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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.

In the decade since the storm, the federal government's involvement in disaster relief has risen -- and so have tensions with localities.
A recent incident involving Double Stuf Oreos highlights the debate about how much supervision of children is too much.
Bad intergovernmental relations have the United States headed for fiscal disaster.
The militarization of police has come under fire, but it’s just a distraction from the real civil rights issues.
The Wisconsin Congressman's bold anti-poverty plan picks battles with conservatives and liberals, reducing its chances of passage.
By letting citizens live in vulnerable places even after disaster strikes, governments plant the seeds for future disasters.
More than 225 years after the first one, states are considering whether to call a second as a way to rein in the feds. But no one really knows what a convention can and can’t do and how it would work.
The feds set a goal of reducing crime on tribal reservations by 5 percent. Here’s how they brought it down by more than 700 percent.
Financial, policy and political problems are hurting efforts to fix our infrastructure.
10 years, 10 highlights for federalism.