On this episode, Watson School dean and economist John Friedman spoke with Todd Fisher, a 1987 graduate of Brown University, about the inner workings and long-term effects of the CHIPS and Science Act. Fisher served as Chief Investment Officer of the White House's CHIPS Program Office from January 2023 to March 2025, and currently serves on the Watson School’s Board of Governors.

The Act, which was passed under President Biden, provided unprecedented government subsidies to the United States semiconductor manufacturing industry, reimagined how government can support private industry, and offered lessons for anyone interested in how to make government work more efficiently.

John and Todd discuss the main opportunities and challenges the CHIPS Office faced, how the office’s approach differed from previous models of public-private partnership, and what it was like trying to, as Todd describes, build a “startup within government.” They also discuss his current role as Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Economic Opportunity in the office of New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.

Read more about the CHIPS Program and Fisher’s work at the “Factory Settings” Substack.

Watch this conversation on our YouTube Channel.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm the Dean of the Watson School and your guest host for this episode, John Friedman.

In this conversation, we're going to explore the new age of American industrial policy. For much of the past half century, the dominant view in economic policy was that governments should rely primarily on markets, rather than try to direct the economy themselves.

Public policy would establish the rules, correct clear market failures, and support research and infrastructure, but generally avoid choosing particular industries, technologies, firms, or regions for special support.

That consensus is now shifting. Across the political spectrum, governments are taking a more active role in directing economic development through investments in specific industries, regions, and even specific firms.

What's the potential from this new approach to economic policy for national security, for inclusive economic growth, and where might it go wrong? To discuss this important set of issues, I'm delighted to have with me, Todd Fisher.

Todd not only serves on the Watson School Board of Governors, but he has served in a variety of roles over the past six years, thinking about ways that government can promote economic development. He currently serves as senior director of strategic initiatives and economic opportunity for New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.

He also served in important roles in the federal Commerce Department during the Biden administration. In '21 and '22, he oversaw funds from the American Recovery Plan as part of the Economic Development Administration, or EDA.

And then from '22 to '25, as the chief investment officer at the Biden administration's CHIPS office, managing nearly $40 billion to invest and expand advanced semiconductor production in the United States. Todd Fisher, thanks for coming on the show.

TODD FISHER: It's a pleasure, John. Thanks for having me.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So as I laid out, you've worked on this issue in a range of settings, but let's start with CHIPS. This is a really massive program, grants, loans, other incentives that were put towards expanding semiconductor production in the US.

You were the chief investment officer. Let's start just by-- you can tell the audience what that role was and, more broadly, what the operation looked like.

TODD FISHER: Sure. Well, first, I think it's worth stepping back for one minute, because when you think about the CHIPS Act, which is a broad based effort in industrial policy and a real intervention in the economy and giving significant dollars to companies that are already particularly well off, there is nothing like that, that the government has really done probably since World War II.

And so I think to frame, what we were trying to do, this was not copy-paste, do it again. This was brand new approach to how we were going to interact with large companies, how we were going to figure out how to allocate money to incent something that was fundamentally about national security and didn't have a playbook to do that, because it hadn't been done.

The other thing to note about that is one of the things that I didn't fully appreciate about government is once you pass a bill like this, the CHIPS Act, there is nobody who is focused on how you execute and put that up into practice.

There's a lot of work going on around policy and writing the bill, et cetera. But suddenly, you've woke up one morning, and you've caught the bus.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Implementation is a thing.

TODD FISHER: Implementation is a thing. And so I want you and your listeners to know that when you start with, this is a pure startup within government for something that really hadn't been done in any of our lifetimes.

And so that's the situation that we were faced, August of Twenty Twenty-Two, when the bill was passed. And I had a 30-year career in the investment world and made a specific decision, 8 and 1/2 years ago, that I wanted to have a full second career of public service.

And so that's what I've been doing for the last 8 and 1/2 years. But when you think about how do you create an entity within the federal government to engage with the private sector-- and these not only the private sector.

We're talking about the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world. I really drew, personally, on my experience, working for KKR, which is one of the world's leading investment firms, and thinking about how do you create an office from scratch that is modeled after world-class investment firms.

Because, ultimately, what we had to do was take this $39 billion and figure out how to, in my mind, invest it. We weren't investing it for financial returns. We were investing it for national security returns. But the analysis was similar.

And so what I was, was the chief investment officer, figuring out how to allocate that money. And I drew on my own experience and then brought experts in on the things that were important here, which might be national security, for example, semiconductor expertise, et cetera, and modeled it within a government context, which is very different from a private investment firm.

And so that's what we did. And it was myself who came from the private sector, and my partner, Mike Schmidt, who is more of a government person and had come from Treasury. And I did a number of things in the New York government before that.

And Gina Raimondo, who had the foresight to say, what I really need here is someone who really understands how government works and someone who understands how the private sector works.

And I have to put them together in an arranged marriage and build a group that ultimately was 150 people, structured after a great investment firms to allocate this money. And so that is what the job was.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: We're going to get into more detail about how you went about that and your successes and challenges in this conversation. But before we do that, I think it's actually worth talking a bit about, even just the choice to come at this as an investment firm in government investing towards national security.

I think by the time the CHIPS office came into operation, there was a pretty broad agreement that there was a national security reason to be expanding the production of leading edge chips in the US.

But the government did not have to come at it this way. So if you were a classical liberal, what you might say is, look, we need more semiconductors in the US. Let's put a domestic production credit on it. We can titrate it to whatever level we want.

And then let TSMC and SK Hynix and whatever else go at it and figure it out themselves. Talk me through how you thought about the difference, the advantages to having this much more bespoke, specific investment approach, as opposed to that, set the tax subsidy, and then get out of the way.

TODD FISHER: Well, first of all, I should say, at my core, I'm a markets person. I believe in the markets and the general effectiveness of them. And I also believe that you should always err towards the side of the simplest answer to that.

I mean, what we did was setting up a 150-person office and hiring a dramatic number of people from the private sector, and making that all work within government. That was super hard.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: I'd like to hear what the more complicated option was.

TODD FISHER: So that is really complicated. And clearly, I think, the default is put a tax incentive in place. And by the way, there was and remains an investment tax credit for semiconductors. So that was always a core part of this program.

In fact, if you look at it, it was the more significant part of the program was the investment tax credit versus the $39 billion that we had. So I believe in that general approach. However, I think that you always have to look at what you're trying to accomplish and the structure and nature of the industry that you're impacting.

And in this particular case, you mentioned that there was at that time general knowledge that we needed to do something on the leading edge. And just for your listeners at the time, 0%-- 0% of any leading edge chip was produced in the United States, and over 90% of those leading edge chips were produced in Taiwan.

And that, from a national security perspective, was a fundamental risk and vulnerability. It's also a very concentrated industry. And so I don't believe that just putting an investment tax credit on the table would have incentivized TSMC to build in Arizona, or Samsung to build in Texas.

And when you think about semiconductors have to look upstream and downstream. When you think about the broader supply chain, it's not just about the semiconductor fab. It's about the suppliers to that fab. It's about the advanced packaging at the back end of that fab.

And so a one-size-fits-all tax credit across everything might incent actually the wrong kind of things here and not the things that we really needed here, for example, the packaging industry. I don't know what TSMC is exactly going to spend this year alone in capital expenditures.

It's more than $39 billion. So when you think about $39 billion over multiple years, and you look at the leading company that's investing more than that in one year, it just gives you a sense it's a relatively small amount.

And we're trying to use that in a way to incent lots of things. When you looked at that, we realized very quickly that it wouldn't be enough to have TSMC just build their fabs in Arizona. Because all the advanced packaging was happening in Taiwan.

And if you're just going to produce something in the US, and then gets shipped to Taiwan to get packaged, what have you done in terms of reducing your vulnerability? And so the only way we could do that is to get advanced packaging to be in this country.

Now, advanced packaging is a much lower margin business than chip manufacturing. It was going to require much more incentive than certainly the investment tax credit, and those companies ended up at the higher end of percentage of incentives.

But there was no advanced packaging company that was going to build in the US. So we had to go out and find them, to incent them. Ultimately, we got Amcor to build in Arizona. That would not have happened with just the pure tax credit.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And how did you think about not just your investments, but in combination with the production tax credit. Was the challenge primarily that these things are extremely expensive, and that you needed to get all of these companies over the hurdle upfront in order to invest what are tens of billions of dollars in building these fabs in the US?

But then once they're built, they're close to competitive going forward, or were you thinking also about the fab is built, can we actually produce chips on the margin in a way that is globally competitive or competitive with some national security subsidy from the government?

TODD FISHER: This is the underlying assumption, and I think it's played out quite well. But because industries, over time, in my terminology, get calcified in a certain structure, there's no particular reason, when you look at it, that Taiwan should be more cost competitive than the US over time.

The labor component in fabs these days is quite low. The cost of equipment, which is the massive amount of the capital expenditures, is the same if you're in Taiwan, as if you're in the US.

But what's happened is that Taiwan has created a whole ecosystem in Hsinchu, with all the suppliers and a lot of scale and, over time, just ease of doing business and the talent. That is hard to recreate.

And therefore, without anything like the CHIPS Act, the natural way of the world would be more money in Taiwan, more money in Taiwan, more money in Taiwan. It's easy. It's cheap. It fits into the ecosystem.

And so we needed to do something to spur a change in that industry, which is what the CHIPS Act was about, really push with money, arm twisting, anything we could to get more fabs built in Arizona to make sure that we, that Arizona was doing all they could to build an ecosystem around that included the suppliers and the industrial parks and ASUs and talent pipelines into semiconductors.

And our thesis was that, over time, if you create that scale, that will be generally competitive in the world, maybe with a bit of tax incentives on an ongoing basis. And even if it's not purely cost competitive, the advantages of being close to all the customers, which are basically US, the advantages of US higher education institutions that are close, and all that talent would outweigh anything.

And so that underlying assumption was that, actually, if you shifted the nature, you could get to a pretty sustainable action. Now, the world has moved on. AI has become absolutely ubiquitous. And so you got to remember, ChatGPT hadn't been introduced when the CHIPS Act was passed.

So AI was not a word in the common lexicon. Now, that demand has pushed even more investment to happen in Arizona. That has allowed Intel and Samsung to also potentially become more competitive. So the market is now working.

But the fundamental work that we did to push these companies to get started in the US, we're bearing the fruits of that now.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So it seems like even beyond the national security dimension of this, the magic word here is agglomeration. If we get scale, if you get things working together-- AI is a great example-- my understanding is that the vast majority of new AI startups still happen in San Francisco, despite it being a place where labor is more expensive, office space is more expensive.

You face more competition from your other firms, if they're going to poach workers. Taxes are pretty high. There's a ton of reasons to not start an AI business in San Francisco. And yet, people are still going there because of the broad benefits of being part of that cluster.

And so it sounds whether it's about the chips industry or some of the other work that you've done in these other contexts, the goal is to get one of these thriving clusters, where things work because other things are already there, and they work, but you have to have something to get the flywheel spinning initially. Am I capturing your logic for what you're doing?

TODD FISHER: I think you are. I think it's very well said. That was a fundamental, underlying precept of the CHIPS Act and how we thought about things. And then our goal was, how do we figure out how to give the least amount of money to incent this ecosystem?

Because we could have easily given all the money to leading-edge. I mean, it's well known that the three leading-edge companies, actually, four with Micron, if you include memory, were asking for way, way more than we had-- more than twice what we had in total themselves.

We needed to have enough to also get that flywheel going with the suppliers, with the advanced packaging companies. And so that was a lot of the work we did by hiring really exceptional talent. I remember one of the first conversations I had with Secretary Raimondo.

I said, we need to have real people that how to work with significant companies across the table. Because these companies, TSMC, Intel, Micron, et cetera, they can hire the best lawyers in the world. They're going to try to spin circles.

They're used to dealing with government in a certain way. We have to reset that. So what we did was we hired very talented people from the financial world, from the semiconductor world, et cetera. That could sit across the table from the CEO fill in the blank.

And we need to structure our application in a way that gives us real information. So we were really deeply understanding the economics of these fabs and what they really needed to make their investment, and not a penny more.

That was a lot of work. That was the equivalent of what a private equity firm would do when they analyze the financial statements of a company and try to figure out, what amount of equity is really needed here, what is the return on this?

And then to put the least amount in that we could to incent that money to come in. Because, if you look at just the $39 billion, on average, we were between 5% and 15% of the total capital expenditures of a given deal.

So the company itself is putting in close to 85-plus percent of the capital. That public-private partnership was what was critical. It was aligning incentives. It was making sure we were on the same page there.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So you mentioned the need to hire great people, and maybe it's worth talking about more the operations of actually putting the CHIPS office together. That was not easy.

Tell our listeners about what hiring 150 people to work in an office, when, as you described, you want people with really a very specific set of skills and expertise. What was that like?

TODD FISHER: I mean, that question gets to what I said very early on here, which is we're trying to recreate an investment firm in a government context. And at an investment firm, like you want to hire someone, put out a job description, get someone in. Maybe you could do that in even a couple of weeks.

In the federal government, as you well know, the processes for hiring people take time, take effort. There's a lot of rules that govern it. And by the way, we had a lot of exceptions in our enabling legislation that allowed us to have exceptional type of hires.

We were allowed to pay more than your typical-rated employee. So we had a lot of benefits, and still, it was really hard and took a lot of time to hire people. That's before you factor in how do you attract people from the financial world into government, who are by nature nervous of that, or have a perception of that.

That it's difficult to trying to get people themselves to want to come to government. And so we just figured a way to set ourselves up and take time out of that lengthy hiring process, take time out of how you onboard people.

And we just went out and recruited people. And it's great, because there are a lot of people who want art like me and want to have an experience in government and are always curious about it, want to impact their country.

So it took us more time than normal, but that effort was well worthwhile and laid the groundwork. But it extends to lots and lots of different aspects, that if you're in the private sector, just take for granted. Can we hire a investment bank to help us? Of course, go do it.

Can we hire a consulting firm to help us? Of course, go do it. That is slow down for a lot of good reasons, ultimately about protecting whatever ways, the paybacks and other types of misuse of funds, and all of that, things are slowed down to make sure that everything's vetted effectively, but it makes it very, very tough to move fast.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So you and your CHIPS colleagues, you mentioned Mike Schmidt and Sarah Myers have written at length about some of these challenges in hiring and contracting and other aspects in the CHIPS office in your great Substack Factory Settings.

I would encourage any of our listeners to go take a look at it. What I found interesting, as I read through many of your different examples was that, as you pointed out, not all of government is like an investment office.

What may be not just a well-founded and sensible constraint in some other context may end up hitting you all in a very different way. So what do you think we can take from your experience doing, something which is a bit unusual to make government more generally a little bit more able to do these types of flexible, meet-the-moment projects?

TODD FISHER: Yeah. Look, I believe that government reform initiatives and efforts to make government work better are critical at all levels of government. And so some of these things are embedded in existing law.

So there's going to have to be some changes to law, which is painstaking and not sexy work, but I think it's critical. A lot of these things are interpretations of law or rules that have been put in place over time.

Again, as you say, in most instances, for good reasons or in a reaction to something that happened or some money that got paid out to someone. Here, let's put that in place. Or this happened here. Let's put that in place.

Nothing gets eliminated, so you end up with an agglomeration of different rules, regulations, laws, et cetera that never disappear and just build on each other, and then slow things down. And then I will tell you one of the things that I think is most challenging, and something that I'm obsessed with is risk aversion.

The natural propensity-- and this is really quite a government thing to being risk averse and erring on the side of risks of comission. Like viewing that, if we do something and it's wrong or it's failed, we could get dragged before Congress or whatever, let's eliminate that fails to take into account risks of omission, right?

That risk of not doing something. And in CHIPS, that was the whole kit and caboodle. I mean, the real risk, when you step back from it is that we didn't get this money allocated, and we didn't get these fabs built.

And Taiwan continued to produce 90% to 95% of all leading edge CHIPS in the world, and China ended up attacking Taiwan. That risk was always front and center in our minds. But for the most part, that is not in people's minds in government.

Because risks of omission do not get measured. How do you measure the project that didn't get done? But the risk of comission, like you did something, and it failed. There was some corruption in that project that you happened to fund, everybody is deathly concerned about that.

And so I believe pretty strongly that there has to be an attempt to change the whole risk appetite within government to have people measure the risk of omission. And that's an up and down change in terms of how people judge risks that they're taking, how people feel empowered or not empowered.

So we constantly try to say, yes, we have to do things right, but we also have to take risk. We can't not take risk because then we don't get our stuff done. So that's how I think about it.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: I've experienced exactly that same thing in government. I would say it goes beyond just risk aversion, in the sense of a calculated there is a small chance that something goes wrong, or I get sued, and so, therefore, we have to check all the boxes to close that off.

That's, I think, at the root of it. But it morphs in cases into almost more just a cultural small C conservatism in the sense that even if people aren't actually worried about getting dragged in front of Congress or sued.

It seems like there's just an instinct, in many cases, to say, well, this regulation says we can do any of the following 10 options in this case for security. But let's just do all of them to make sure that we cover ourselves.

And there's just a real resistance to find a way to get to yes, even when there are serious risks of-- I agree with you that the risks of comission loom larger in people's minds than the risks of omission.

TODD FISHER: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. And part of it is-- and we had-- this is not a negative comment against lawyers, but Washington does have a lot of lawyers in it and the government. And in many cases, the lawyers loom large.

And we had great lawyers at CHIPS-- the best, really the best. But it is often a case of, let's start with the analysis of the regulation and the rule, and here's what you can and can't do. And that needs to be flipped a little bit on its head.

And that's what, I think, particularly our general counsel at the Commerce Department was really good at, was tell me what you're trying to get done. And then let me try to figure out how to enable you to get that done, which is a totally different mindset.

I mean, we were still digging into the regulations and saying, all right, how do we do this? But thinking creatively about how to enable that to get done. We now have an administration that goes beyond that.

But there are some things to learn from this administration in terms of really trying to push even further and into we really need to figure out a way to do this, and we're going to have to take a little bit more legal risk to make that happen.

We were constantly trying to figure out where on the spectrum of risk we wanted to be and having really constructive discussions and debates on that. But the fact of the matter is, typically, if the lawyer says you can't do it, most people say, OK, we can't do it.

In my world, particularly coming before the government, it was, all right, we can't do it that way. But here's what I'm trying to accomplish. Help me figure out a legal way. I don't want to do anything illegal. Help me figure out a legal way to do that. And that's just a different mindset. And sometimes, it takes a different type of lawyer.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: The legal risk is one thing. I just want to touch a little bit before we move on from CHIPS on some more of the political risk. And I don't know-- when I was in government, the episode of Solyndra loomed very large.

So for our listeners, Solyndra was a solar panel manufacturing company. The Obama administration, very early on, made a loan guarantee as part of a wide-ranging set of investments in green tech. The program, as a whole, actually made money.

This particular investment went south, cost the US taxpayer about $500 million, and that kicked off a very large political controversy because, predictably, the CEO of Solyndra had been in the room with Obama at some point.

And once these things get going, they can be difficult to stop. How did you think about those types of risks? And that just must be completely different than in a private context where, look, calculate risk ex-ante. You manage expectations, and then what happens happens.

TODD FISHER: Yeah. Well, it is, and it isn't. And it gets back to the comments I was making about risk aversion, risk of omission, and comission. I think Solyndra, it's just-- the word should be banned.

It is bandied about Washington in a way that is totally unconstructive, because it is the poster child of risk of commission. It was a bad choice, because it was one of the first loans that they had put out, and I'm sure there were mistakes made in diligence, just by reading through it.

But we had, I remember, a large meeting with the Secretary and all her policy people, and I remember her saying something like, we can't have another Solyndra. And I said to her, I always am willing to speak truth to power, I guess.

And I said, Secretary, I just don't think that's the right framing here. If we are not taking risk, we are not doing our job. The reason CHIPS exist is because the private sector, the markets that I already said that I believe strongly in, are not able-- will not, themselves, create the result that we're looking to create for national security.

So by its nature, we are taking more risk than the private markets are willing to take. So we will have failures, like period, end of discussion. So we need to figure out how to manage those failures and how to make sure we have a process that we feel is really robust.

And she looked at me. In fairness to her, she said, you know what, you're right. You're right. That is a good point. What we need to do is make sure we are communicating that effectively up front, so people what this program is about, that we are taking risk, that we don't expect every single one of our investments to go well.

We put very clear milestones in each of our investments to protect ourselves and make sure we weren't putting good money after bad. We had upside sharing and all of our deals, where if they did way better than we thought. We would get money back.

So we did a lot to protect ourselves. But I think we all knew, and I still think that not all the things we did will work out.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So the Biden administration ends, and now you find yourself in a somewhat similar role in the state of New Jersey. Love to dig into how that's similar, how that's different.

But just to start with, why don't you tell me and our listeners a little bit about the role, especially on the regional economic development, building agglomerations within the state of New Jersey. How do you think about what you're trying to do building towards inclusive growth?

TODD FISHER: The role in New Jersey is all about execution. It is about how do you make government work better for the residents and businesses of, in this case, New Jersey, but fill in the blank. There is a view, and I think it's a fair view, that, actually, government has failed people in many ways, and it needs to work better.

And I think Mikie Sherrill, in her campaign, was very focused on this issue. She had her whole agenda around saving you time and money. On day one, she, through executive order, set up the Office of the COO, chief operating officer, that didn't exist before.

By the way, I think there's only 16 or 17 states in the country that have a chief operating officer. And the goal of that office was to make things work, is to be that connective tissue across all these disparate programs, disparate agencies, civil society, that make getting things done so complicated, and empower that group to actually do that.

So in my case, that is around executing the long-term strategy on her key priorities of energy and housing and permitting reform, and also, creating and driving an economic strategy for the state, and figuring out how to attract, retain, businesses in the state, how to grow jobs in the state, how to leverage the strengths of the state to accelerate economic growth.

And breaking out of that classic reactive mode of whatever the news of the day is, and creating a group that is not driven by that cycle but is driven by, let's think about what eight years or four years looks like from now, and work backwards from that.

What do we have to put in place? And let's set up a clear strategy, and then bring people together to execute against that strategy. That's what this group is meant to do.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: You've only been in the job for five months, so we won't blame you for all of New Jersey's problems just quite yet. But what are you seeing? I'm sure there are many different complementary approaches.

But what's an example of the type of broader strategy that you're trying to develop that's going to leverage the possibility of agglomeration to drive that growth that might not happen were it not for government trying to coordinate all that's going on?

TODD FISHER: Yeah, I think, again, broadly, I do believe that the private sector creates a lot of its own benefits for itself. If you take New Jersey, very strong life sciences state, many of the largest pharmaceutical companies have their headquarters in New Jersey.

The strengths of New Jersey around talent, we have probably the best, at least one or two in the country. In terms of K to 12 education, we have some of the world's best research institutions, Princeton and Rutgers, but also NJIT and Rowan and Stevens.

And obviously, logistically, where we sit between New York and Philadelphia, and really great strengths. And over time, because of lots of reasons, processes have become ossified, more challenging to get permits issued.

Obviously, there's some cost implications of doing business in New Jersey, that things don't work as well as they could. And so the life science is a good example. This week, I brought 12 or 14 major life sciences companies together to talk about how we can more effectively create pathways, workforce pathways for their businesses of the future, the skills that they need now and into the future.

Whether that's about oncology drugs, whether that's about AI and the way that's changing their business and the new types of skills. And why can the government play a role in that? Because we have a lot of programs.

We have the convening power that can bring these businesses together with some of our leading universities, with our community colleges, and get that system organized in a way that works better for the life sciences industry.

So this aspect of ordering, helping to build and connect government, civil society, universities in a way that actually accentuates the strengths of New Jersey is what I see as the role of government, hopefully, in partnership with the private sector creates something that really matters.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: How do you then-- let's take the example that you gave. Life sciences is already a strength in New Jersey, and the government is trying to use some of its convening power and maybe some of its workforce development grants to get the flywheel turning of more programs to train skilled technicians and other workforce needs that are, in turn, going to make it more effective to have businesses and innovation in the state?

Do you see that same risk aversion, small C conservatism, in the way that state, local governments, universities of their own quasi government, especially when they're public universities.

Is it similar to what you saw in the federal government? How is it different, operating at much different scales. I'm interested in your initial experiences here in New Jersey.

TODD FISHER: I think it's similar. I do think it's similar. What we didn't talk about with CHIPS was the challenge of lots of different priorities. Ezra Klein famously called our program the Everything Bagel, how do you balancing labor and environmental and national security and all of those things.

And we have a Department of Labor that has multiple workforce programs. We have our economic development administration that has a bunch of workforce programs. We have our Department of Education and our Office of the Secretary of Higher Education.

These things get fragmented a bit within different groups. And the only party that can actually pull them together and create scale out of them is the Governor's Office, or the White House, or whatever, the local City Office of the Mayor is.

And that's what I see my role as. I see lots of good small programs and workforce across so many places. I see one off life sciences companies, doing something unique with a community college, but they're all one off.

And it's so clear that if they were all brought together, we could do so much more. And there are some states that have done so much more and have shown the path to do this in a coordinated, sophisticated, focused way.

And that's what I see there. If you move from that to something like permitting, then it gets back to the kinds of things we talked about in hiring practices or contracting with it. That permitting challenge is the same, as we talked about in the federal government.

There's risk aversion. People don't get paid, because they've issued a permit that goes bad, that allows something to happen that shouldn't happen. And so there's that. There are old systems. There are complexities of hiring and structure and civil service and all of that.

There are processes that have been in place forever. There are rules that built on rules, that built on rules, that people don't feel empowered to change. And so this is, in my mind, when you talk about abundance, this is really the work of just fundamental change management.

It is not the stuff that really is valued. I still believe that I talked about lawyers before, but I can talk about policy in government is the pinnacle. You want to be like the lead policy person in the White House.

And execution skills are devalued-- devalued is probably too strong-- or not valued as much, but they are so critical. And the path of changing something like permitting, you have amazing people working in our Department of Environmental Protection, our Department of Community Affairs, or Department of Transportation.

They're doing their job. They're overworked. It's hard to hire people because of the salaries and things like that. There are old rules that they need to follow. The systems are written in COBOL.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: COBOL, for our listeners, is a Nineteen Sixties and Seventies programming language that basically nobody teaches anymore, but is used to run many government systems.

So, for instance, when the pandemic hit, the reason that we gave all unemployed people $600, as opposed to giving them all, say, a 10% or a 20% boost, was that the COBOL systems could not process. It could add, but it could not multiply. That's where that came from.

TODD FISHER: I didn't even know that.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Just the background. Sorry, go ahead.

TODD FISHER: That's amazing. But what's the work to do that. It's not as easy as issuing an executive order. It's not as easy as just changing rules. It is an all of the above approach to change management.

There might be some simple things to do on process. There might be incentive things to do. There might be recognition things to do. There might be regulatory things to do. The falsity is that this should be easy. We could fix it immediately.

That is just not true. You have to do the hard work to change mentalities, to change processes, to recognize the good work that people are doing and help them to do their job better, and to show them the art of the possible.

And the reason that I went to work for New Jersey, A, I think the governor is terrific, and I think her agenda is great. And she has a strong desire to prove in New Jersey that government can work better.

And if it does work better, that can be a model for the rest of the country. That's why I'm in New Jersey, because I want to experience it firsthand.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Well, I think that's a good place to end. Excited to have you helping us here at Watson. Excited to see what difference you can make in New Jersey and around the country, and looking forward to keeping up with all that you're doing. Thanks so much, Todd.

TODD FISHER: Thank you, John. Same to you, I'm really excited about what you're doing at Watson. It's really great to watch the school blossom, and I'm glad to be a part of it.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: I appreciate that. Thanks so much.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Juliana Merullo. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, with additional music by Blue Dots Sessions. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that, too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at [email protected]. Again, that's all one word, [email protected]. We'll be back soon with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.