Matt Mahan

We want to be responsive.

We feel this urge as elected officials to show that we're being responsive to every need.

But then we spread ourselves very thinly.

And what I think gets lost is the thing that matters most, which is, are we actually holding ourselves accountable for meaningfully improving the things in the world, the outcomes that matter most?

And so I would argue that on the handful of indicators that matter most at this moment,

The cost of housing, the cost of energy, the quality of our public schools, the quality of our safety in public spaces, the suffering of people who are deep in the throes of addiction and mental illness.

And when you look at some of these key things, we're spending more and more and getting less.

And what I've tried to do in San Jose is get us to bring a little more of a performance management mindset into government and say, yes, we provide over 200 discrete services and programs, but let's set goals around a few really important things.

Let's set some priorities and actually measure every dollar we spend, every hour of staff time.

and try to validate that that dollar hour of staff time is actually moving us closer to the goals we have.

And so actually setting public goals and measuring performance sounds very simple and obvious.

We don't actually do a lot of that as elected officials.

I think that that general perception is largely accurate.

I don't think that there's just one cause of the waste and inefficiency in the system in California.

I'd point to a few things.

I mean, one is, and it's been pretty well documented by folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson with their book Abundance.

You see it in, I think it's Mark Dunkelman with Why Nothing Works.

There's a bit of

scholarship recently on sort of how is it that government is struggling to turn tax dollars into impact?

And I think part of the answer is just how bureaucratic and process heavy and litigious