HKS alumni show that bipartisanship can be powerful

Anne Healy MPA/ID 2012, JD 2012 is the chief executive officer at the Recoding America Fund, and Lauren Lombardo MPP 2022 is the organization’s policy director. RAF is a 6-year, $120 million philanthropic initiative to make state and federal government run more smoothly, efficiently, and powerfully. RAF’s work is bipartisan, and though Healy and Lombardo have different political ideologies, they work closely together each day. We spoke with them about their work, bipartisan collaboration, and their time at HKS. 

Q: What is the problem RAF is trying to solve? 

Healy: For decades, America’s industrial-era government operating system has grown more sclerotic. This undermines progress in the domains that we all care about—creating abundant futures for Americans, ensuring national security, enabling continued American competitiveness in the global economy. Efforts to fix that have generally been incremental and, not surprisingly, found incremental success at best. At RAF, we’re thinking about how to enable more upstream, structural government reform to enable it to not just catch up to today but to be ready for the next decade. 

Q: Can you share an example of why we need government service reform? 

Healy: It can be hard to explain how upstream bureaucratic impediments can have very real effects on people’s lives and well-being. About a decade ago, a federal regulatory body spent nearly a year reviewing the Department of Veteran Affairs’ proposal to add a simple checkbox to its existing disability application to enable veterans to dual-enroll in healthcare benefits without having to fill out a separate application. This review process was a result of the comically misnamed Paperwork Reduction Act. This additional checkbox was eventually approved but could’ve been much faster. It’s not hard to imagine that there were veterans who were not enrolled in healthcare during that unnecessarily drawn-out year-long process who otherwise might have been. Some of those vets might therefore have had worse health outcomes and maybe even died because of that delay in enrollment in benefits. If they had just approved this one thing, this one checkbox, there are plausibly veterans who would have gotten healthcare faster than they otherwise did. 

Q: Why is bipartisanship powerful for your work? 

Lombardo: This work is not nonpartisan. It’s bipartisan. It’s not that people don’t care about these issues from a political lens. They do, but there is compromise across those political differences that we’ve historically reached in broader conversations about the appropriate size, scope, and role of government. The solutions that are going to enable the largest amount of change are not partisan solutions, they are bipartisan solutions that reflect and understand these compromises. 

Healy: There are, for example, civil service reforms where there very well may be divisions within each party on what the reforms look like. There’s not just a Democrat position and a Republican position. It might be that the only coalition that can prevail is one that finds new ways of piecing together a strong enough coalition across that ideological spectrum to get the best possible version of comprehensive civil service reform passed.

Q: Can you tell us more about working across party lines? 

Lombardo: Most of the policy work I have done has been bipartisan. Because the political rhetoric is so heated and polarized, especially in Congress, I don’t think people realize that members of Congress who seem to be bitter rivals on big network shows are actually friends and hang out and text and get dinners together. Their staff work very collaboratively together. I’m leaving the Hill with close friends that are both further to the right of me and further to the left of me. But I think that that’s just part of the work. And if you’re respectful of those boundaries, then you really can develop productive friendships and relationships. 

Q: Anne, what have you learned from Lauren about working across difference? 

Healy: Lauren just has this incredible ability to work with people who have very different perspectives, mental models, and constraints. She respects, appreciates, and understands those differences and then works towards something greater than them. 

Q: Lauren, what have you learned from Anne’s approach? 

Lombardo: I’ve really enjoyed and appreciated learning from Anne’s approach towards cultivating a shared mission in a unified team. Anne is very strong in pointing folks towards a North Star and championing everyone to pursue that goal, understanding where people are and where she needs to meet them to bring them along.