Inside, Outside, and In Between: Leading Across All Levels of Government

For our penultimate episode of EJB Talks for the spring 2025 semester, Bloustein School Young Alumni honoree and Advisory Board Member Sara Meyers MPP ’09 shares her unconventional path into public policy, beginning with a background in music and German before being inspired by political events to pursue change from within government. She talks to Dean Stuart Shapiro about her extensive experience across various levels of government, from federal work at HUD, where she led major operational efforts, to local leadership roles in DC’s education system, and more recently as COO of the CHIPS Program Office at the Department of Commerce. As she ventures onto a new path with a climate-focused investment philanthropy organization, she emphasizes the value she found as a policy generalist, the importance of transferable skills like data analysis, writing, and project management, and the benefits of diverse experience in creating effective, impactful policy.

Transcript

Stuart Shapiro
Welcome to EJB Talks. I’m Stuart Shapiro, the Dean of the Bloustein School. And the purpose of this podcast is to highlight the work my colleagues and our alumni in the fields of policy, planning, and health are doing to make the world a better place.  

Today I’m speaking with a former student of mine and a member of the Bloustein School Advisory Board, Sara Meyers. Welcome to the podcast, Sara! 

Sara Meyers
Thanks so much for having me. Good to be here! 

Stuart Shapiro
So, we always start in the beginning, with origin stories and such. So, tell us a little bit about what led you to public policy. 

Sara Meyers
It’s a pretty winding road, actually, but I’ll spare you the really early details. I studied German in undergraduate and then I thought I would have a career in music. And so I went on and on and I did an audio engineering degree in German, in Germany. I came back and was working in a recording studio and you know, the first time I voted was in Bush/Gore. And I was working in the recording studio when the reelect happened and I was so unmoored by that. And had been sort of active in protesting throughout Gore that I sort of figured that being a recording engineer was not going to be my contribution to the world.  

And so, I started volunteering and applying for school and I figured that protesting was valuable and also that it was probably more effective to try to make change from the inside. And thus, the policy school application 

Stuart Shapiro
Yeah, I love the thinking about whether it’s more effective making change inside or outside. I don’t think there’s a right answer to that question. As someone who’s had his career mostly on the inside, I sympathize with your direction. But I also understand that sometimes outside forces are needed too. So, on the inside you’ve done a lot of different things and we could probably talk for hours about each of them. Let’s give the listeners a brief overview here and tell me about your work at HUD. Particularly, you are deputy assistant secretary at the Federal Housing Administration. 

Sara Meyers
Yeah, I mean that came after I was at HUD for about nine years, and that came towards the end. I did like a series of, sort of high visibility projects, like the Recovery Act and Hurricane Sandy. The sort of building the stat programs there for performance management. But you know, the deputy assistant secretary is a senior executive service role, which is a kind of job in the federal government. And you’re really supposed to be, like a, generalist, that can move from policy area to policy area. In my case, I was tasked for operations. That was a team of about 115 people I would say and it was, you know, managing the operations for, I want to say, FHA was about 2400 FTEs at time? So like a big… one of the biggest components within HUD.  

And you know, honestly my work there was like, the first role is NCS, and I was significantly younger than almost everybody. And so, a lot of it was sort of figuring out, finding my way in that space and the work itself was, you know a lot. A lot of work in government operations is about how do you find efficiencies, how do you make people who are in sort of, back office roles feel more connected to the mission. Because a lot of times you see separations between like, the policy people and the ideas people and the people that have to do the implementation. And a lot of the times that that lands in procurement and HR and everythingelse.  

And so, you know, I did a ton of work around IT transformation there. But it was really the full portfolio of operations for a big team. And you know, the thing that’s memorable is just like what it was like to be a young executive responsible for such a big for such a big shop. And then in particular, in the midst of this I got the SES position on January 17, that was certified by opium on January 17 of 2017. And so, it was like, transition to a new administration, I had only worked for the Obama administration. This was the first Trump administration. So there was a lot of personal growth in that time, I would say. ((laughing)) 

Stuart Shapiro
So just for listeners. An “SES” is a senior executive service. It’s the higher levels of management within government. And you know, since you said efficiency and talked about working in government, I just have to push a little bit and say, so you mean there are people in government already who cared about efficiency and that maybe we don’t need a Department of Government Efficiency? 

Sara Meyers
Oh goodness, yeah. We could talk for a long time about that. Absolutely true. Like literally, anybody who enters that space now … or not now … before DOGE was like, focused on how do you make this work faster and better? Everybody knows it’s like too big, too sprawling, too many rules. And there’s a lot of people thinking about how to make that better and at a systems level. But also, literally every day, in the day-to-day like, churn, transaction level work that people are doing across the government like, anybody who’s in an executive role is like trying to make that better. So it should not….Make no mistake, there are plenty of people focused on this. 

Stuart Shapiro
Yeah, no. What a lot of people don’t understand is nobody inside the government has a stake in government working badly. And so everybody wants to see it improve. So, after a little bit of time at HUD, after you got the SES, and stayed in the Trump administration, you went to local government tell us about that. And you switched policy areas. Tell us about that. 

Sara Meyers
Yeah. Well, I had had enough. ((laughing)) I wanted to try something new. I think, you know, I was like my first job I took four years between college and graduate school. So, I was like a little bit older than, you know, my peers anyway, who entered the workforce when I did. But I’d been there for nine years and like for my generation, that actually felt like quite a long time to be in one place even though I had had probably four or five different jobs in that span. I like knew there was a world out there that I needed to experience. And I, you know, I was looking. I talked to people who had left the Treasury Department, but also HUD, and gone to work for DC government. And something that one of them said to me that really resonated and was super intriguing was, you know, a “fire drill” at the Treasury Department is that, the deck for the secretary is late.  

A “fire drill” in my actual job today is that there is a literal fire in the men’s shelter and I need to go there at 1:00 in the morning. And that sort of like, urgency and the proximity to constituents struck me as, like just vastly different than the experience you have when you’re doing the national scale policymaking and writing NOFAS or, you know, grant opportunities for the public or regulation. It’s just like a different beast? And so I left housing, I left the Department of Housing and Urban Development and went to the State Superintendent of Education in DC, which is actually a state function, even though DC is not a state. If we were a state, it would be like, you know, if they were in New York, they would be in Albany. 

Stuart Shapiro
Right. 

Sara Meyers
So there is a regulator and grant maker of traditional public and charter schools in DC. That was a team of about, I want to say 1,900 people and I was hired as the Assistant Superintendent for Operations. I became the Deputy Superintendent overseeing Ops, data and technology. And I entered at a point where there was like, very intense and very public scandal going on in one of the, sort of, city’s big schools and I felt immediately that proximity effect, that like…and the thing that’s interesting to me about local government or state government is that, like, you both have to operate at scale and have systems-level thinking about how you’re serving 95,000 students and designing systems that make sense. And, you have to pick up the phone and talk to a parent. 

Stuart Shapiro
Right. 

Sara Meyers
And that is…you have to go up and down the continuum like all day. And I think it’s like, very hard also, like really good for your brain, probably? ((laughing)) And was just an experience that I really… anybody who’s in the federal government, I always tell you should go to the government. So it’s like the same on some level and it’s like a different beast entirely. 

Stuart Shapiro
So you answered one of my follow-ups. Did you get that urgency? And clearly you did. How did you like it? 

Sara Meyers
I mean, I loved it. It’s like …it really also teaches you the impact of (unintelligible) on like, state and local entities. Of the grandiose vision that people have at the federal level. I remember getting a I think that ED (Department of Education) put out a, like a PRA notice or something, Paperwork Reduction Act notice, because they were about to do some big collection related to grants that we were getting. And I’ve done Paperwork Reduction Act work from the federal level and it’s like, terrible. But then we like, commented on this insane reporting that they wanted from us. And of course, like you know, they took the comments into consideration. And they did, basically, what we told them was going to be way too burdensome for all of the reasons that you fave at the federal level. But like, it creates real operational nightmares on the ground.  

And I think it just it… having the perspective of both the ….all of the levels of government on the continuum is just super….it makes you more effective than doing either, I think. But yeah, long answer too… yeah, I really liked it a lot. It was super interesting. I learned so much. Highly recommend. 

Stuart Shapiro
And maybe we can talk about the Paperwork Reduction Act sometime. I actually just had a…. 

Sara Meyers
(((laughing))) I know you know quite a bit about it. 

Stuart Shapiro
…reporter call me about it yesterday. (((laughing))) So, but I don’t think our listeners have the same level of fascination with it that I do. So I’m going to move on past the PRA there. So you liked it. You had a good time. Then you come back to the feds. But this time in a different role. Tell us about that. 

Sara Meyers
Yeah. You know, again like four years at the education agency in DC. Two of which were COVID. Which was a whole other level of special. 

Stuart Shapiro
Sure. 

Sara Meyers
And challenging. And I was ready to do the next thing. There was a new administration, you know, already underway with the Biden Administration and I was eager to sort of figure out a place to come back. But I ultimately ended up getting connected to a guy named Mike Schmidt, who recently had been named the director of what’s called the CHIPS Program Office at the Department of Commerce. The CHIPS Program Office is the manufacturing incentives side of the $50 billion that the Commerce Department got under the CHIPS and Science Act which was passed in 2022.   

And the whole… it’s a national line product security program which is designed to incentivize companies, semiconductor manufacturing companies, to build new or expand or modernize commercial fabrication facilities known as “fabs” for semiconductors. I started as the COO and chief of staff, I think it was a 7th employee in January of 2023. And we ultimately scaled to, depending on how you count, it’s like upwards of 150 people. And there’s like a real imperative to move quickly, both because everybody understood the urgency of getting these investments made in the United States.  

There’s a whole like back story on CHIPS and why it’s important and why it’s bipartisan. But it’s one of these like sort of signature initiatives of the Biden Administration that has a ton of attention around it, or had a ton of attention around it, and in our Secretary like, real expectation that we move as quickly as possible. 

And so that was a startup, you know, it was another start up in government that I as COO, was building the sort of, operational mechanics for and really building the organizational culture. All while we were sort of desiging this program on the fly. You know, like what should be in our Notice of Funding Opportunity? How are we going to run an investment process to select applicants and then negotiate deals with them?  

And that experience was just transformative for a bunch of reasons. But I think first and foremost is the level of talent. The people that we hired to that team from across sectors. They hired a lot of people from finance, from private equity and insurance. From other parts banking. We hired people from the semiconductor industry. We lots of people from government, from academia and you know, everybody we hired was like, top notch work ethic and super dedicated to our mission.  

And they all brought such different perspectives to the problems that we are solving every day that it was like the first time I really feel like I saw how diversity of experience really gets you to better outcomes. And ultimately, like it sort of shaped what I decided to do after that adventure, which I left at the end of at the end of the Biden Administration. 

Stuart Shapiro
Do you want to speak briefly about your new venture? 

Sara Meyers
Sure, it is very early days. I’m in week one, but I’ve joined a climate-focused investment philanthropy organization. And I’m going to be focused on scaling the carbon markets, which is another area, climate and certainly carbon markets, that I like, semiconductors, know nothing about the assets. But I’m really excited to dig in and help build some new initiatives. 

Stuart Shapiro
So, one of the reasons I wanted to go through your resume there was because it makes the point that you’ve done a lot of different policy areas and a lot of different levels of government. Can you, sort of, for an MPP student, for example, tie that together with, what in your education gave you the ability to make those, to have that diverse set of experiences, and excel at them? 

Sara Meyers
Yeah, I mean it’s not like one-to-one right? But I think that the…so like, people make choices about whether to be a generalist or not, or go deep on a policy area. And I don’t know that I had made that choice when I was at Bloustein, like at that point. I don’t think I really like sort of wrestled with that as a choice. But I learned some things that I did not… that I really had no experience in like, basic stuff like macro and micro and public finance. I’m forgetting the names of some of the classes. But there was some basic stuff that I just like, had no exposure to at all. That made me conversant in a way that I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have been.  

And I think the other thing that I would say is like, picking some, figuring out what is the hard transferable skill that you have that people will, when you’re early in your career, rely on you to bring to the table. Then gets you in like, all the rooms. And then it’s kind of like, at some point on your path you have the opportunity to choose like, do I want to continue to be a generalist and hop from area to area? Or do I want to go deep on something? And for me, the like, path to breadth and learning has always just been like, being generalist gives you so much flexibility. Flexibility to follow the people who are smartest and will be the most fun to work with? Anyway, so I don’t know. That’s a long answer to your question, but… 

Stuart Shapiro
No, but it’s a good one and and yeah, I think useful. So in terms of practical advice for students, what would you tell them? 

Sara Meyers
Yeah, I think it’s really like…there’s a handful of skills that that are…. that seem really basic but that are essential and you know, I’m old at this point, so I’m sure like the nature of the of having those skills has advanced beyond what I have. But like, when I was when I was starting out like, I was the person who was going to handle like a large data set. And, you know, a large data set at the time that like 13,000 rows in a spreadsheet to project, you know, obligations and outlays for Recovery Act recipients and HUD. And I know the scale is different now of what you can be expected to do. But like having a harder skill, like now data analysis. Having a hard skill, like really excellent writing, like persuasive writing. To be able to distill, you know, learn something quickly, distill the information to a succinct and coherent and persuasive argument is another super like, transferable skill across policy areas.  

And then the other one that’s sort of similar is like… If you’re top notch like or if you’re like, excellent at organizing your work and figuring out the linear path from here to there. Like really exceptional project management skills are also like… If you have any of those three things in your repertoire. Like you will be value add to whoever is the boss of whatever thing and they will find a way to put you in the rooms that then get you the exposure you want. 

Stuart Shapiro
That’s great advice. I do want to clarify one thing. You said you were old. You were my student, and if you’re old, I don’t know what that makes me. ((laughing)  So I want to take issue with with that statement. Sara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. 

Sara Meyers
Thanks for having me. Fun to chat! 

Stuart Shapiro
A big thanks as well to Tamara Swedberg and Karyn Olsen, who make the podcast possible. We’ll be back in a week or two with another episode of EJB Talks with another expert from the Bloustein School. Until then, stay safe.