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Donald F. Kettl

Columnist

Donald F. Kettl, a columnist for Governing, is a professor emeritus and the former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Until his recent retirement, he was the Sid Richardson Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He is a senior adviser at the Volcker Alliance and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Kettl, who holds a Ph.D. and master's degree in political science from Yale University, is the author of several books, most recently The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn't Work (2020) and Can Governments Earn Our Trust? (2017), and the co-author of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems (2023).

He can be reached at Dfkettl52@gmail.com or on Twitter at @DonKettl.

The states and feds started fighting about banking law in 1789. They're still at it.
The fine print in the federal education law may be its undoing.
Somebody needs to push EPA into the 21st century.
Why don't we fix old roads and bridges? Because it's more fun to make new ones.
We need to stimulate state and local economies. We also need to keep close watch on what we're stimulating.
Federalism isn't irrelevant to the 2008 presidential campaign. It's just that no candidate is framing ways for the feds to deal with the big issues.
States and localities face problems a rising economy won't solve.