Joshua Schank

Ready to transform government from the inside out? It's easy to complain about government bureaucracy and transportation in Los Angeles, but what if you could actually improve them instead? That's exactly what the authors of New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies set out to do in the Office of Extraordinary Innovation at Los Angeles Metro, a transportation agency with a $9 billion annual budget in a county larger than 42 states. Now you can learn from their hard-earned successes, and valuable mistakes, as they provide helpful lessons learned for anyone looking to make change in public agencies. You'll learn how to: Navigate internal resistance Build coalitions and fix processes Recognize impenetrable fiefdoms Pick your battles and win them Using amusing behind-the-scenes stories, New Tricks presents a pragmatic playbook for those who want to deliver lasting government reform, and an outright nerd-fest for anyone working in public transportation!

While learning procedures like the markup or cloture, the legislative process can seem mechanical and dry. What students hunger for, and greatly benefit from, is seeing lawmaking from the inside—the backroom politics that makes the process so fascinating, so real, so compelling. All Roads Lead to Congress drives students through one piece of legislation—the surface transportation bill—showing them the maneuvering and negotiating that go on among members of Congress and their staffers as they haggle over a huge pot of money. The bill provides an example of both sides of the domestic legislative coin, as members of Congress formulating the bill fight over both policy issues (mostly along party lines) and money (mostly along regional lines). While working on the Hill, Costas Panagopoulos and Joshua Schank were able to follow the path of this legislation from inception to law, observing firsthand the twists and turns of its journey. While filled with details and dialogue reminiscent of a good novel, All Roads is sure to explain the various rules that structure legislation, the leadership styles and strategies at play, the tensions among levels of government, and the impact of the executive. Students are not only likely to read this intriguing case study of Hill life cover to cover, but they also might seriously consider an internship or future career on the Hill. More important, they will have absorbed conceptual ideas about Congress effortlessly.