 Good afternoon, everybody. Real pleasure to welcome you here to the Ford School of Public Policy. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the John and Sandy Wildean of Public Policy here. It is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to this policy talk and Wiser Diplomacy Center event with Dennis McDonough, former White House Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama. Dennis is going to be in conversation today, as you might see, with John Chichari, associate professor at the Ford School and director of the Wiser Diplomacy Center. They're going to be discussing new frontiers, labor immigration, and foreign policy, but feel free to ask them questions about anything that's of interest to you when we get to that point in the conversation. Before I say more about Dennis and his distinguished career, I want to recognize the special role of the Wiser Diplomacy Center in the intellectual life of the Ford School. The role of the center is to provide practical training to students interested in international affairs, to inform research on topics related to diplomacy, and to serve as a hub for the University of Michigan's engagement with the foreign policy community. Since its launch just last semester, the Wiser Diplomacy Center has hosted an amazing array of visitors here at the Ford School, including two former secretaries of state, two former ambassadors to the United Nations, two former national security advisors, and a U.S. special representative to North Korea, who is now the current Deputy Secretary of State. And all of that in addition to our wonderful guest today. For making all of this possible, I want to offer my deepest gratitude to Ambassador and Regent Ron Wiser, his wife Eileen Wiser, and the entire Wiser family for their generous gift that established the Wiser Diplomacy Center. Today, we are deeply honored to host Dennis McDonough. Dennis has devoted his career to public service, having worked not only as Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama, but also in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the National Security Council. Dennis began his career in the legislative branch, working as a professional staffer on the International Relations Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, and later in the U.S. Senate for Majority Leader Tom Dashel of South Dakota, and then working with both Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, and then Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Dennis served as a senior foreign policy advisor on President Obama's 2008 campaign, worked during the transition, and then after President Obama took office, Dennis became Deputy National Security Advisor. Four years later, starting in 2013, he served as President Obama's Chief of Staff for the whole second term of the administration. Dennis managed the White House staff, as well as Cabinet Secretaries, agency leaders. He advised the President on domestic and international policy, management issues facing the federal government, and devised and enforced plans for accountability and transparency in government. Anybody who knows anything about Washington knows that this is both the worst job and the best job in Washington. It is the best job because you have a chance to work with someone like President Obama and to have reach across the federal government. It's really the most important position next to the President of the United States in terms of its reach across the government. It is the worst job in the country because it's an impossible job to do. So anybody who occupies that job gets the gray hair that Dennis has earned, and I'm sure he's going to talk to you about it during his discussion. Let me just say what President Obama said on appointing Dennis as his Chief of Staff. Dennis is respected by leaders across our government. He always holds himself accountable first and foremost, and it's no easy task, but through it all, Dennis does it with class and integrity and thoughtfulness for other people's points of view. He is the consummate public servant. He plays it straight, and that's the kind of teamwork that I want in the White House, as President Obama. Since 2017, Dennis has been at the Markle Foundation, where he's currently a Senior Advisor working to create a skills-based market that will allow all Americans to succeed in a digital economy. He's also an executive fellow at a school called Notre Dame at the Keo School of Global Affairs, where he teaches a global policy seminar. He is also our first and only speaker to have been portrayed by the actor John Ham in a movie. I believe this achievement will not be repeated, or at least any time soon. Finally, before I turn things over to John and to Dennis, let me just say a little word on format. Those of you who have been here before know how we work. Towards the end of the event today, we're going to have some time for questions and answers from all of you. Professor Ann Lin, along with two Ford School students, Vivian Columbi and Jacob Kopnick, will sift through your question cards that will be handed out during the course of the event, and they will pose them on behalf of the audience to our speakers. For those of you who are watching online, we usually have quite an active online audience, please tweet your questions using the hashtag policy talks. And now, without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome Dennis McDonough. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us, and of course, thank you for visiting the Ford School. I am delighted to have this chance to speak with you, and for this opening segment, when I pitched some interview questions to you, I'd like to focus on two aspects of your background. One is, of course, the work that you've done both as Deputy National Security Advisor and as Chief of Staff to deal with complex organizations and interagency processes, and another is to confront complex, multifaceted cross border policy challenges. And so I'd like to start with a few questions pertaining to your current projects on labor markets and the new economy, and then shift over to talking a little bit about complex crisis responses that are very relevant in today's context with coronavirus. So on the first topic, I'd like you to speak a little bit about your work with Markle and the Rework America Task Force, and maybe we could start with the question about what keeps you and your colleagues up at night with regard to the changing economy. What are some of the main challenges that we need to consider in an era of artificial intelligence, online gigs and the like? Yeah, well, John, thanks so much, and Michael, thanks for the overly generous introduction, and Paul, in the Board of Regents, thanks very much for the introduction to the Ambassador, and your wife, thanks so much for this institution. I will say that I love working for Uncle Sam. It's hugely rewarding, hugely challenging, and as I've said, every student I've run into since I've worked for the government, Uncle Sam needs you. Uncle Sam needs level-headed, reason-based, logical policymakers like your own Betsy Stevenson, who was like an unbelievable colleague to work with in the U.S. government. Creative, reason-based, experience-based, and just exceedingly decent person. And then many other University Emissioning graduates from Broderick, Johnson, to Cecilia Muñoz, to Valerie Jarrett, these are all, I call them, University of Michigan Nationalists, because they're so strident. No one more strident, though, than a good friend of mine who's now the Deputy Secretary of State, Steve Began, whom I've worked with in a variety of different capacities. And there's very little that Steve and I agree on politically, other than the greatness of this country and the people and institutions like the University of Michigan as a real manifestation of that American power, American strength, and American greatness. So thanks for all that you do, and thanks for having me here. You know, I got involved in this issue, and I just said this to a group of folks associated with the Ford School profs and others upstairs, which is not an overstatement. I got involved in it because of the work that Betsy and several of her colleagues on the Council of Economic Advisors did with President Obama. I still remember President Obama coming home from a trip to the West Coast. And we used to take a walk at the end of every day. We took a walk from 6 to 6.30. Rain or shine, even a day like today he would have prided himself. He kind of pretends like he's a Chicagoan, but, you know, he's got a more Hawaiian than Chicagoan. So he's not big on the cold, but we'd go out, rain or shine, snow or otherwise. And I remember this walk where he talked about a visit to San Francisco, and he had met a young entrepreneur who was working on a new radiology algorithm, which, as I think we all understand now, allows better accuracy for cheaper by accessing instantaneously, millions and millions and millions of x-rays against which to judge whether there's deviations in an existing x-ray. So you're much more able to make a decision about an individual x-ray by running it as against millions of other x-rays rather than putting it up on the screen with your glasses and you're looking at how it goes. And so we talked about it a little bit, and I got excited as I want to do, and he didn't as he's want to do. He's a very rational man, but he's quite down about it. I said, well, what are you bummed out about? Sounds like a pretty amazing thing. He said, yeah, you know, radiology is a good middle class radiologist, good middle class job, you know, even upper middle class. How many radiologists are going to be out at work because of this technology? And I said upstairs, and I believe that one of his great attributes was his ability to see around corners and to see impact of decision. And it's one of the things that the Ford School is so good at teaching your students, which is like, let's think not only about the policy, but let's think about the people behind the policy and what are the impact of the people, on the people of those policies. And this was an ongoing theme we used to discuss a lot with either the monthly jobs updates when Betsy and Jason would bring the president the jobs data, the first Friday of every month, or just an ongoing conversation where he asked, you know, what's happening to work, the dignity that comes with work, the meaning that comes from work, and whose job is it to worry about dislocation before the dislocation happens rather than picking up the pieces of dislocation expulse factor. And so when I left the government, John, as a long answer, long wind up to your question, I really thought I wanted to spend and want to spend my time now on two issues. One is the dislocation of people as a result of climate and conflict, and that's refugees. So I spent a lot of my time on that. And then this other question which I spend a lot of time on at Marco, which is what about the nature of work and the changing technological underpinnings of our economy can we anticipate in terms of dislocation and problems, and how can we get in front of that? And how can we make sure that our government policies are both informed by what works and what needs to happen for the economy, but informed by what people need to have access to dignified work. Meaningful work, well-paying work. And so that's what we're trying to do at the Marco Foundation by aggregating experience from governors, by business leaders, labor leaders to extrapolate from what works and what doesn't to inform federal policymaking questions. Thanks. Give us a sense then of some of the approaches that you've identified that appear to be effective or at least potentially effective in managing some of these challenges. So one thing we spent a lot of time on in Colorado through what we call skillful is focusing on a question of non-college educated workers. So these are workers with some college or no college. And how are they finding access to meaningful new training opportunities and through this training opportunities into new jobs? We did some partnership with LinkedIn, for example, on trying to aggregate training opportunities by geography, trying to connect those training opportunities to jobs, open jobs that needed the skills available in those training opportunities. And one of the things that we found most successful in finding new training opportunities, getting through and completing those training opportunities, and then getting into a new job, one of the things that defined success in a relatively small population set was access to a human coach. So not just access to technology, but actually access to a human coach and something that allowed a person to understand that, or allowed us to understand that that person can't stop his or her life to go to a training program that's only available in work hours, for example, if that person still has to make money to pay the bills for her family. A coach, that interaction with a coach allows that person to somehow personalize the training opportunities so that they can take into account their own life, their own needs, and that it's not some kind of single cookie-cutter situation that doesn't recognize that it's the people who are in need of training and skills opportunities are moms and dads. They have oftentimes one, two, three existing jobs. But to get to that next level of opportunity to get to better pay to more meaningful and more successful, they need a more nuanced opportunity to get to new skills and training. Are there good models that exist about the division of labor or the complementarity of federal government agencies, state and local agencies, private companies that might be the employers for these workers? Well, so there's like big trends that are troubling. One big trend, for example, is a relatively smaller amount of capital that companies themselves are investing in training. This is a problem, that companies are getting out of the business of investing in their workers. I think that's not a good long-term trend, but it does then point out a public policy challenge for the government that says, okay, so who is then responsible for spending a lot of time on, as we look at policy innovations, is how will we be thinking about who pays for training opportunities for workers who are not owning a bachelor of arts or a master's? And so there are examples of private institutions like Goodwill. Interacting with local employers or local community colleges, some of it funded by available federal funding that connects that training opportunity to an actual open job and does it in a much more affordable way than to just put it on the worker herself to both make her schedule work for an existing program and pay for that out of pocket. We'll see. We're continuing to working with 27 governors across the country, Republicans and Democrats. We're trying to aggregate data from existing programs and try to identify best practices of what works and what works well. In addition to the governor's forum, are there other channels where you think that we need to invest to generate ideas for policy innovation? It can be universities, can be very interesting institutions as existing. One of the things is you ask somebody, one of the big challenges we find is for people looking for training, they're captive to a closed network. So I talked a little bit at lunch today with several of the business school students and Ford school students about their colleagues. It's an amazing network that will travel with you forever. And you'll add new people to that network and that will be very flexible and growing network. There are a lot of workers in our economy who are captive by geography or by experience to a much smaller network. You talk to some of these workers and you say, who are you talking to about training opportunities or who are you talking to about new people? Oftentimes the answer is my brother, my sister, my dad, my pastor. And the question is how do we then plug into those existing networks to broaden them to make them more vibrant? And can that be something as kind of as informal as working through the local goodwill? And how do we pay for that? And so those are some of the things that we do. And again, it needn't be some big structural question. People are operating in and out of existing networks all the time and so especially with the amount of data that we have and the amount of technology that's available, we should be able to grow those and make them much more vibrant than they have been. So one set of challenges is how to make the workforce as a person. And I think of it like many of the individuals in the audience who are training now in University of Michigan to go out in the workforce. And I wonder if you could comment, you've had a lot of different kinds of jobs or jobs that have required a diverse set of skills. How does an individual who's here at the Ford School or at the university prepare him or what? I think it's a difficult job with a lot of stress that'll turn your hair white, as Michael said. Exercise your judgment and say no. No, look, we talked about this at lunch, John. And I think this is the secret, right, which is I said and I say if I could hire a hungry, I'd hire a hungry every time. You know? And how do you know that when you're hiring somebody, you're not hiring somebody because you know she has all the answers. You're hiring her because she knows where to go and find the answers. She knows how to lead a team to develop the answers. She has the confidence to ask the question of the expert to get to the answer. And, you know, I don't know what the full suite of skills on a resume are that says hunger, but I think I know some of them, right, which is languages, travel, work, experience. You know, going to school and putting yourself through school, you know what that speaks to me about hunger. Team sports, working in teams, the ability to kind of delay your gratification to a better outcome for the team. So those are the things that I'm looking for. And the last thing on hunger is just like curiosity. You know what's great about hunger is you get to work with people like Betsy and ask them any question you want to ask them. And then you get the answer. That's what Obama used to say all the time. I love that I can answer, ask, I get to work with all these smart people and ask them these questions. And imagine if you're that kind of curious person, what kind of opportunity you're going to meet. And are you really just talking to people who share the same views as you do? Same politics? How boring. Are we really going to let algorithms on our news aggregators feed us up what to read? Are we going to go find what we want to read? What we know we need to read? We're not going to just let the biases be confirmed by what we've read before, but you have to go find things that say I need to know more about x and let me go find x. I'm not going to wait for x to come to me. That's at the heart of the University of Michigan, at the heart of the Ford school. I said to Michael at lunch, my brother used to every day start with a sports page and I said what are you doing? He said, yeah, but you start and end with the sports page. Right? The question is where are you going to get additional new thinking? And don't be the master of your own opinions. Right? Be the master of finding new thinking and associating with new people. And boy, you're out of the gates on that strong right now. New thinking gets us nicely to the next segment of this conversation, which is to talk about complex multifaceted policy challenges. And all of us now are reading in the newspaper about coronavirus and thinking about whether our institutions are in a position to be able to respond effectively to it here at home or internationally. I wonder if we could start on learning from your experience in the response to the Ebola crisis several years ago. Widely perceived as having been a very successful response despite the obvious limitations to any response in those scenarios. I wonder if you could tell us what you think worked well in that case and what elements of that could be replicated here. Sure, so let me start with something that didn't work well. President Obama thought I'm obviously biased, but I thought he was a great leader. One of the things he did really well was he really relied on experts. Really could make a team work together and really sing well. But then he also always circled back with thank yous to the team, which I think is really an important thing. So you may recall that we had a bunch of doctors that deployed overseas. Some of them U.S. government doctors, some of them private doctors, but he met with many of them in Oval to say thanks. And everybody had to, on the way in, had to get their temperature taken. We want to make sure they didn't have. So they stopped by the med unit. So I thought that was good. So that meeting happens, and as soon as everybody's going to get a call. And this wasn't the President's, you know, schedule or this was the President. He doesn't pick up the phone and call a lot. He's like, can you come down here? And I said, well, of course I can. He said why did that last doctor give me the elbow? I said, what are you talking about? The last doctor in the line didn't shake my hand. He gave me the elbow. And you remember that people would not shake hands, they just like, because they didn't want to share any germs. And I said, well, I don't know. I think maybe it was a joke. He said it was not a joke. I'm not going home to supper with the first lady and the girls until I know why that guy gave me the elbow. I was thinking to myself, oh my God, did I just give the President of the United States a bowl of it? So I called up Ron Klein and I said, hey, can you get that doctor on the phone? I want to find out why he gave the President the elbow. And so we tracked him down and of course it was a joke. And I was able to go tell the President. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to go tell the President because I thought, holy mackerel, I'm just going to go down as the Chief of Staff who gave the President of the United States a bowl of it. No, but here's what works. Science works. Best available data works. And so you recall that one of the things at the time was, look, why don't we stop all travel from West Africa to the United States? I don't recall that logic seems sound. But the best science says that stopping travel encourages people to withhold data. Withholding data means you're going to get an incomplete picture about the nature of the spread of the virus. And so if you incent people to hide what they're experiencing then they will. Because if somebody wants to travel or needs to travel they're going to withhold important information to help us get a more complete picture of how the virus was being transmitted. The political answer was to say yep, we can turn off travel and turn off access to the United States including by the way several are saying at the time American, private American doctors who had traveled to West Africa to help with the virus. We should just say well you made that decision, you got to stay out. This was an active debate in the country. But the data, best practice and science all dictates well that's not the way to run an operation. And it also then requires you to go defend the scientific based, science based reaction to the crisis. And that may be politically uncomfortable. But at the end of the day if you know what the right outcome is you have to make a stand for that right outcome. So that's one thing which is make your decisions based on best available science. Not on bias, not on prejudice, not on what even might be the best political interest. But rather on science, one. And then two is use all the instruments of your power to confront this. And I think a real unsung hero of that time was Chairman Marty Dempsey was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who under orders from the president arranged for the deployment of many mobile medical units staffed by U.S. military personnel into West Africa that ended up serving putting our troops in the front lines of this complex medical challenge crisis. Drawing on their considerable skill and training but also then generating a host of goodwill for the United States because of the treatment and the support that we gave thousands and thousands of families in West Africa. So science using all the elements of American power and then also just recognizing that honesty is the best policy. Right? If we got a crisis, you call it a crisis. You don't wish it weren't a crisis. Right? You don't publish that. Don't worry. We got it all under control if you don't because at the end of the day all you have as a general matter but all you have in the midst of a crisis is your word and the confidence of the American people that they can take to the bank what you said and the minute you lose that is going to be the minute that you can't contain a crisis. So those are kind of my first three, John. And by the way, in each of those places there's like a critical critically important person. Ron Klain who coordinated U.S. government policy kind of across agencies as the presidents in effect desire for this. Marty Dempsey who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs really mobilized the military presence in West Africa. The president himself of course but then those multiple doctors who used to send the doctors out to the podiums all the time to update the American people on what we knew and importantly what we didn't know. And these are all things that I think the American people have come to expect from the government and I think they're right to expect it. What do you think are the main similarities and differences diplomatically between the Ebola response and what we're now looking at with coronavirus. In 2014 you have Liberia and Sierra Leone countries where the U.S. and Britain have had long leadership roles and close relationships. Here you've got a large power with whom we have a more difficult relationship more inclined to assert sovereign control and management over the problem perhaps. In what way would this change the response that you would recommend diplomatically to kind of virus out? Well I think the first and most obvious difference John is the one you cite which is the current COVID-19 broke out in the heart of China and Wuhan which is like Ube province which is kind of the functional equivalent of Chicago. It's about four times the size of Chicago but it's like a second city. Which all the Chicago people in here just gasped about. My wife just gasped about what do you mean second city? First city. But anyway you get the picture. So it's major place and the Chinese are not going to throw their doors open to the U.S. or others to come in and dig into the bottom of this. Whereas I think our West African friends did. They invited in international support from day one of the threat. So that's one big difference. The second big difference is and I saw Ron said this Ron Klein said this publicly the last couple of days is we know far less today about the nature of this virus the current coronavirus than we did at the beginning of the Ebola crisis. Which is something because we didn't know much at the start of the Ebola crisis. So there's a lot to learn which underscores the importance of maintaining open dialogue and you know opportunities for open and honest sharing that I referenced a minute ago so that we can be learning from each other's epidemiology and each other's experience. Really all we know about this virus is what we're learning in the main from the Chinese but now South Korean, Iranian and Italian experiences and Japanese experiences. Our ability to get up the curve of understanding what's happening is enhanced by our ability to share across these countries. Chinese have not been great about this and I think people have been pretty public about our concern that maybe the Chinese are not fully sharing what they know. And that's a challenge but that's a challenge that the U.S. should be able to get our hands around by increasing our interaction with the Chinese. There's a debate now in the papers of course which many of you have read about whether an authoritarian system is better positioned or less well positioned than democracy to be able to deal with something like coronavirus when it enters a population. I wonder if you could walk us through your sense of where the United States would be better prepared or where it would have challenges that may not exist in China if indeed coronavirus becomes prevalent in this society. I think at some point it would be really great to be on the other side of this crisis and to be able to look back on this. So I guess my first reaction is let's make sure that we handle this right and then look back. But some of the attributes my wife and I have been discussing this at considerable length the last couple of days because I think like a lot of families people are focused on this and are worried. But what do I think are the positive attributes of our system? One is that really since 9-11 we've both at the state level and then coordinating federal through federal to state level we've gotten good at sharing information from the feds to state and local authorities and state and local medical institutions, hospitals. We've gotten good at making sure that we're prepared for big crises that we're sharing with necessary equipment making sure that the federal government is helping subsidize and fund that equipment to state and local so I feel good about that. And then we're also good at exercising these these capabilities. One of the things that was really remarkable watching how we treated for example infected doctors who came home with Ebola was those facilities in Houston and Atlanta were expert at managing that particular virus and that's just a function of intense training and then exercising those training skills. So those are three things that I feel quite good about. The thing that I'm worried about is that we not somehow think that we can explain away the nature of the crisis. Just have to be very candid about what we know very candid about what we don't know and then be very candid and regular in our communication with the American people to bring them up to speed on how we're learning. So I think it was a very choppy start yesterday where there seem to be different messages coming from the federal government about whether this is going to be a pandemic whether it's currently in control what to expect and then some fairly nondescript guidance to families to say everybody should be prepared for this. I remember reading through the stories thinking that's great but so what does that mean? So I'm worried about the relatively choppy nature of the communication so far. So those are all resolvable things that are right to expect answers on those questions. In just a moment I'm going to open up to questions from the audience that Vivian and Jacob and Professor Lin will pose but one more on this back to the level of international organizations. I read a statistic the other day that says the World Health Organization's annual budget is around the same as a mid-sized American hospital and making the case for more investment in that global organization as a way to coordinate and to transfer knowledge. What's your sense of how reliant we are on effective multinational organizations to respond to crises like this as opposed to networked bilateral diplomacy? Yeah well so I think I think we're I think we are reliant on it I don't think overly reliant on it and I think you know I saw something in the news this morning on the newspaper on the way out flying into Detroit that I think Harvard and Yale would announce a project where they're cooperating on some epidemiology around this virus with existing institutions in China with whom they have existing relationships. I think that's a really good thing. I think that we have bilateral cooperation with the Chinese on certain international and global health issues so for example out of Ebola the Chinese were very supportive of the effort in West Africa on Ebola in 2014-2015. That cooperation was I think as much as profound a set of cooperative efforts between the United States and China in the international system as we've ever had I think that's a positive thing. So those are all positive things but at the end of the day I think what you need the WHO for is and you want to make sure it's there when you need it so you can't spin this up you know occasionally it's got to be an available capability an available capability reliable capability is the ability to share data about existing challenges so WHO team just has come out over the course of the last day I gather from Wuhan and they're able to come out now with data which will help inform us on our decision making about this virus. If we didn't have that data we'd be then even further behind trying to understand what's happening in as much as as I said I think the Chinese have not really shown us all their cards yet and the WHO then has shown us an opportunity of something to get smarter much more quickly than we would have without it. So I think the answer to your question is John that I think we could invest more in the WHO but it doesn't have to be massive what it does it does well what it does is it shares data and information about what's happening but that is not enough we have to continue these bilateral discussions at both the government and non-governmental level. Let's turn to some questions from the audience I realize that we've got other issues that have come up in conversation that you've done work on include migration include cyber security and a whole host of other issues and I'm sure we'll get to some of those now. I just want to start by thank you for coming and letting your insights today. My name is Jacob Cognac I'm a senior in the BA program here focusing in Middle East policy and international development. My question is your pre-chief of staff background is heavily grounded in foreign policy and international relations So why did he ever hire me to do that other job? Essentially So when you are a chief of staff you suddenly oversee a massive domestic portfolio in what ways did your foreign policy experience inform your analysis of domestic policy? Yeah so it's good I remember talking to the president about the job and I said look Here's what I know Mr. President I can't be like a domestic policy advisor like Ram or like Jack partially because I'm so much taller than Ram and so much better looking than Jack No I said because look that's just not my thing Right The good news though is that there are people around you like Betsy and like Jeff Zients and Cecilia Munoz and Broderick Johnson who are expert in their area and so if you put me in this job I'm not going to be your policy advisor because I can't be that person and by the way you have a national security advisor and Tom Donilon and Susan Rice who are world class advisor my job is to make sure that this team works and gets you sound advice that the decisions that come to you are square that the options have been developed transparently and so that you won't be surprised that somehow you make a decision and then you learn ex post facto about the decision that well you know three or four agencies every decision he makes look you reserve the hardest decisions for the president that's your job and that's his job and the thing the chief of staff has to do to be a good chief of staff is to tee those decisions up square not be the person who's on a walk and saying well you know yeah let's really delve into Mr. President like Aaron Medicaid I'm here to tell you that thank God I never did that because I don't know anything about that but we have people like Kathleen Sebelius and Sylvia Burwell and Jean Lambrou who did so my job was to make sure that they had an opportunity to present those options to the president and my commitment to him was that those decisions be presented squarely the team would feel part of the because at the end of the day the decision is just the start because the decision the president makes sets off execution and white houses get in trouble when they forget that the hard part comes after the decision on the execution good evening I'm Vivian Columbi I'm a first year MPP student here at the Ford school with interest in international policy this next question pertains to the labor discussion we had earlier specifically what are your thoughts on a universal basic income or guaranteed income for lower income individuals as a tool to combat the rise of automation and skills based dislocation yeah so it's interesting I've seen a couple interesting papers on for example how Alaska managed and has managed proceeds from the Alaska oil pipeline and how that has arguably functioned similar to kind of a UBI like policy tool for Alaska and there's a lot to commend that and a lot to and some problems that have come from it so I don't rule it out but I'm very clear-eyed about it because at the moment kind of the fundamental attributes that we have a system that supports people in transition or people suffering from dislocation in our system are just the basic pieces that we have today are currently under attack the Affordable Care Act work requirements are on Medicaid the efforts to reduce access associated with the Affordable Care Act work requirements for example around Medicaid which I think have been proven to not show any discernible uptake in work but have proven to show discernible downtake in access to Medicare and healthcare treatment access to healthcare generally I'd like to stop those and solidify the pieces of our existing safety net that have proven themselves quite well over time and then I'd also like to make sure that we're focused on making sure that there are dignified training options for people who want them cognizant of the individual circumstances of those people who are looking for those training options so they have access to dignified work and I think there's currently enough dignified work to be done the question is how are we disintermediating between people who could do it and the work and one of the big pieces of it I think is how we advertise open work in Colorado 75% of open construction manager jobs require a Bachelor of Arts 23% of current construction managers have a Bachelor of Arts so why is that? I think that the market itself is insufficiently transparent opaque and leaves out a lot of people who may have the skills but are not able to advertise those skills because we advertise the job for a credential, a BA that two thirds of the country does not have so we're just leaving too much of our massive talent off the field we have a job training question so how does job retraining and the tools that might be successful change when looking at a whole community built on a industry such as coal mining how do you get that type of job training out to places like in Appalachia where coal mining is a dominant industry I think this is the hard this is the hard case and I think that the short answer is I don't know yet but I think if you go back to honesty is the best policy part of this is that promising a return of jobs that are not going to come because of changing technology and the environment is not the best way to do that and so I don't I guess I don't want to over promise this I think we don't know yet and I think the interesting part is that we have a lot of governors who are trying a range of options and our goal at the rework America task force is to try to extrapolate some policy lessons from those experiments and the federal government can do different next question also about labor what changes do you believe need to be made to the education system to promote a more fair labor market that addresses the strengths of the individual well look I this is both in response to the question in response to my current situation since I have kids who are 18, 15 and 12 I'd like to see higher education get more affordable one two is also be good to figure out a way for us to have a more nimble training and education opportunity over the course of an individual's lifetime recognizing that you don't stop going when you're 22, 23 or 25 or 26 and so the question is how do we make the rest of the training infrastructure more accessible more flexible and agile to respond to people's lives rather than making people drop their lives to try to get into the training system so that you can continue to add skills in those years say 25 to 55 you know so I think some of the attributes of those to an education system that does that would mean people are more able to carry with them in some kind of reasonable cost effective way a record of the skills that they've aggregated over time you know right now if you want to go get your so I've got a BA and an MS when I want to get my transcripts I have to pay 25 bucks right now like it's not a major deal for me but what's the deal I have to pay 25 bucks for that like I thought I got that when I went to college right so I say that mostly in jazz but think of you you're a military spouse and you've taken courses at a variety of institutions across the country as you've gone from different bases to different bases as your spouse has been active duty and you have to aggregate those skills or the transcripts and you're paying 25 bucks a pop why is that shouldn't we be much more able to somebody to carry that lifelong learning transcript with them so that they can call on it with technology being what it is today that should be more doable so there's things from big structural things to relatively smaller technical fixes that I think would actually empower workers themselves to demand a better wage in the market but right now the too much of the market is really tilted towards opacity and away from the interest of the worker so given your experience on security issues what do you see as the role of drone strikes right now and how would you evaluate that policy based on your time in the White House awesome question so I'd commend to you a speech that the President Obama gave in May or June 2013 at the National Defense University where he gave a speech about how he saw the limits on his power to carry out and to use this new technology of drones and I think the speech itself largely holds up the principles at the heart of the speech which is that the President even or maybe even especially because of the new technology wanted to make sure that the American people had confidence that he in exercising this great power afforded to him by that technology is still ultimately accountable to the American people as their elected representative and so that he owed them answers about the circumstances under which he used that technology the impact of that technology say for example on civilian casualties the legal basis for him to use that power and as a result of all that he felt a great responsibility to make transparent and public as much of that information as he could partly because of the nature of our system which is a democratic system he has the ability to exercise that power because of the votes of the American people so he owes them transparency but also because this technology is going to proliferate and if we are not as transparent and as accountable as we can be in our system how will more closed systems like Russia less accountable systems like Iran or China use that technology so he felt a great responsibility to kind of put out those principles in such a way as to try to raise the bar on other governments and I think the extent to which those practices that he laid out in that speech and then that we've subsequently followed until 2017 have been changed and I think that's ultimately detrimental to the American national interest for two reasons which is it reduces accountability to the American people as I suggested a minute ago and two is it gives greater current blanche to other actors in the international system to operate less beholden to the kinds of principles that we have come to expect from our leaders What was the most challenging event situation you encountered while in the White House and how did you handle it It's an excellent question so I'll say one thing first just about the structure of the White House which is so the West Wing is the kind of business end of the White House East Wing is the first ladies business end of the White House and then the residents is right in the middle and that's where the first family lives so in the West Wing Chief of Staff's office is on the corner kind of the southwest corner of the building and then about I don't know 40 yards east of there is the Oval Office so it's pretty close 120 feet, 150 feet and here's two things Maxims in four years as Chief of Staff never once did I beat good news to the Oval Office I never once Mr. President I just want to come down and let you know we just got the decision from the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act oh I know just got a call from Eric Holder we're all set Mr. President I just want to let you know that I just heard from negotiators we got a deal on the Paris Accords oh I know I was just on the phone with John okay so 0 for four years on good news here's the flip side of that Maxim never once did bad news beat me to the Oval Office every single time hey did you mention that to the President oh no I haven't had a chance in fact Josh Bolton who was President Bush Bush 43's last Chief of Staff said well you have to have a Chief of Staff because if you didn't the President would never get any bad news so as premise with that premise here's the worst day my worst day in the White House was about October 8th 2013 and I remember walking down the hallway from the Chief of Staff's office to the Oval Office and I was about to tell the President that it wasn't an excess of demand for healthcare that was stopping people from being able to get through healthcare.gov it was that healthcare.gov itself was broken that we rolled out a broken piece of technology for him and I knew I was going down there to tell him that after literally every week since I became Chief of Staff the President literally said this to me he said Dennis you know that healthcare.gov and the new marketplace only works if the website works right I said absolutely Mr. President we're all over that so I told him that so I started the first week of February and this is now the first week of October so what's that 32 times I told him we got it all under control Mr. President everything's fine and I remember telling him and it's one of those things we've all had it anger your parents and you really hope they just yell at you but they're so disappointed they don't even raise their voice and you're just like this is terrible please yell at me or something or fire me I don't know so I did tender my resignation he was having none of that but I think he knew that we were in an open enrollment period so that is to say a period during which people could enroll in the marketplace and we had a set period for the first year it was three months so 12 weeks and we needed every day of those 12 weeks to add as many people to the risk pool as we could get not just sick people who knew they needed healthcare insurance but healthy people so that we could smooth out the risk and he knew that if he fired me we'd be slower and getting the system back up and running and getting people enrolled so I was saved by my own incompetence but that was by far the worst day 28 times when I lay in bed at night and I close my eyes and I still see that little hourglass on the screen of my computer that no matter how many times I pressed a button on my keyboard nothing happened so that was a terrible day how do you balance your own beliefs in working in the White House and what is your best advice to students on grads in particular I guess hoping to serve in public life that's a great question I'm going to answer this in two ways I had a mentor in graduate school his name was Seth Tillman terrific man in fact the first person that I told I had been offered the Chief of Staff's job by President Obama and he's a fascinating guy and he was J. William Fulbright his speech writer and so you think about all the great books that Senator Fulbright wrote legislator as educator power and principle arrogance of power and you think about the role that he played as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in ending the Vietnam War and you think to yourself that must have been an interesting guy to work for and Seth was a fascinating guy and he talked to me about something he called the Staffer Ethos Staffer Ethos he said is by the way he worked for the San Foreign Relations Committee when there was not a Republican and a Democratic staff there was just one staff so he worked for Republicans and Democrats and he said so his job was to be best prepared on his position for the private discussion with the Senator and argue his position as strenuously as he could until the Senator made the decision and at that time that was now his position and it would forever be his position and if I have sympathy for President Trump on one thing it's this staff walking out of a meeting with him and saying well he decided X but I was for Y what gives you the right to do that that strikes me as chicken you make your arguments in private and then the President makes his decision, her decision and that's your position now this is not easy with Senator Fulbright Democratic Senator from Arkansas who finally lost re-election in 1972 because when he wasn't stopping the war in Vietnam you know what he was doing Phyllis Bustering the Voting Rights Act Phyllis Bustering the Civil Rights Act and so I asked Seth about that and I said Jesus that's like a little hard on the whole staff or ethos thing right you're working for a segregationist so that points up the challenge of the question right which brings me to the second way I often get this question which is I have 10 brothers and sisters my oldest brother is a Catholic priest my second oldest brother is a former Catholic priest and so the question often comes as a good Catholic how can you work for a Democrat so I usually try to moderate my anger but then the answer to that question is this which is if I want to be the decider I should be the President of Congress or the Senator but as a staff guy you're asked to be hired to be in those jobs to make your positions known and in that regard I feel like often times President Obama sought me out particularly because of my view and often times because he knew it was different than his so my expectation isn't that I win every argument who gets to work in a job where you win every argument and if you do you're probably working in the wrong place right the challenge is do you get the opportunity to make your argument or is somebody trying to force you to trim your argument to coincide with a generally popular view or can you speak your mind because you've trained your mind you've through hunger developed your mind through association with these great professors learned all sorts of new things the President that I know best wanted a staff person who did that not who gave him an answer that he wanted to hear or that he was predisposed to believe in the first instance those he was most suspicious of wasn't that right if he knew you were gilding the lily boy that's it so in response to the question what do I I forget precisely the question but what's my advice my advice is to be the smartest you can be and be as passionate as you can be and don't put your light under the bushel put your light on top of the bushel and make your arguments but recognize you don't win everyone by the way as I said if you win every argument you're probably in the wrong place how does the recent polarization between majority conservative and majority liberal communities make it increasingly difficult for the American people to collectively respond to crisis it's a good question I think I don't think there's anything about polarization per se that makes response to crisis harder provided that our leadership is relying on some of those tenants we talked about earlier which is letting science dictate decisions not being afraid to take the hard right position that is to say the hard difficult position rather than the easy and quickly attractive decision and relying on people because of their expertise if you're willing to stick to those principles I think you can manage any crisis our institutions have seen everything I said this at lunch but think about the White House itself 45 presidents actually 44 but President Trump is for vagaries of history I don't know what to talk about but President Trump is 45 every president's had a piece of that White House Washington didn't live in it he negotiated the purchase of the self-law Adams lived in it but just for a couple months long enough to write the most beautiful letter to his wife I wish I could write the way these guys write my wife might actually like me better Madison's had to move out everybody else moved back in until Truman he had to move back out because they realized how badly we rebuilt the building after the Brits and the Canadians I repeat what I said before I won't use that swear word I used at lunch burned it down but every president's had a piece of that building which is to say everything this country has gone through saying a big part of our population is three-fifths of a person slavery civil war world war civil rights movement 9-11 how arrogant to think that any individual moment you have in that building is so unique that you should just invent a new way to deal with the problem institutions are up to the challenges that we face and that's because our institutions are made up of all these people this is why I so badly want more of these University of Michigan nationalists to move to Washington and go to work for Uncle Sam because you're the institutions and we're up to these challenges there's no question in my mind absolutely no question in our mind and any time a leader tells you we're not we got the wrong leader it's time to change him and I think this might be the last question we have time for but what advice can you give young voters when trying to decide who to vote for in the primaries and what policies should we prioritize and how does a candidate's past affect how much we should trust them I say the most important advice I can give you is vote President Obama used to come back from these like trips to see students I mentioned this earlier today he's always so excited these students they're so altruistic they're so creative they're so entrepreneurial but it sounds like they're so busy doing those things that they don't vote Mrs. Obama has this saying she says raise your hand if you're listening to the playlist that your grandmother made for you no list, no hands raise your hand if you're wearing an outfit that your grandfather picked out for you no hands go up says well as long as you keep not voting you're by virtue of the data letting your grandmother and your grandfather decide who will lead you so vote that's the thing I just cannot tell you enough of vote and in terms of a person's history you know I forget what Axelrod calls the primaries he calls them something like a gut check or something like that you can't get through this without the mere American people knowing you I think you know after seeing everything that's come and gone in these primaries I think you know the people at the end of the day I I'm not one of those who is very cynical about these people I think it's a general matter most of these people are in this for the right reason and in any case they're showing you all their cards and so I actually don't really care who you vote for I just really really really really really want you to vote and if that happens there's nothing more we can hope for you know so please vote good well thank you a very good sort of call to concrete action to take away from the conversation we appreciate your insights on a wide array of issues let's please continue the conversation outside where we have a reception and please everyone stay involved we've got a great stream of events continuing through the winter and spring please join me in thanking Dennis McDonough thank you very much