On Statecraft
Vol. ICalifornia2026

On
Statecraft

Publication · Procurement advisory · Paperwork help ↓
An editorial collage of maps, public records, civic architecture, and administrative machinery

The governing question

Politics announces.
Institutions decide.
Administration makes real.

On Statecraft is a publication about the art and practice of governing: how governments exercise power, make decisions, administer institutions, and translate political ideas into operational systems.

Its distinctive lens comes from public procurement—the quiet machinery of authority, competition, pricing, documentation, discretion, implementation, and accountability.

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Legibility, expertise & political power

On Statecraft and Redistricting California

A politician encounters a contractor, a survey, public testimony, and a specialized procedure—and mistakes complexity itself for failure.

James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, describes the long effort of governments to make populations and territory legible: to translate complicated, local social arrangements into forms that can be recorded, compared and administered. These abridgements are necessary to statecraft. The danger comes when the simplification is mistaken for the reality it was designed to represent.

That is useful background for reading Steve Hilton’s Califailure. Hilton argues that redistricting “ought to be straightforward.” Equalize population, respect city and county borders, establish geographic centers, and “geographically logical” districts should follow. Then, in Hilton’s telling, California complicated matters when it formed the redistricting commission and moved the process into subjective territory.

This sounds damning until one looks first at what the commission was trying to collect from Californians themselves.

What the state needed to know

The data is California’s communities-of-interest survey packet. It asks residents to describe their communities, explain what interests held them together, identify neighboring areas they believed should or should not be placed in the same district, and draw their communities on a map.

The commission then contracted Q2 Data & Research, LLC for technical GIS services to make that public input usable. The scope included data management, analysis, software expertise, summarizing testimony from groups of citizens self-identifying as communities of interest, presenting criteria for evaluating maps, and producing and maintaining the maps requested by the commission.

The contractor was not inventing communities or deciding political representation on its own. It was performing the technical work necessary to convert public input, geography and population information into usable district maps.

Scott’s work suggests a more serious question: what information would disappear if the process were made as simple as Hilton wants it to be?

Nor is hiring technical mapping expertise evidence of dysfunction. Commissioners are not GIS technicians. Public agencies routinely contract for specialized capabilities they do not maintain in-house. The scope of work exists precisely to define what those specialists are being paid to do.

Hilton does not need to be a redistricting subject-matter expert. A governor cannot be an expert in every technical field. But before presenting an unfamiliar government process as evidence that California is broken, he should make some effort to understand what that process is for.

Complexity is not a diagnosis

The redistricting example matters because it shows a recurring interpretive error rather than an isolated factual mistake. Hilton repeatedly encounters complexity and treats the complexity itself as evidence of failure. He sees a contractor, a study, public testimony, a specialized procedure, and asks why government is making things so complicated.

In redistricting, the answer is not abstract. An electoral map does not merely describe political communities. Once backed by state power, it helps determine whether those communities can exercise political power together at all.

Before diagnosing California’s government as a failure, Hilton might profit from reading Seeing Like a State.

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Essay 2 of On Statecraft

PALOMAR closed landfill

What an underground landfill fire taught me about procurement, judgment, and public administration.

Let me offer a procurement story I still think about with genuine nostalgia. It begins, as the best procurement stories often do, with an underground fire at a closed landfill.

The Palomar closed landfill had a failed detector and control system associated with its subsurface conditions. That is a dry way of saying there was a potentially combustible problem under a site the County was legally obligated to monitor, and the equipment meant to help watch it was not working. The matter drew in technical staff, departmental leadership, procurement leadership, senior County Counsel, and the office of Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer. Everyone understood the operational question immediately: How fast can we fix this? The procurement question was more elaborate: How fast can we lawfully fix this, and how do we leave a record that will still make sense after the emergency has passed?

Ordinarily, this looked like public work because we were doing actual construction, including digging trenches. Over several working sessions, we worked through the Public Contract Code, labor requirements, our available contracting vehicles, and the peculiar rules governing closed landfills. Tom Bosworth, the County Counsel attorney who knew the landfill regulatory environment, identified the key: that regulatory environment allowed the work to be treated as daily maintenance. It sounds like an odd distinction until you understand the problem the rule addresses. Closed landfills are notorious for subsurface conditions that are foreseeable but impossible to schedule. PCC recognized that agencies responsible for maintaining them cannot competitively bid every intervention before they know where or when it will be needed.

I prepared the single-source justification supporting the task order. The department developed the technical scope; counsel tested the legal theory; procurement shaped the acquisition path and preserved its rationale; leadership approved it. It was serious work, but it was also the kind of work I love: a room full of people bringing different pieces of the problem, arguing carefully, changing their minds when the facts required it, and eventually producing an answer the agency could act on and defend.

Afterward, Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer sent me a personal note thanking me for the “extra hours, evenings, and weekends” I had devoted to the project. She wrote that my communication with the Board and community stakeholders had been “very thorough, thoughtful, and helpful.” I kept the note.

Procurement is usually invisible when it succeeds. It was gratifying to know that this time, it had been seen.

That experience is why I have never thought of procurement as the office that buys things. At its core, public procurement is where operational reality, public money, law, risk, and human judgment synchronize, producing a record the agency can act on and defend.

Spend enough time in public procurement and you accumulate questions. Why is a contractor removing graffiti subject to prevailing wage when an in-house maintenance worker doing the same thing may not be? Why can an inch of asphalt change the contracting rules that apply? Why is work at a closed landfill carved out of requirements that would ordinarily apply to construction? Why can’t we look at price until after we determine which respondents are qualified? Why do we have the market-basket doctrine?

Public procurement is full of rules like these. The longer you do the work, the more often you find yourself asking the same question: Why?

And, remarkably often, there is an answer.

There is usually a history underneath the rule: a problem government encountered, a market behavior it was trying to prevent, a public interest it was trying to protect, or a line somebody had to draw so that thousands of individual decisions could be administered consistently.

That is part of what contracting officers learn over time. Not simply what the rules say, but what they are doing. Once you understand that, procurement stops looking like an accumulation of bureaucratic obstacles and starts looking like an administrative system built out of lessons.

That distinction has been on my mind lately as fraud, waste, and abuse have become increasingly central to the public discussion of government contracting and public programs. The spectacular failure is easy to see. The ordinary administrative control that prevents one is almost invisible.

In the coming weeks, I want to look more closely at some of the fraud cases now being used to tell a story about government failure, and ask a different set of questions: What controls existed? What were they designed to prevent? Were they actually used? And what happens when we reduce the administrative capacity responsible for making them work?

Because before we treat fraud as evidence that administration has failed, we should understand what happens when we take the administration away.

Coming soon: Decoding the Anti-Fraud Executive Order.