In this edition of the Hoover Institution Briefing on Empowering State and Local Governance, researchers and civil servants gather at Hoover for another meeting of the Conference on State and Local Policy Research. Hoover Fellow Valentin Bolotnyy coauthors a new paper on how online platforms can make voters more deliberative. And Senior Fellow Michael J. Boskin speaks in a video podcast with former governors Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Jerry Brown about federalism, disaster response, education, and how states make laws.
FEATURED ANALYSIS
Hoover Institution Gathers US Policy Officials and Leading Scholars at Conference for Collaborative State and Local Policy Research
Civil servants and leading policy scholars from across the United States gathered at the 2025 Conference on Collaborative State and Local Policy Research on January 27–28, 2025, in Hoover’s new Shultz Auditorium.
Presenters discussed innovative new government programs and fresh ways of evaluating existing ones across multiple disciplines including health, criminal justice, housing, education, and public finance. In each presentation, scholars showed unique insights into government policy with the help of administrative data supplied by a partner government agency. The questions tackled by scholars were typically motivated by the needs of the government partners themselves.
Presenting scholars included Hoover’s own Thomas Dee, Eric Hanushek and Oliver Giesecke. The conference is part of an ongoing effort by Hoover’s State and Local Governance Initiative to examine policy outcomes of government programs using high-quality, comprehensive data, working in partnership with government entities.
Read more here.
INTERVIEW
Hoover’s Michael J. Boskin Hosts Conversation with Former Governors Bush, Daniels, and Brown
Federal officials should encourage results over compliance and shy away from recent escalating fights about who is to blame when things go awry.
Those are some of the takeaways for policymakers from an hour-long discussion with three of America's most distinguished former governors—Jeb Bush (Florida), Jerry Brown (California), and Mitch Daniels (Indiana)—that explored the critical relationship between states and the federal government.
Moderated by Michael J. Boskin, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, as part of the ongoing Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy, this conversation examined how these leading public servants managed natural disasters, educational reform, fiscal challenges, and infrastructure development during their terms.
“We know that trust in government has been eroding substantially for a very long time,” Boskin said during the discussion, “but it’s an important fact that trust in state and local government is much, much higher than it is in the federal government.” The conversation built on themes explored in American Federalism Today, a book Boskin edited that features interviews with the three governors about their experiences dealing with Washington while in office.
Watch the episode here.
ALSO FEATURING:
Unlocking America's Infrastructure, Part 2: Removing NEPA's Obstacles
In this entry on Substack, Senior Fellow Joshua D. Rauh and Visiting Fellow Rick Geddes outline the costs in terms of money and time imposed on US infrastructure development by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970. NEPA mandates that any new piece of infrastructure receive a thorough and lengthy environmental impact assessment, adding years to the completion timeline for projects such as new subway lines in cities. It also allows for costly litigation by outside parties who may oppose the project’s construction. Rauh and Geddes offer up several suggestions for how NEPA could be reformed to allow for faster infrastructure construction in many instances.
Read more here.
California Adopts Permanent Water Rationing
In this piece for California on Your Mind, Senior Fellow Lee Ohanian writes of changes made this year by California’s State Water Resources Control Board that mandate hard quotas on urban water consumption, with some cities seeing steep reductions in water supply by 2040. Ohanian points out the doubtful fiscal math supporting this move, arguing this may cost the state nearly triple what it expects to save. According to Ohanian, the move also papers over the issue of California’s water conservation and collection infrastructure, which has barely expanded in recent years as new projects are strangled in red tape and litigation.
Read more here.
As the World Turns—and Burns—in California
Reflecting back on jostling between California governors and presidents past, Distinguished Policy Fellow Bill Whalen writes about how major players in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires have fared thus far. Looking at President Donald Trump, California governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, and California senator Adam Schiff, Whalen finds that unlike in the past, the political posturing started before anyone had really picked up the pieces in the fire-ravaged zones. He says it “doesn’t bode well for those Californians who lost possessions in the Los Angeles fires or worry about the ability of America’s elected class to set aside their partisan beefs in times of crisis.” Whalen says both Trump and officials in California appear to “thrive on drama,” when the residents of the Los Angeles area just want to see results.
Read more here.
Kindling for an Inferno
In a new piece for Defining Ideas, Visiting Fellow Matthew E. Kahn cites eight different factors he argues contributed to the severity of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Many of them concern state and local regulations such as zoning, water rates, insurance availability, and the state of the vegetation in the areas that caught fire. Addressing some of these factors could encourage individual property owners and local governments to make changes that would make neighborhoods more resilient in the face of wildfires, Kahn writes.
Read more here.
Fellow Spotlight: Natalie Millar
Natalie Millar is the Styslinger Family Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She specializes in labor economics, public economics, and the economics of education. She is also a research fellow for the Alabama Commission on Higher Education and the North Carolina State University Postsecondary Career and Technical Education program.
For more insight on important state and local issues visit
https://www.hoover.org/focus-areas/empowering-state-and-local-governance
