Marco Rubio testified before Congress recently, where he dropped this little gem in a reply to Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York:
We have to have a State Department that can deliver on a foreign policy that is rooted in the national interest of the United States. To defend the national interest of the United States requires us to make sure that every dollar we spend and every action we take has to have measurable outcomes to deliver for the American people. They have to either make our country safer, or they have to make our country stronger, or they have to help make our country more prosperous. It has to do at least one of those three things. And ideally, whether it’s a program or a measure that we take, it should do all three of them.
Those who have read The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (which I highly recommend) will recognize the logic here — that in any successful enterprise, your actions must directly support your goals, and those goals must be explicitly articulated.
So even if he and I might disagree on what kinds of outcomes it should be up to government to ‘deliver’, I greatly appreciate his articulating them, and demanding that we take only actions that will bring them about. That’s a great starting point for moving forward.
As I often do when I hear someone making sense about something, I thought of how this might sound if it were about education rather than foreign policy. It’s hard to even imagine someone in government saying something like:
We have to have an education policy that is rooted in the interest of the United States. That requires us to make sure that every dollar we spend and every action we take has to have measurable outcomes to deliver for the American people. They have to either make students more literate, or more numerate, or more rational. It has to do at least one of those three things. And ideally, whether it’s a program or a measure that we take, it should do all three of them.
The fact that it is so hard to imagine tells us just how much trouble we’ve got ourselves into. But at the same time, it points to a path that can lead us back out.
