Do Politicians Even Listen to Think Tanks?

Nonprofit think tanks conduct research, prepare policy reports, and hold briefings for lawmakers. But does anyone in the halls of power really care? That’s the question that guides this conversation with Scott Centorino. Scott previously served as President Trump’s Special Assistant for Domestic Policy in the White House and as a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank. His experiences give him special insight into what makes a think tank effective and how donors should evaluate their success.

Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.

Peter Lipsett: Well, if you’re listening to this podcast, you are likely a donor to some sort of policy think tank or policy shop, or maybe you work at one. So here’s a question that we probably don’t ask enough: Is anybody listening to the stuff that these organizations are putting out? And more importantly, are the elected officials, their staffs, and the bureaucrats that surround them paying attention to the work coming out of these great organizations that are promoting free market policies, liberty, and the ideas that we care about? That is what I want to explore today. And to do that, I am going to bring in my friend Scott Centorino. Scott was special assistant to the president for domestic policy for the first year of this Trump term, where he helped craft and coordinate legislation and executive orders on a whole range of issues—surely things you probably saw in the news. He was behind the scenes getting some of those things done. Before that, though, he was working in the liberty movement. He had stints at Do No Harm and Health Reformers Academy, and a long stint at the Foundation for Government Accountability. So he knows the liberty world—he’s been inside the halls of power, and he’s back in the private sector now, helping think tanks and policy organizations win with conservative policy. And winning with conservative policy is the goal. So, Scott, I’m thrilled you’re here to help us unpack how we can win better, as it were.

Scott Centorino: Thank you for having me, Peter. It’s good to be on with you. And I’m sure there are folks listening who probably have partially funded my life over the last several years, so thank you to what you do, Peter, and thank you to all of your listeners. I’ll go ahead and preemptively answer one of your questions, which is: it’s very valued, it’s very important. But I look forward to telling some stories and getting into some of the details here. Okay.

Peter Lipsett: Good. And it’s also worth noting, Scott is, I think, the first guest to broadcast live from the same county I’m in. He actually only lives about two miles away from where I do here in the mountains of Virginia.

Scott Centorino: And yet you didn’t invite me to your house.

Peter Lipsett: They didn’t—I didn’t even invite him over. So maybe I’m not as generous as I think I am. All right, Scott, let’s start inside the White House. What did the typical day look like?

Scott Centorino: Boy, well, the cliché answer is true: there is no typical day. But my standard shorthand is that it’s the best and worst experience you’ll ever have in your life. Everything is a scramble, everything is a five-alarm fire—you’re trying to decide which house to stop from burning down first. That’s pretty much the whole day, in terms of the feeling you have from 8 a.m. until about 7 p.m.

To add one more layer of detail beyond the feeling—obviously, there’s this incredible thing about working in the White House. Just the setting is a daily reminder; it never got old for me in my year. It’s this daily reminder of the unique opportunity you have to be at what feels like the center of the universe, and the energy in that building is palpable. You bump into Marco Rubio going up the stairs. You accidentally spill a little coffee on Susie Wiles’s shoes—I didn’t actually do that, but I do know somebody who did, by the way. Being in that space is incredible, so that’s the good part. But also, of course, everybody wants a piece of you. There’s never enough time to do everything you want—it’s a mad dash to get through your tasks. In my role, which was a policy role, it was certainly substantive. There are other roles in other offices that are more about events, coordination, and logistics, and those are super stressful too, in their own way. Pretty much my worst nightmare—hell on hell for me—would be event planning in the White House, because the stakes are so high and I’m not good at event planning. But for my role, it was developing and coordinating the implementation of the president’s policy agenda.

So where he had a clear idea of what he wanted to do on any given issue, it was my job to make sure that whatever authorities existed to make that happen were being used—that the agencies understood their task—and to keep them accountable on behalf of the president. And where the president didn’t have a totally clear idea of what he wanted to do on a given topic, my job was to develop options and brief, say, Stephen Miller and Susie Wiles, and ultimately the president, on what those options were, maybe give a recommendation, and then execute whatever the decision was. We called ourselves the Office of Promises Kept, because some of those promises were developed during the campaign and some were developed after taking office, but we viewed our role very simply as: give the president the best options he can have, let him make a decision, and then execute. So a normal day was doing all the things that go into that, plus a million other things—taking meetings, trying to talk with people on the Hill about bill language, making sure that the people in the White House Counsel’s Office or the Office of Public Liaison were all on the same page about what needed to happen next week over such-and-such event. It’s nonstop, and it’s actually very difficult to summarize quickly, but hopefully I’ve given some clarity. It’s really busy. It’s really busy, as you know.

Peter Lipsett: Anything—bottom line, you can just say it’s really busy, and there’s always something.

Scott Centorino: It’s a function of how wildly bloated our federal government has gotten, that so much flows up through DC in the first place, and then within DC to the president, that it’s literally unmanageable in any logical way. So you have to pick and choose which things you want to prioritize. That’s always true, but I can’t imagine that when the federal government was much more in keeping with the founders’ vision, you had the same challenges in the executive branch.

Peter Lipsett: So how often, then, in all these meetings and all this running around, are you meeting with nonprofits in the liberty space?

Scott Centorino: Well, it depends on the person, of course. I was probably more open-minded and interested in meetings like that because I came from that world—I had a better sense of what they could offer, resource-wise. Some people are not as interested in that, and that’s fine. I was probably on the far side of the spectrum, because I would take meetings with people I didn’t know, even from groups I was pretty skeptical would be helpful, just because I wanted to hear what they had to say. And occasionally, on issues where I didn’t have as much background, they could give me some helpful guidance on what the issues even were. Even if somebody says they disagree with the administration’s policy on X, maybe you didn’t know that X was even a thing—so just being made aware of it is helpful. The other factor here, when it comes to think tanks, is that a huge number of people in the policy space in the White House, and of course across the different agencies, come directly from think tanks. I’ll give you an example: everybody remembers that flurry of executive orders, especially in the first hundred days of this Trump term. That whole process of getting all those executive orders out began two months before inauguration day. I was in Palm Beach, and I was part of a team putting those together. Stephen Miller was there, a lot of other people were there, Susie was there. And you were prioritizing—all right, you’re going to write these four, you’re going to write these three. In that group of two deputy assistants to the president and six special assistants to the president, who ultimately were under Vince Haley in the Domestic Policy Council—there was one from FGA, one from AFPI, one from the Senate who had think tank experience at American Compass, one from Do No Harm—that’s me—another one from FGA, one from Paragon, and another one from AFPI, if I’m remembering correctly. So it was totally—it was well stocked with think tank people, who all had their own backgrounds, obviously. And if the only thing think tanks did was serve as a bit of a holding tank for folks between administrations—to make sure you didn’t lose good conservative warriors to the more generic lobbying world—that has value by itself. If the only thing it did was keep in amber people like Theo Merkel and Sam Adolphsen and others, rather than lose them to the outside, that has real value. But think tanks, of course, do way more than that too.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, I think—it’s interesting you say that, because I think certain staff members, certain organizations, even certain donors have almost an allergy to that. They say, ‘We want to be separate.’ And I think you raise a good point: these unmanageable, unwieldy executive offices need staff, and I’d much rather have staff—the Scott Centorinos, those types of people—going in, versus somebody who has no idea what’s going on, or who is only loyal to whomever, whether it’s the president or the leader of that office, and doesn’t understand that fuller landscape. I mean, America—or AFPI, which I always butcher; I get the acronym right and then start putting the wrong words in the wrong places—but it was essentially created for that purpose, for holding those folks in amber between the administrations, and it served its purpose and continues to be a very functional organization, a think tank, today.

Scott Centorino: Well, and one thing I’ll add there is: even setting aside pulling lobbyists in instead of think tank people, one of the things I found and was surprised by was how few of the people who were still in government and were brought into the administration knew anything about state policy. A handful of us, including myself, who had come from FGA and Do No Harm and had spent a lot of time in state policy, were pretty much the only people around who had any experience in state government. So many federal programs, even Medicaid, ultimately flow through the states. We found ourselves unique, and people with issues way outside our portfolios would come to us and ask us basically how state government worked. Because even if you didn’t bring in any lobbyists, the default kind of person you bring into an office like that is a Hill person—someone who’s been in DC for the last ten years—and in most cases they’ve not worked in state government.

Now, in fairness, there were plenty of times when I had to go to them. There was one time—I’m not embarrassed to admit it—I had to reference the One Big Beautiful Bill, H.R. 1, and I couldn’t figure out which version on the Senate website was the actual final enrolled version, because it’s so nonsensical the way it’s set up, with all these hyperlinks—it doesn’t really matter, but I couldn’t figure it out. And here I was in the citadel of the free world and couldn’t figure out which bill was the actual final version that passed. So what did I do? I asked Theo Merkel, who spent ten years on the Hill: ‘Hey, can you send me the One Big Beautiful Bill? I don’t know which version is the final one.’ So we had good relationships where you want people from think tanks, because the think tanks have experience in the states too. And that’s very unique in any kind of transition in DC.

Peter Lipsett: That’s a really unique point—yeah, I hadn’t really thought about that. All right, so let’s talk about persuasion, and maybe take it in two different ways. What does effective persuasion look like for the people who actually are able to get on the phone, get in front of you, have a conversation? But then I’m also curious—and we can turn to it second—about passive communication, or those conversations that are going on out in the ether—to what extent are those being paid attention to?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, I guess the number one thing—and this was a bit of a surprise to me—was how little persuasion is actually required. I’m not poo-pooing persuasion; it’s very important. But for the most part, when I met with a think tank, they didn’t need to persuade me that the idea they were pitching was a good idea. If I was talking to them, I probably had some sense of what they stood for and whether I trusted them or not. And that’s the most important thing. It’s not the quality of your ideas, unfortunately—it’s the human connectivity. Do I know somebody I trust on this issue to give me good advice, good data, et cetera? You don’t have enough time to do a deep dive on every single issue, so you have to rely on good, smart people, including think tank people from the outside whom you trust to give you ideas. So in most meetings where an idea was pitched to me that I liked, the persuasion part was done in the first two minutes. It quickly became: all right, what do I do about this? You think the Department of Education should do X? Okay—if I’m going to pick up the phone and call the Department of Education after this meeting, how do I tell them to do it? What are their authorities? What’s the sub-agency that would run this? How would they implement it? It gets into the realities of governing very quickly. And that’s probably where you see the biggest differentiation between effective think tanks and less effective ones: a lot of think tanks have great ideas and smart people, but they don’t think through the follow-on. They’re not ready for a yes, I guess is the simplest way of putting it. They’re not ready to help the staffer do the work that’s so often required.

Peter Lipsett: That’s a fascinating point. One of my bugaboos is that I think we, generally on the right, are not ready for a yes—we catch the car and then don’t know what to do with it. And one of my great fears is that we’re going to do the same thing with school choice and all the victories we’ve had there. That’s a whole different podcast and a whole different rabbit hole. But that’s really interesting—essentially, the folks who are coming in are telling you something valuable and also telling you how to get it done, doing a little of the work for you. Yes, there are certain things they don’t know—they don’t know the right person to call—but they know that if you know the right person to call, here’s what needs to get done. Doing that homework counts for a lot, it sounds like.

Scott Centorino: Yeah, I think that’s the number one thing I look for and would recommend. It’s also how I would judge a think tank’s performance and effectiveness—it sounds terrible, but it’s how much of the work of the policymaker they’re doing for the policymaker. I’ll be specific. Say you’ve got seven different issues in your portfolio—I’ll use myself as an example. On day one in the White House, I was told that I had to develop, coordinate, and implement all of the federal administration’s policies on welfare. That includes Medicaid, food stamps, housing, public housing—

Peter Lipsett: Seventy percent of the budget.

Scott Centorino: Right. Homelessness, mental illness and addiction, gun rights, gender ideology, all of veterans’ affairs—and I think I’m missing a couple. I had election integrity for a couple of months. There were a couple others I’m forgetting. So you can imagine, if that’s your portfolio, you’re stretched thin, of course. And this isn’t me complaining. What I’m saying is: if two people brought me ideas that I liked—say I liked both of them and thought, yeah, this is absolutely worth doing—if someone wrote me a memo with talking points and maybe a first draft of a bill, a regulation, or a guidance memo that Health and Human Services could put out to make the policy change—it doesn’t have to be perfect, just a first draft, some basic blocking and tackling of what I’d have to do to make it happen—if I have to choose how I’m going to spend my afternoon, I’m probably going to go with the option where some of the work is already done. That’s just a function of how big our government is and how bloated the responsibilities are. But it’s natural to go with the option that’s further along in the process, because so often you do a lot of work on something and it falls apart for some reason. Why would you invest so much in something if you’re not sure it’s going to happen? If something’s farther along in the process, then yeah, you’re going to jump for that. So think tanks that are really effective, in my experience, are ready to do some of the work for the policymaker. They’re not just going around asking for things—they’re legitimately offering help. Pretty much every think tank has learned that they need to say that. But if the policymaker isn’t seeing and feeling it—here’s the first draft of the regulation we’re asking you to change, bam—then it’s much less likely to be an effective meeting, and you’re much less likely to go down the road that think tank wants you to go down. Even if it’s just a starting point. So I might call up HUD after a meeting and say, ‘Hey, I just got this really interesting draft—can you look at it and tell me if you like it?’ I’ll call somebody I trust at an agency who I know is aligned: ‘Can you tell me why this isn’t workable, or why we shouldn’t do this?’ Without that work already done by the think tank, I’d have to do all of that myself. I did that plenty of times; I’m not trying to get out of work. Most of these people are the hardest-working people you’ll ever meet. But if you can push the ball as far downfield as possible for that policymaker, you’re going to have much better odds of succeeding.

Peter Lipsett: And it also accrues to the benefit of the nonprofit as well, because then they can not just say, ‘That piece of legislation—that was our idea.’ Ideas have a thousand fathers. If you can say, ‘Actually, two-thirds of the text is the version I gave them when I sat down with Scott in a meeting six months ago’—that’s a much clearer win, and the progenitor of that success can be more easily identified.

Scott Centorino: Exactly.

Scott Centorino: Yes. And the really pro move is being willing to do the work for the policymaker and then not take credit—or only take credit in private settings, so the donors know what’s happening, but you’re not going around bragging about a win that really belongs to the policymaker. This isn’t just true of the White House, or this White House in particular, which has its own idiosyncrasies—it’s true even of state legislatures. If you’re not pounding your chest after a win, and you let the state legislator have that win—because ultimately it was them knocking on doors in the summer heat, them who won the election, them who ran the bill through, them who had to overcome opposition within their own party and across the whole legislature—they really earned the win. And most legislators, most policymakers, want the credit for their wins; they don’t want to be sharing it with fifty-five different groups. Now, there’s a time and place for taking credit, of course—I don’t mean to cast aspersions on all of that—but the best place to do it is in private, and let the policymaker have their day. Because then they’re much more likely to come back to you, and the think tank is much more likely to get win number two and win number three, if you let them have that win publicly.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And let the non-humble elected official be the non-humble one, and let the humble think tank be the humble one, depending on the setting. That’s hard—that goes against every human impulse, but that’s really good. Okay, so swing it to the opposite side—the more passive stuff. Cato holds a luncheon, or a full-day event on a topic, or AFPI does some sessions that bring in some people—to what extent are people in the White House, and in the legislature, et cetera, paying attention to what’s going on off campus, essentially?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, it’s a hard question, and honestly, you can cut my answer, because I’m probably not the best person to ask. I’m an old man at heart—I’m not on Twitter. Well, maybe I am on Twitter, but I’ve posted zero times and check it about once every six months. I don’t keep up with social media. Most people in this world are glued to social media, and I’m not a representative person—I know that. What I’ll tell you is: at the White House, and certainly plenty of other places, Fox News is on in the background at all times, in pretty much every office, including individual offices—there are TVs in every office with Fox News on. So that’s probably the easiest way to broadcast a message: just get on Fox News, Peter. That’s all you have to do; it’s the easiest thing in the world. Aside from that, the easiest way to make an impact with passive content is, again, human connectivity. So if Theo, who worked at Paragon—I’ve never worked at Paragon, don’t work with them now, but they’re a good group—Theo Merkel, who runs healthcare policy, came from Paragon. He might come over to my office and say, ‘Hey, have you read the latest Paragon paper?’ Or in a team meeting I might say, ‘I’m working on this Medicaid work-requirement implementation from the One Big Beautiful Bill,’ and he might say, ‘Yeah, there’s a good chart they put out six months ago,’ and then I might find it that way. That’s the best and most common way you find material—somebody you know and trust who’s already in your network brings it to your attention, or somebody from the outside texts you: ‘Hey, you might want to look at this one-pager we just put together on school choice in Michigan.’ That’s the best way. Now, not everybody has total connectivity with all the big players, so that’s sometimes impossible, of course. If you put out good content—there are a couple of outlets, obviously the Daily Caller, the Wall Street Journal, National Review-type outlets; I won’t list them all—but if you get a hook there, people do pay attention. And obviously Twitter is another big way people find things. But I’ll stop there, because I don’t think what I have to say is all that representative on this front. I’m pretty old at heart.

Peter Lipsett: Well, it reinforces something you said earlier about the importance of having people like you coming from FGA, or people from Paragon—people from these institutions who are working on these issues. Back during the first Trump administration, there was a lot of credit given to Trump, rightfully so, for passing a lot of really good stuff in the first couple of years—taxes, deregulation, all that. It was this overnight success that I point to people as being thirty years in the making: the Federalist Society being built up, CEI doing this regulatory work click by click over time, FGA, the state policy think tanks—all of that being ready day one, so it could be executed. And because there were people like you going in who knew that was there, they could take it off the shelf and run with it. So what I keep hearing from you is that the human element really matters. Being prepared for the moment when it comes really matters. And—from this last answer—you can’t just assume that because you’re saying it over here, it’s getting heard over there. You’ve got to be in the fight. You’ve got to be direct.

Scott Centorino: That’s right. And yeah, I may have been misleading—I was speaking about all the different ways you can get the attention of people. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the people inside are not going to see it. If you’re putting out an op-ed, publishing a paper, or tweeting about something—even if it’s exactly what the person wants to see, on that day—unless it’s put in front of their eyeballs exactly when they need it, odds are they’re not going to see it. That’s why human connectivity is so important, because there’s so much content. I can’t emphasize enough how much is thrown at you every day. I’ve gotten in the habit of explaining it this way—and I assume this is true for a typical White House staffer, not just the policy people, and it’s also true, by the way, of political appointees at the very top echelons of the agencies: imagine you had to brief an ER doctor having the worst day of her career—a bunch of kids with gunshot wounds in the emergency room that day. She’s bouncing around from room to room trying to save lives. The person before you who just spoke to her said, ‘If you don’t solve this Rubik’s Cube in your left hand in the next ten minutes, your house will burn down,’ or something like that. And then your job is to go in and brief that ER doctor on why school choice is good. Something like that. She’s interested—she really wants to know. But that’s the challenge. That’s the attention span, by the nature of the jobs these folks have. So you’re not going to get much passive connection—you’ve got to put things in front of them, and it’s got to be related to something urgent. They’re putting out fires. You either have to make your thing a fire, or make your thing something helpful to a fire that’s currently burning.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, wow. So much of the activity—and I guess this isn’t a knock—there are other people to influence besides people in the White House, besides legislative staff. You need people—the county commissioner in a district in Iowa who’s also good friends with the congressman—who may see your piece, and it may trickle up. We need these ideas bouncing around in the ecosystem. But we shouldn’t expect that just because it’s not bad—even in the Washington Post, even in Politico—that it’s going to get seen by the people we want it to be seen by.

Scott Centorino: And building up a library of content and collateral, even if it’s not immediately noticed, can be helpful. Because at some point, if you’re pointing out a problem that’s not quite on the front burner, at some point it will be, and you’re going to want to have that material ready when that happens—and actually have the data to back up your position. So it’s not a waste of time.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, that’s really interesting. What are questions that donors should be asking their groups, based on the things you’ve seen, toward the idea of being more effective?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, I suppose one thing would be: if you’ve got a group proposing a solution to something, I’d want to know—how does the entity you’re asking to do this, whether it’s the federal government, the executive branch, Congress, state government, whatever, actually accomplish it? That’s obviously the second question any policymaker would probably ask once they like the idea in the first place. And if they’re not ready to give you a good answer on that question, they’re probably not ready to answer it for a policymaker either. I’d also ask—this is a basic one—if a group is taking credit for a win, ask them: ‘Out of curiosity, can you tell me why you’re taking credit for this win? Why not let the policymaker have this win and just tell me about it directly?’ Or ask them how they calculate wins. I’ve been part of organizations that are very thoughtful—when they say they’re taking credit for eight wins in a state in one year, they’ve got a whole process for how they count a win, and they’ll have half-wins, and they’ll look at something that a lot of other groups might count as a win but they won’t, because they really didn’t do much on that issue with the sponsor of the bill. They’re very thoughtful about counting wins. And I’ve seen other groups just take credit for things they were never part of. So I’d ask a group: how do you actually count wins? Do you have a process for that? If they don’t, that’s a red flag. I’d also ask—especially at the state level—if a group headquartered in DC is taking credit for a win in Atlanta, Little Rock, or Boise: did you ever go to Atlanta, Little Rock, or Boise? Did you testify in the hearing? Did you actually meet with the sponsor? Because a lot of groups take credit for things, particularly at the state level, where they never showed up. Something good happened, and maybe one group was actually helpful, but six groups take credit for it. Like you said, victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. Ask those basic questions. The other way to judge it, I’d say, is to ask policymakers. I’d think most of the listeners here, who are donors funding liberty-oriented think tanks, are also donors in the more directly political world. Ask your policymakers: ‘What groups have you found helpful? What groups have actually shown up for you? What groups have actually taken some slings and arrows on your behalf and given you concrete help, rather than just saying, this would be great if you could do this? What groups have made offers rather than just asks?’ That’s the best way to judge these groups, in my opinion. Now, I suppose the asterisk on that is: there are some groups that don’t aim to be all that action-oriented, that aim to be more academic in nature, and that’s not the right metric for those. But a lot of the groups we’re talking about here aspire to be pretty helpful, in an active sense, to policymakers. So I’m sure this is pretty obvious to most of your listeners, but ask policymakers which groups are actually showing up for them when they need help and have the solutions they’re looking for.

Peter Lipsett: This is a real practical question for the groups out there who might be listening, or people who are on boards. You were there for a year—I know, in talking to you, it probably feels like you were there for an entire administration, because it’s not easy work, as we’ve already covered in your very vivid ER analogy—if that’s what every day is like, that’s rough. So I understand why you were only there for a year, but we want the Scott Centorinos there—we want good people there. When somebody like you leaves, and I, as a policy person, have built up a relationship with you, then what do I do? Are you trying to hand off some of those relationships? Or if it hasn’t been a year—say I worked with you on something in July, and then the next year something else comes up, but you’re gone—how do I even try to reintegrate myself into those conversations?

Scott Centorino: It’s a great question—and, by the way, a great SAT word, ‘re-inculcate.’ Well done—five hundred points for Gryffindor. Nobody’s ever asked me that question, and it’s a good one. There’s obviously a lot of turnover in these jobs, because despite how cool they often are, they’re also often miserable jobs. So people move on. I was surprised how many people were in my boat—we didn’t cover this in the bio, there was no reason to—but I left my wife and kid at home, hours and hours away from DC. There were a bunch of people in the White House doing that, flying home every weekend across the country.

Peter Lipsett: I met one who was going back and forth to Miami. I mean, it is really a true civil service.

Scott Centorino: Yeah, there were people all over the place—one commuting back to his family in Alabama, one going to Houston, one to Maine, all over the place every weekend. Brutal—literally financially unsustainable, by the way, but that’s a different matter. So that’s an issue in its own right. But you have people, including me, who take the jobs with the intent of them being short-term missions: I’m going to do this, accomplish as much as I can, and then go home. And that can be frustrating. I’ve certainly been on the other side of the table too, where you put all this investment into a person, build a relationship, and then that person leaves and you start over. That’s really frustrating. The best thing to do—and again, this is probably common sense—is, if it’s a really good person, which, if they’ve cultivated that relationship with you, they probably are, just ask them: ‘Hey, who took over your portfolio? How can I get synced up with them?’ I’ll give you a concrete example: when I left—because I’m just so great, Peter—my portfolio was divided among multiple people. No, in all seriousness, it needed to be divided up after I left. I had a unique combination of experiences that made it make sense for the welfare person to also have gender ideology, and also law and order—that was the other issue. I had all of law and order in my portfolio too—forgot about that one. That was a big one.

Peter Lipsett: And there are so many seasons of that—I don’t know how you kept up with it.

Scott Centorino: Yeah, brutal—so many seasons. But great theme song, more of a pulse. Pum, pum. When I left, it wouldn’t have made sense to give that portfolio to one person—you split up portfolios depending on who you have, and all that. So I would have said to somebody I was working with on a law-and-order issue, ‘You should talk to this person,’ and to somebody I was working with on a gender issue, ‘You need to talk to this person.’ Often it’s not clear who’s going to take over a portfolio when the first person leaves. So ask for an introduction to the person above that person: ‘Hey, can you make sure I’m connected with your boss, so I know who to go to in the coming weeks?’ In some cases they may be hesitant to do that, because that person is even busier than the person below—but you never know. You can’t get it if you don’t ask for it. So yeah, I think that’s really frustrating work, finding that human touch, but it’s absolutely necessary and worthwhile.

Peter Lipsett: So you’re back on the other side now, out of the White House—you look much more rested, and you’re back home. All that’s good—yeah, just by not shaving.

Scott Centorino: Despite not shaving, which the people listening can’t see, but yeah.

Peter Lipsett: But so now that you’re on the other side—as we talked about at the top, you’re working with think tanks again, working with policy, more in a consultancy aspect. So touching a lot of different issues, not dissimilar to what you were doing before. So how are you talking to them differently now than back before you were in the White House? What are you consulting them to do differently, to really have the impact and grow their influence in a smart way?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, the experience really underlined a few things I kind of knew in the abstract but have really taken to heart now. Number one—and we’ve touched on this a little—the how is so much more important than the what, ultimately. Because ninety-nine percent of the time, if you’ve got a really good substantive meeting with a policymaker, it’s because they already know and trust you and are going to buy what you’re selling in terms of the idea. I’m describing think tanks here, not trade groups or whatever. And if that’s true, then you’d better be ready to help walk with them on implementation and do some of the work with them. I’ll give you an example: because I had law and order in my portfolio, I also had human trafficking in my portfolio, and I quickly learned that that is the problem from hell. There are apparently no solutions, as frustrating as that is—or at least I couldn’t find any really good solutions with a federal hook. One of the most frustrating experiences was—I knew human trafficking was a problem, so I went out of my way to invite, and accept the invitation of, a bunch of groups that work on human trafficking—all incredible, good, smart people who knew the issue really well—and they would come in and describe the problem. But after five minutes I’d say, ‘Okay, what do you want me to do about it? What can we do about it? What are the options? Give me a menu of options to pick from.’ And we really never got anywhere on that front. Maybe that’s a legitimate function of federal authority, but those were frustrating meetings—that’s an extreme example. But it really reaffirmed how valuable that second step is. I’ll also say it reaffirmed how valuable it is to get really good at teaching 101-level material. You’ll become a go-to person, or go-to group, if you’re good teachers of 101 material. For example, I was given all the issues I listed. I knew a lot about some of them, maybe most of them—there were a couple I was fairly new to. I took Veterans Affairs because I was the only one of the six special assistants to the president who’d ever served in the military. That’s the only reason they gave me Veterans Affairs. I’d never been in a VA facility in my life—I knew nothing about VA policy. They had to give it to somebody, so they gave it to me. If there had been someone in that moment who could sit me down and explain, for an hour, ‘Here’s how the Department of Veterans Affairs works, here are the major questions of the last ten years, here are the questions you’re likely to face, and here are some of the choices’—without putting too much of a thumb on the scale—I would have met with that person as much as they wanted. Ultimately I got a lot of that guidance from people who work at VA, and there’s plenty of material online. But man—if you put collateral on your website as a think tank that’s just 101 explainers, good primers—’here’s how Medicaid works’—that will be a magnet for people who are handed an issue they don’t understand, which is a lot of people, a lot of the time. It’ll bring them into your orbit and build credibility and trust, and then they’re more likely to actually look at the solutions you’re pitching. Maybe they’re not interested in those—but it gets eyeballs on your material, because you’d be surprised how high up people go, in terms of authority, without really understanding the issues as well as the think tanks do. There’s just not enough people at the top to understand everything. So getting good at 101 explaining is really valuable, and I didn’t fully appreciate that before.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, those are—I mean, that’s a super actionable thing, right, for any groups listening: have that up there. It turns out people at the highest levels of government still rely on Google and still look things up. And if you are the source material with the right perspective, then you can be a go-to. That’s really great. Well—maybe a final question. What are the unknown unknowns out there? Where are the missed opportunities—things that surprise you, like, why does nobody do this? Maybe that 101-explainer thing is a piece of it, but what are some easy layups for groups out there to start influencing a little more, that would have helped you in your time and will continue to help groups in the future?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, good primer materials is definitely one. Having material on implementation is another. Beyond that, one thing a lot of groups don’t do, that they could, is preparing policymakers for internal and external pushback. Let’s say you’re doing everything else right—here’s an idea on school choice, let’s use that as an example again. The policymaker says, ‘Great, I’m all in—how do we do it?’ And the person from the think tank is ready: ‘Here’s how you do it, here’s a draft piece of guidance, here’s how this would be implemented at the state level, here’s a 101 explainer on how this all works.’ They’re doing everything right. But when that person turns around and briefs, say, Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, or the president, and says, ‘This is what we ought to do, here are the problems, and here’s why I think we should do this’—if they have any questions or concerns and that person isn’t prepared to argue against them, and certainly when it hits the media, or the public more broadly, or folks on the other side politically, it can easily and quickly fall apart. So you’ve got to prepare policymakers—you’ve got to build their shield for them too. It’s not enough to give them the sword; you’ve got to let them know, ‘Here are the common questions you’ll get about this,’ or ‘Here’s the pushback you’re going to get from the other side, or internally.’ I’ll stick with school choice: if you don’t tell a conservative lawmaker, ‘You’re probably going to hear from conservatives in rural areas who are worried about how school choice impacts sports programs in their local schools—they only have one school in their county anyway, so why would school choice help them?’—if you’re not telling the policymaker they’re going to hear that from other conservatives in rural areas, you’re doing them an injustice. First, because they’re going to trust you less, since you didn’t tell them they’d hear that. Also, your odds of succeeding with that policymaker just took a plunge, because they’re likely to crumble if they’re not ready for that pushback—’Wait a minute, maybe this wasn’t as good an idea as I thought. There are other conservatives against this—maybe I didn’t think this through.’ And they’ve got a stack of other problems on their desk—the minute they get pushback on one, maybe they just switch gears to another. So if it’s not a perfect game on any one issue, it can fall apart very quickly, because they’ll just move to another issue. You’ve got to make it feel like a glide path for them as much as possible. And if there’s going to be pushback—which, on just about every issue, there will be—you’ve got to make them feel ready for it: here’s what you’re going to hear, here are the responses you can give, here’s the data to back up the position. That would help a lot. A lot of groups don’t do that—you kind of have to learn it the hard way, on your own.

Peter Lipsett: That’s a great point—you’ve got to steelman and strawman your own arguments. Know the terrible arguments against it, but also the ones that hold water. And frankly, that’s a place where donors can come in too—in meeting with these people and hearing policy ideas from think tanks, they can help push back on that too. We can have a role in that.

Scott Centorino: Yep.

Scott Centorino: Absolutely. I’ll give you two more off the top of my head. One is just speed and urgency. Most think tanks, most of the time, do not move at the same pace as most policymakers—for good reason, by the way; everybody would fall off a cliff at some point if they did. But they don’t move at the same speed and urgency as most policymakers, in most cases. If you’ve got a direct ask from a policymaker, you’ve got to move quickly, because odds are that person has a deadline you may not know about—it’s probably today or tomorrow. There are so many things in the White House, in particular, but this is true elsewhere, that come together at the last minute. Maybe you were just asked to brief the chief of staff tomorrow at noon. If I reach out to a think tank at three o’clock in the afternoon to help me prepare for a briefing the next day—maybe I don’t tell them exactly when that briefing is, for whatever reason—but I’m looking for help immediately. And of course, think tanks don’t work for policymakers directly—you’re not under any legal obligation to be incredibly responsive. But if you want to be impactful, and you’ve got a direct ask from a policymaker, you’ve got to know that odds are it’s of real urgent importance. That doesn’t mean you have to do everything—if you’re writing a ten-page foundational paper on some topic, you can take your time; if nobody’s asking for it, you don’t have to do that today. But if you’ve got somebody asking for follow-up data—if you just had a meeting with them and they say, ‘Can you get me more information on this?’—you should treat that like a hot potato in your lap. If you don’t respond today or tomorrow, it could fall off and never be noticed again. Everything from the policymaker, you’ve got to treat with real urgency, and that’ll help you be more effective, certainly.

The other thing I’d say, at the state level in particular—less true of the federal government—is just show up. What’s the old Woody Allen line, eighty percent of life is showing up? If you arrive in Lansing, Michigan, in late January when there’s two feet of snow on the ground, and you’re willing to have a meeting with a sponsor, willing to do the work and give them a piece of paper they need, and willing to show up and testify and support them in that moment—that is worth ninety-five meetings in DC. DC is very good at having meetings and nodding and smiling and nothing ever gets done—of course, everybody knows this. Real things happen in the states all the time, and it doesn’t take much to help state policymakers. And they remember—they will remember for years, I promise. They’ll remember for years that on January 26th, you showed up at their hearing in Lansing, Michigan, and you were supportive and helped them. It’s much more valuable, that time. So showing up is another big one.

Peter Lipsett: Those are—that’s all great advice, all really good. I think there’s a lot the groups can take away from everything you’ve shared, and a lot donors can take away, in terms of how they’re working with the groups they give to, and cutting through the noise of who’s really effective—because it’s hard to parse out. There’s a lot of moving pieces, a lot going on behind the scenes. And if the groups can be thoughtful about how to work with elected officials, and not view them as the enemy but as partners in getting some of this stuff done, we can hopefully advance a lot more good policy. Scott Centorino, thank you so much for joining us—this was terrific.

Scott Centorino: Thank you, Peter.

Peter Lipsett: Well, I was excited to record that episode, but it turned out even better than I expected. There was so much great, interesting information—nice inside-baseball stuff—probably so many more stories I could have asked Scott about from his time there. Not every group out there wants to be heard and seen by elected officials—Scott referenced the ideas stage, people in the incubator stage of creating ideas. But a lot of the groups out there that you may support do want to move the needle with elected officials, with their staffs, with legislatures. And if that’s the case, they need to do it in a smart way—they need to know what they’re up against and some of the challenges. Policy groups can make the job of staffers and politicians so much easier by doing their homework, having plans ready to go, knowing the arguments on both sides—the good arguments and the miserable arguments—and then being ready to move quickly. And, as Scott said, don’t forget to be humble—there’s still a role for promoting our work, just be careful about it. And of course, some of it is just raw luck. But the groups that are out there trying to make their own luck are going to get farther, because when opportunity comes, you want to be prepared.

Well, I want all the groups that DonorsTrust supports to be successful, to change things for the better. And you, I imagine, want the same thing—you wouldn’t be listening otherwise. So encourage the groups you give to, or groups you may be on the board of, to take a listen to this episode. There could be some invaluable advice to help them have more impact with their work, which in turn lets your dollars have more impact, and ultimately lets America have more impact by being a freer, more prosperous place. So that’s a virtuous cycle we can all get behind. Well, I very much appreciate you listening and tuning in. If you are already working with DonorsTrust, thank you. And if you’re not, think about how we can be an invaluable piece of your charitable giving. With our donor-advised funds, our philanthropic advising, our legacy protection—we are here to serve donors who care about limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise. If that is you, we would love to work with you. Well, until next time—thank you for being a giver. We’ll talk more soon.

Do Politicians Even Listen to Think Tanks?

Nonprofit think tanks conduct research, prepare policy reports, and hold briefings for lawmakers. But does anyone in the halls of power really care? That’s the question that guides this conversation with Scott Centorino. Scott previously served as President Trump’s Special Assistant for Domestic Policy in the White House and as a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank. His experiences give him special insight into what makes a think tank effective and how donors should evaluate their success.

Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.

Peter Lipsett: Well, if you’re listening to this podcast, you are likely a donor to some sort of policy think tank or policy shop, or maybe you work at one. So here’s a question that we probably don’t ask enough: Is anybody listening to the stuff that these organizations are putting out? And more importantly, are the elected officials, their staffs, and the bureaucrats that surround them paying attention to the work coming out of these great organizations that are promoting free market policies, liberty, and the ideas that we care about? That is what I want to explore today. And to do that, I am going to bring in my friend Scott Centorino. Scott was special assistant to the president for domestic policy for the first year of this Trump term, where he helped craft and coordinate legislation and executive orders on a whole range of issues—surely things you probably saw in the news. He was behind the scenes getting some of those things done. Before that, though, he was working in the liberty movement. He had stints at Do No Harm and Health Reformers Academy, and a long stint at the Foundation for Government Accountability. So he knows the liberty world—he’s been inside the halls of power, and he’s back in the private sector now, helping think tanks and policy organizations win with conservative policy. And winning with conservative policy is the goal. So, Scott, I’m thrilled you’re here to help us unpack how we can win better, as it were.

Scott Centorino: Thank you for having me, Peter. It’s good to be on with you. And I’m sure there are folks listening who probably have partially funded my life over the last several years, so thank you to what you do, Peter, and thank you to all of your listeners. I’ll go ahead and preemptively answer one of your questions, which is: it’s very valued, it’s very important. But I look forward to telling some stories and getting into some of the details here. Okay.

Peter Lipsett: Good. And it’s also worth noting, Scott is, I think, the first guest to broadcast live from the same county I’m in. He actually only lives about two miles away from where I do here in the mountains of Virginia.

Scott Centorino: And yet you didn’t invite me to your house.

Peter Lipsett: They didn’t—I didn’t even invite him over. So maybe I’m not as generous as I think I am. All right, Scott, let’s start inside the White House. What did the typical day look like?

Scott Centorino: Boy, well, the cliché answer is true: there is no typical day. But my standard shorthand is that it’s the best and worst experience you’ll ever have in your life. Everything is a scramble, everything is a five-alarm fire—you’re trying to decide which house to stop from burning down first. That’s pretty much the whole day, in terms of the feeling you have from 8 a.m. until about 7 p.m.

To add one more layer of detail beyond the feeling—obviously, there’s this incredible thing about working in the White House. Just the setting is a daily reminder; it never got old for me in my year. It’s this daily reminder of the unique opportunity you have to be at what feels like the center of the universe, and the energy in that building is palpable. You bump into Marco Rubio going up the stairs. You accidentally spill a little coffee on Susie Wiles’s shoes—I didn’t actually do that, but I do know somebody who did, by the way. Being in that space is incredible, so that’s the good part. But also, of course, everybody wants a piece of you. There’s never enough time to do everything you want—it’s a mad dash to get through your tasks. In my role, which was a policy role, it was certainly substantive. There are other roles in other offices that are more about events, coordination, and logistics, and those are super stressful too, in their own way. Pretty much my worst nightmare—hell on hell for me—would be event planning in the White House, because the stakes are so high and I’m not good at event planning. But for my role, it was developing and coordinating the implementation of the president’s policy agenda.

So where he had a clear idea of what he wanted to do on any given issue, it was my job to make sure that whatever authorities existed to make that happen were being used—that the agencies understood their task—and to keep them accountable on behalf of the president. And where the president didn’t have a totally clear idea of what he wanted to do on a given topic, my job was to develop options and brief, say, Stephen Miller and Susie Wiles, and ultimately the president, on what those options were, maybe give a recommendation, and then execute whatever the decision was. We called ourselves the Office of Promises Kept, because some of those promises were developed during the campaign and some were developed after taking office, but we viewed our role very simply as: give the president the best options he can have, let him make a decision, and then execute. So a normal day was doing all the things that go into that, plus a million other things—taking meetings, trying to talk with people on the Hill about bill language, making sure that the people in the White House Counsel’s Office or the Office of Public Liaison were all on the same page about what needed to happen next week over such-and-such event. It’s nonstop, and it’s actually very difficult to summarize quickly, but hopefully I’ve given some clarity. It’s really busy. It’s really busy, as you know.

Peter Lipsett: Anything—bottom line, you can just say it’s really busy, and there’s always something.

Scott Centorino: It’s a function of how wildly bloated our federal government has gotten, that so much flows up through DC in the first place, and then within DC to the president, that it’s literally unmanageable in any logical way. So you have to pick and choose which things you want to prioritize. That’s always true, but I can’t imagine that when the federal government was much more in keeping with the founders’ vision, you had the same challenges in the executive branch.

Peter Lipsett: So how often, then, in all these meetings and all this running around, are you meeting with nonprofits in the liberty space?

Scott Centorino: Well, it depends on the person, of course. I was probably more open-minded and interested in meetings like that because I came from that world—I had a better sense of what they could offer, resource-wise. Some people are not as interested in that, and that’s fine. I was probably on the far side of the spectrum, because I would take meetings with people I didn’t know, even from groups I was pretty skeptical would be helpful, just because I wanted to hear what they had to say. And occasionally, on issues where I didn’t have as much background, they could give me some helpful guidance on what the issues even were. Even if somebody says they disagree with the administration’s policy on X, maybe you didn’t know that X was even a thing—so just being made aware of it is helpful. The other factor here, when it comes to think tanks, is that a huge number of people in the policy space in the White House, and of course across the different agencies, come directly from think tanks. I’ll give you an example: everybody remembers that flurry of executive orders, especially in the first hundred days of this Trump term. That whole process of getting all those executive orders out began two months before inauguration day. I was in Palm Beach, and I was part of a team putting those together. Stephen Miller was there, a lot of other people were there, Susie was there. And you were prioritizing—all right, you’re going to write these four, you’re going to write these three. In that group of two deputy assistants to the president and six special assistants to the president, who ultimately were under Vince Haley in the Domestic Policy Council—there was one from FGA, one from AFPI, one from the Senate who had think tank experience at American Compass, one from Do No Harm—that’s me—another one from FGA, one from Paragon, and another one from AFPI, if I’m remembering correctly. So it was totally—it was well stocked with think tank people, who all had their own backgrounds, obviously. And if the only thing think tanks did was serve as a bit of a holding tank for folks between administrations—to make sure you didn’t lose good conservative warriors to the more generic lobbying world—that has value by itself. If the only thing it did was keep in amber people like Theo Merkel and Sam Adolphsen and others, rather than lose them to the outside, that has real value. But think tanks, of course, do way more than that too.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, I think—it’s interesting you say that, because I think certain staff members, certain organizations, even certain donors have almost an allergy to that. They say, ‘We want to be separate.’ And I think you raise a good point: these unmanageable, unwieldy executive offices need staff, and I’d much rather have staff—the Scott Centorinos, those types of people—going in, versus somebody who has no idea what’s going on, or who is only loyal to whomever, whether it’s the president or the leader of that office, and doesn’t understand that fuller landscape. I mean, America—or AFPI, which I always butcher; I get the acronym right and then start putting the wrong words in the wrong places—but it was essentially created for that purpose, for holding those folks in amber between the administrations, and it served its purpose and continues to be a very functional organization, a think tank, today.

Scott Centorino: Well, and one thing I’ll add there is: even setting aside pulling lobbyists in instead of think tank people, one of the things I found and was surprised by was how few of the people who were still in government and were brought into the administration knew anything about state policy. A handful of us, including myself, who had come from FGA and Do No Harm and had spent a lot of time in state policy, were pretty much the only people around who had any experience in state government. So many federal programs, even Medicaid, ultimately flow through the states. We found ourselves unique, and people with issues way outside our portfolios would come to us and ask us basically how state government worked. Because even if you didn’t bring in any lobbyists, the default kind of person you bring into an office like that is a Hill person—someone who’s been in DC for the last ten years—and in most cases they’ve not worked in state government.

Now, in fairness, there were plenty of times when I had to go to them. There was one time—I’m not embarrassed to admit it—I had to reference the One Big Beautiful Bill, H.R. 1, and I couldn’t figure out which version on the Senate website was the actual final enrolled version, because it’s so nonsensical the way it’s set up, with all these hyperlinks—it doesn’t really matter, but I couldn’t figure it out. And here I was in the citadel of the free world and couldn’t figure out which bill was the actual final version that passed. So what did I do? I asked Theo Merkel, who spent ten years on the Hill: ‘Hey, can you send me the One Big Beautiful Bill? I don’t know which version is the final one.’ So we had good relationships where you want people from think tanks, because the think tanks have experience in the states too. And that’s very unique in any kind of transition in DC.

Peter Lipsett: That’s a really unique point—yeah, I hadn’t really thought about that. All right, so let’s talk about persuasion, and maybe take it in two different ways. What does effective persuasion look like for the people who actually are able to get on the phone, get in front of you, have a conversation? But then I’m also curious—and we can turn to it second—about passive communication, or those conversations that are going on out in the ether—to what extent are those being paid attention to?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, I guess the number one thing—and this was a bit of a surprise to me—was how little persuasion is actually required. I’m not poo-pooing persuasion; it’s very important. But for the most part, when I met with a think tank, they didn’t need to persuade me that the idea they were pitching was a good idea. If I was talking to them, I probably had some sense of what they stood for and whether I trusted them or not. And that’s the most important thing. It’s not the quality of your ideas, unfortunately—it’s the human connectivity. Do I know somebody I trust on this issue to give me good advice, good data, et cetera? You don’t have enough time to do a deep dive on every single issue, so you have to rely on good, smart people, including think tank people from the outside whom you trust to give you ideas. So in most meetings where an idea was pitched to me that I liked, the persuasion part was done in the first two minutes. It quickly became: all right, what do I do about this? You think the Department of Education should do X? Okay—if I’m going to pick up the phone and call the Department of Education after this meeting, how do I tell them to do it? What are their authorities? What’s the sub-agency that would run this? How would they implement it? It gets into the realities of governing very quickly. And that’s probably where you see the biggest differentiation between effective think tanks and less effective ones: a lot of think tanks have great ideas and smart people, but they don’t think through the follow-on. They’re not ready for a yes, I guess is the simplest way of putting it. They’re not ready to help the staffer do the work that’s so often required.

Peter Lipsett: That’s a fascinating point. One of my bugaboos is that I think we, generally on the right, are not ready for a yes—we catch the car and then don’t know what to do with it. And one of my great fears is that we’re going to do the same thing with school choice and all the victories we’ve had there. That’s a whole different podcast and a whole different rabbit hole. But that’s really interesting—essentially, the folks who are coming in are telling you something valuable and also telling you how to get it done, doing a little of the work for you. Yes, there are certain things they don’t know—they don’t know the right person to call—but they know that if you know the right person to call, here’s what needs to get done. Doing that homework counts for a lot, it sounds like.

Scott Centorino: Yeah, I think that’s the number one thing I look for and would recommend. It’s also how I would judge a think tank’s performance and effectiveness—it sounds terrible, but it’s how much of the work of the policymaker they’re doing for the policymaker. I’ll be specific. Say you’ve got seven different issues in your portfolio—I’ll use myself as an example. On day one in the White House, I was told that I had to develop, coordinate, and implement all of the federal administration’s policies on welfare. That includes Medicaid, food stamps, housing, public housing—

Peter Lipsett: Seventy percent of the budget.

Scott Centorino: Right. Homelessness, mental illness and addiction, gun rights, gender ideology, all of veterans’ affairs—and I think I’m missing a couple. I had election integrity for a couple of months. There were a couple others I’m forgetting. So you can imagine, if that’s your portfolio, you’re stretched thin, of course. And this isn’t me complaining. What I’m saying is: if two people brought me ideas that I liked—say I liked both of them and thought, yeah, this is absolutely worth doing—if someone wrote me a memo with talking points and maybe a first draft of a bill, a regulation, or a guidance memo that Health and Human Services could put out to make the policy change—it doesn’t have to be perfect, just a first draft, some basic blocking and tackling of what I’d have to do to make it happen—if I have to choose how I’m going to spend my afternoon, I’m probably going to go with the option where some of the work is already done. That’s just a function of how big our government is and how bloated the responsibilities are. But it’s natural to go with the option that’s further along in the process, because so often you do a lot of work on something and it falls apart for some reason. Why would you invest so much in something if you’re not sure it’s going to happen? If something’s farther along in the process, then yeah, you’re going to jump for that. So think tanks that are really effective, in my experience, are ready to do some of the work for the policymaker. They’re not just going around asking for things—they’re legitimately offering help. Pretty much every think tank has learned that they need to say that. But if the policymaker isn’t seeing and feeling it—here’s the first draft of the regulation we’re asking you to change, bam—then it’s much less likely to be an effective meeting, and you’re much less likely to go down the road that think tank wants you to go down. Even if it’s just a starting point. So I might call up HUD after a meeting and say, ‘Hey, I just got this really interesting draft—can you look at it and tell me if you like it?’ I’ll call somebody I trust at an agency who I know is aligned: ‘Can you tell me why this isn’t workable, or why we shouldn’t do this?’ Without that work already done by the think tank, I’d have to do all of that myself. I did that plenty of times; I’m not trying to get out of work. Most of these people are the hardest-working people you’ll ever meet. But if you can push the ball as far downfield as possible for that policymaker, you’re going to have much better odds of succeeding.

Peter Lipsett: And it also accrues to the benefit of the nonprofit as well, because then they can not just say, ‘That piece of legislation—that was our idea.’ Ideas have a thousand fathers. If you can say, ‘Actually, two-thirds of the text is the version I gave them when I sat down with Scott in a meeting six months ago’—that’s a much clearer win, and the progenitor of that success can be more easily identified.

Scott Centorino: Exactly.

Scott Centorino: Yes. And the really pro move is being willing to do the work for the policymaker and then not take credit—or only take credit in private settings, so the donors know what’s happening, but you’re not going around bragging about a win that really belongs to the policymaker. This isn’t just true of the White House, or this White House in particular, which has its own idiosyncrasies—it’s true even of state legislatures. If you’re not pounding your chest after a win, and you let the state legislator have that win—because ultimately it was them knocking on doors in the summer heat, them who won the election, them who ran the bill through, them who had to overcome opposition within their own party and across the whole legislature—they really earned the win. And most legislators, most policymakers, want the credit for their wins; they don’t want to be sharing it with fifty-five different groups. Now, there’s a time and place for taking credit, of course—I don’t mean to cast aspersions on all of that—but the best place to do it is in private, and let the policymaker have their day. Because then they’re much more likely to come back to you, and the think tank is much more likely to get win number two and win number three, if you let them have that win publicly.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And let the non-humble elected official be the non-humble one, and let the humble think tank be the humble one, depending on the setting. That’s hard—that goes against every human impulse, but that’s really good. Okay, so swing it to the opposite side—the more passive stuff. Cato holds a luncheon, or a full-day event on a topic, or AFPI does some sessions that bring in some people—to what extent are people in the White House, and in the legislature, et cetera, paying attention to what’s going on off campus, essentially?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, it’s a hard question, and honestly, you can cut my answer, because I’m probably not the best person to ask. I’m an old man at heart—I’m not on Twitter. Well, maybe I am on Twitter, but I’ve posted zero times and check it about once every six months. I don’t keep up with social media. Most people in this world are glued to social media, and I’m not a representative person—I know that. What I’ll tell you is: at the White House, and certainly plenty of other places, Fox News is on in the background at all times, in pretty much every office, including individual offices—there are TVs in every office with Fox News on. So that’s probably the easiest way to broadcast a message: just get on Fox News, Peter. That’s all you have to do; it’s the easiest thing in the world. Aside from that, the easiest way to make an impact with passive content is, again, human connectivity. So if Theo, who worked at Paragon—I’ve never worked at Paragon, don’t work with them now, but they’re a good group—Theo Merkel, who runs healthcare policy, came from Paragon. He might come over to my office and say, ‘Hey, have you read the latest Paragon paper?’ Or in a team meeting I might say, ‘I’m working on this Medicaid work-requirement implementation from the One Big Beautiful Bill,’ and he might say, ‘Yeah, there’s a good chart they put out six months ago,’ and then I might find it that way. That’s the best and most common way you find material—somebody you know and trust who’s already in your network brings it to your attention, or somebody from the outside texts you: ‘Hey, you might want to look at this one-pager we just put together on school choice in Michigan.’ That’s the best way. Now, not everybody has total connectivity with all the big players, so that’s sometimes impossible, of course. If you put out good content—there are a couple of outlets, obviously the Daily Caller, the Wall Street Journal, National Review-type outlets; I won’t list them all—but if you get a hook there, people do pay attention. And obviously Twitter is another big way people find things. But I’ll stop there, because I don’t think what I have to say is all that representative on this front. I’m pretty old at heart.

Peter Lipsett: Well, it reinforces something you said earlier about the importance of having people like you coming from FGA, or people from Paragon—people from these institutions who are working on these issues. Back during the first Trump administration, there was a lot of credit given to Trump, rightfully so, for passing a lot of really good stuff in the first couple of years—taxes, deregulation, all that. It was this overnight success that I point to people as being thirty years in the making: the Federalist Society being built up, CEI doing this regulatory work click by click over time, FGA, the state policy think tanks—all of that being ready day one, so it could be executed. And because there were people like you going in who knew that was there, they could take it off the shelf and run with it. So what I keep hearing from you is that the human element really matters. Being prepared for the moment when it comes really matters. And—from this last answer—you can’t just assume that because you’re saying it over here, it’s getting heard over there. You’ve got to be in the fight. You’ve got to be direct.

Scott Centorino: That’s right. And yeah, I may have been misleading—I was speaking about all the different ways you can get the attention of people. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the people inside are not going to see it. If you’re putting out an op-ed, publishing a paper, or tweeting about something—even if it’s exactly what the person wants to see, on that day—unless it’s put in front of their eyeballs exactly when they need it, odds are they’re not going to see it. That’s why human connectivity is so important, because there’s so much content. I can’t emphasize enough how much is thrown at you every day. I’ve gotten in the habit of explaining it this way—and I assume this is true for a typical White House staffer, not just the policy people, and it’s also true, by the way, of political appointees at the very top echelons of the agencies: imagine you had to brief an ER doctor having the worst day of her career—a bunch of kids with gunshot wounds in the emergency room that day. She’s bouncing around from room to room trying to save lives. The person before you who just spoke to her said, ‘If you don’t solve this Rubik’s Cube in your left hand in the next ten minutes, your house will burn down,’ or something like that. And then your job is to go in and brief that ER doctor on why school choice is good. Something like that. She’s interested—she really wants to know. But that’s the challenge. That’s the attention span, by the nature of the jobs these folks have. So you’re not going to get much passive connection—you’ve got to put things in front of them, and it’s got to be related to something urgent. They’re putting out fires. You either have to make your thing a fire, or make your thing something helpful to a fire that’s currently burning.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, wow. So much of the activity—and I guess this isn’t a knock—there are other people to influence besides people in the White House, besides legislative staff. You need people—the county commissioner in a district in Iowa who’s also good friends with the congressman—who may see your piece, and it may trickle up. We need these ideas bouncing around in the ecosystem. But we shouldn’t expect that just because it’s not bad—even in the Washington Post, even in Politico—that it’s going to get seen by the people we want it to be seen by.

Scott Centorino: And building up a library of content and collateral, even if it’s not immediately noticed, can be helpful. Because at some point, if you’re pointing out a problem that’s not quite on the front burner, at some point it will be, and you’re going to want to have that material ready when that happens—and actually have the data to back up your position. So it’s not a waste of time.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, that’s really interesting. What are questions that donors should be asking their groups, based on the things you’ve seen, toward the idea of being more effective?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, I suppose one thing would be: if you’ve got a group proposing a solution to something, I’d want to know—how does the entity you’re asking to do this, whether it’s the federal government, the executive branch, Congress, state government, whatever, actually accomplish it? That’s obviously the second question any policymaker would probably ask once they like the idea in the first place. And if they’re not ready to give you a good answer on that question, they’re probably not ready to answer it for a policymaker either. I’d also ask—this is a basic one—if a group is taking credit for a win, ask them: ‘Out of curiosity, can you tell me why you’re taking credit for this win? Why not let the policymaker have this win and just tell me about it directly?’ Or ask them how they calculate wins. I’ve been part of organizations that are very thoughtful—when they say they’re taking credit for eight wins in a state in one year, they’ve got a whole process for how they count a win, and they’ll have half-wins, and they’ll look at something that a lot of other groups might count as a win but they won’t, because they really didn’t do much on that issue with the sponsor of the bill. They’re very thoughtful about counting wins. And I’ve seen other groups just take credit for things they were never part of. So I’d ask a group: how do you actually count wins? Do you have a process for that? If they don’t, that’s a red flag. I’d also ask—especially at the state level—if a group headquartered in DC is taking credit for a win in Atlanta, Little Rock, or Boise: did you ever go to Atlanta, Little Rock, or Boise? Did you testify in the hearing? Did you actually meet with the sponsor? Because a lot of groups take credit for things, particularly at the state level, where they never showed up. Something good happened, and maybe one group was actually helpful, but six groups take credit for it. Like you said, victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. Ask those basic questions. The other way to judge it, I’d say, is to ask policymakers. I’d think most of the listeners here, who are donors funding liberty-oriented think tanks, are also donors in the more directly political world. Ask your policymakers: ‘What groups have you found helpful? What groups have actually shown up for you? What groups have actually taken some slings and arrows on your behalf and given you concrete help, rather than just saying, this would be great if you could do this? What groups have made offers rather than just asks?’ That’s the best way to judge these groups, in my opinion. Now, I suppose the asterisk on that is: there are some groups that don’t aim to be all that action-oriented, that aim to be more academic in nature, and that’s not the right metric for those. But a lot of the groups we’re talking about here aspire to be pretty helpful, in an active sense, to policymakers. So I’m sure this is pretty obvious to most of your listeners, but ask policymakers which groups are actually showing up for them when they need help and have the solutions they’re looking for.

Peter Lipsett: This is a real practical question for the groups out there who might be listening, or people who are on boards. You were there for a year—I know, in talking to you, it probably feels like you were there for an entire administration, because it’s not easy work, as we’ve already covered in your very vivid ER analogy—if that’s what every day is like, that’s rough. So I understand why you were only there for a year, but we want the Scott Centorinos there—we want good people there. When somebody like you leaves, and I, as a policy person, have built up a relationship with you, then what do I do? Are you trying to hand off some of those relationships? Or if it hasn’t been a year—say I worked with you on something in July, and then the next year something else comes up, but you’re gone—how do I even try to reintegrate myself into those conversations?

Scott Centorino: It’s a great question—and, by the way, a great SAT word, ‘re-inculcate.’ Well done—five hundred points for Gryffindor. Nobody’s ever asked me that question, and it’s a good one. There’s obviously a lot of turnover in these jobs, because despite how cool they often are, they’re also often miserable jobs. So people move on. I was surprised how many people were in my boat—we didn’t cover this in the bio, there was no reason to—but I left my wife and kid at home, hours and hours away from DC. There were a bunch of people in the White House doing that, flying home every weekend across the country.

Peter Lipsett: I met one who was going back and forth to Miami. I mean, it is really a true civil service.

Scott Centorino: Yeah, there were people all over the place—one commuting back to his family in Alabama, one going to Houston, one to Maine, all over the place every weekend. Brutal—literally financially unsustainable, by the way, but that’s a different matter. So that’s an issue in its own right. But you have people, including me, who take the jobs with the intent of them being short-term missions: I’m going to do this, accomplish as much as I can, and then go home. And that can be frustrating. I’ve certainly been on the other side of the table too, where you put all this investment into a person, build a relationship, and then that person leaves and you start over. That’s really frustrating. The best thing to do—and again, this is probably common sense—is, if it’s a really good person, which, if they’ve cultivated that relationship with you, they probably are, just ask them: ‘Hey, who took over your portfolio? How can I get synced up with them?’ I’ll give you a concrete example: when I left—because I’m just so great, Peter—my portfolio was divided among multiple people. No, in all seriousness, it needed to be divided up after I left. I had a unique combination of experiences that made it make sense for the welfare person to also have gender ideology, and also law and order—that was the other issue. I had all of law and order in my portfolio too—forgot about that one. That was a big one.

Peter Lipsett: And there are so many seasons of that—I don’t know how you kept up with it.

Scott Centorino: Yeah, brutal—so many seasons. But great theme song, more of a pulse. Pum, pum. When I left, it wouldn’t have made sense to give that portfolio to one person—you split up portfolios depending on who you have, and all that. So I would have said to somebody I was working with on a law-and-order issue, ‘You should talk to this person,’ and to somebody I was working with on a gender issue, ‘You need to talk to this person.’ Often it’s not clear who’s going to take over a portfolio when the first person leaves. So ask for an introduction to the person above that person: ‘Hey, can you make sure I’m connected with your boss, so I know who to go to in the coming weeks?’ In some cases they may be hesitant to do that, because that person is even busier than the person below—but you never know. You can’t get it if you don’t ask for it. So yeah, I think that’s really frustrating work, finding that human touch, but it’s absolutely necessary and worthwhile.

Peter Lipsett: So you’re back on the other side now, out of the White House—you look much more rested, and you’re back home. All that’s good—yeah, just by not shaving.

Scott Centorino: Despite not shaving, which the people listening can’t see, but yeah.

Peter Lipsett: But so now that you’re on the other side—as we talked about at the top, you’re working with think tanks again, working with policy, more in a consultancy aspect. So touching a lot of different issues, not dissimilar to what you were doing before. So how are you talking to them differently now than back before you were in the White House? What are you consulting them to do differently, to really have the impact and grow their influence in a smart way?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, the experience really underlined a few things I kind of knew in the abstract but have really taken to heart now. Number one—and we’ve touched on this a little—the how is so much more important than the what, ultimately. Because ninety-nine percent of the time, if you’ve got a really good substantive meeting with a policymaker, it’s because they already know and trust you and are going to buy what you’re selling in terms of the idea. I’m describing think tanks here, not trade groups or whatever. And if that’s true, then you’d better be ready to help walk with them on implementation and do some of the work with them. I’ll give you an example: because I had law and order in my portfolio, I also had human trafficking in my portfolio, and I quickly learned that that is the problem from hell. There are apparently no solutions, as frustrating as that is—or at least I couldn’t find any really good solutions with a federal hook. One of the most frustrating experiences was—I knew human trafficking was a problem, so I went out of my way to invite, and accept the invitation of, a bunch of groups that work on human trafficking—all incredible, good, smart people who knew the issue really well—and they would come in and describe the problem. But after five minutes I’d say, ‘Okay, what do you want me to do about it? What can we do about it? What are the options? Give me a menu of options to pick from.’ And we really never got anywhere on that front. Maybe that’s a legitimate function of federal authority, but those were frustrating meetings—that’s an extreme example. But it really reaffirmed how valuable that second step is. I’ll also say it reaffirmed how valuable it is to get really good at teaching 101-level material. You’ll become a go-to person, or go-to group, if you’re good teachers of 101 material. For example, I was given all the issues I listed. I knew a lot about some of them, maybe most of them—there were a couple I was fairly new to. I took Veterans Affairs because I was the only one of the six special assistants to the president who’d ever served in the military. That’s the only reason they gave me Veterans Affairs. I’d never been in a VA facility in my life—I knew nothing about VA policy. They had to give it to somebody, so they gave it to me. If there had been someone in that moment who could sit me down and explain, for an hour, ‘Here’s how the Department of Veterans Affairs works, here are the major questions of the last ten years, here are the questions you’re likely to face, and here are some of the choices’—without putting too much of a thumb on the scale—I would have met with that person as much as they wanted. Ultimately I got a lot of that guidance from people who work at VA, and there’s plenty of material online. But man—if you put collateral on your website as a think tank that’s just 101 explainers, good primers—’here’s how Medicaid works’—that will be a magnet for people who are handed an issue they don’t understand, which is a lot of people, a lot of the time. It’ll bring them into your orbit and build credibility and trust, and then they’re more likely to actually look at the solutions you’re pitching. Maybe they’re not interested in those—but it gets eyeballs on your material, because you’d be surprised how high up people go, in terms of authority, without really understanding the issues as well as the think tanks do. There’s just not enough people at the top to understand everything. So getting good at 101 explaining is really valuable, and I didn’t fully appreciate that before.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, those are—I mean, that’s a super actionable thing, right, for any groups listening: have that up there. It turns out people at the highest levels of government still rely on Google and still look things up. And if you are the source material with the right perspective, then you can be a go-to. That’s really great. Well—maybe a final question. What are the unknown unknowns out there? Where are the missed opportunities—things that surprise you, like, why does nobody do this? Maybe that 101-explainer thing is a piece of it, but what are some easy layups for groups out there to start influencing a little more, that would have helped you in your time and will continue to help groups in the future?

Scott Centorino: Yeah, good primer materials is definitely one. Having material on implementation is another. Beyond that, one thing a lot of groups don’t do, that they could, is preparing policymakers for internal and external pushback. Let’s say you’re doing everything else right—here’s an idea on school choice, let’s use that as an example again. The policymaker says, ‘Great, I’m all in—how do we do it?’ And the person from the think tank is ready: ‘Here’s how you do it, here’s a draft piece of guidance, here’s how this would be implemented at the state level, here’s a 101 explainer on how this all works.’ They’re doing everything right. But when that person turns around and briefs, say, Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, or the president, and says, ‘This is what we ought to do, here are the problems, and here’s why I think we should do this’—if they have any questions or concerns and that person isn’t prepared to argue against them, and certainly when it hits the media, or the public more broadly, or folks on the other side politically, it can easily and quickly fall apart. So you’ve got to prepare policymakers—you’ve got to build their shield for them too. It’s not enough to give them the sword; you’ve got to let them know, ‘Here are the common questions you’ll get about this,’ or ‘Here’s the pushback you’re going to get from the other side, or internally.’ I’ll stick with school choice: if you don’t tell a conservative lawmaker, ‘You’re probably going to hear from conservatives in rural areas who are worried about how school choice impacts sports programs in their local schools—they only have one school in their county anyway, so why would school choice help them?’—if you’re not telling the policymaker they’re going to hear that from other conservatives in rural areas, you’re doing them an injustice. First, because they’re going to trust you less, since you didn’t tell them they’d hear that. Also, your odds of succeeding with that policymaker just took a plunge, because they’re likely to crumble if they’re not ready for that pushback—’Wait a minute, maybe this wasn’t as good an idea as I thought. There are other conservatives against this—maybe I didn’t think this through.’ And they’ve got a stack of other problems on their desk—the minute they get pushback on one, maybe they just switch gears to another. So if it’s not a perfect game on any one issue, it can fall apart very quickly, because they’ll just move to another issue. You’ve got to make it feel like a glide path for them as much as possible. And if there’s going to be pushback—which, on just about every issue, there will be—you’ve got to make them feel ready for it: here’s what you’re going to hear, here are the responses you can give, here’s the data to back up the position. That would help a lot. A lot of groups don’t do that—you kind of have to learn it the hard way, on your own.

Peter Lipsett: That’s a great point—you’ve got to steelman and strawman your own arguments. Know the terrible arguments against it, but also the ones that hold water. And frankly, that’s a place where donors can come in too—in meeting with these people and hearing policy ideas from think tanks, they can help push back on that too. We can have a role in that.

Scott Centorino: Yep.

Scott Centorino: Absolutely. I’ll give you two more off the top of my head. One is just speed and urgency. Most think tanks, most of the time, do not move at the same pace as most policymakers—for good reason, by the way; everybody would fall off a cliff at some point if they did. But they don’t move at the same speed and urgency as most policymakers, in most cases. If you’ve got a direct ask from a policymaker, you’ve got to move quickly, because odds are that person has a deadline you may not know about—it’s probably today or tomorrow. There are so many things in the White House, in particular, but this is true elsewhere, that come together at the last minute. Maybe you were just asked to brief the chief of staff tomorrow at noon. If I reach out to a think tank at three o’clock in the afternoon to help me prepare for a briefing the next day—maybe I don’t tell them exactly when that briefing is, for whatever reason—but I’m looking for help immediately. And of course, think tanks don’t work for policymakers directly—you’re not under any legal obligation to be incredibly responsive. But if you want to be impactful, and you’ve got a direct ask from a policymaker, you’ve got to know that odds are it’s of real urgent importance. That doesn’t mean you have to do everything—if you’re writing a ten-page foundational paper on some topic, you can take your time; if nobody’s asking for it, you don’t have to do that today. But if you’ve got somebody asking for follow-up data—if you just had a meeting with them and they say, ‘Can you get me more information on this?’—you should treat that like a hot potato in your lap. If you don’t respond today or tomorrow, it could fall off and never be noticed again. Everything from the policymaker, you’ve got to treat with real urgency, and that’ll help you be more effective, certainly.

The other thing I’d say, at the state level in particular—less true of the federal government—is just show up. What’s the old Woody Allen line, eighty percent of life is showing up? If you arrive in Lansing, Michigan, in late January when there’s two feet of snow on the ground, and you’re willing to have a meeting with a sponsor, willing to do the work and give them a piece of paper they need, and willing to show up and testify and support them in that moment—that is worth ninety-five meetings in DC. DC is very good at having meetings and nodding and smiling and nothing ever gets done—of course, everybody knows this. Real things happen in the states all the time, and it doesn’t take much to help state policymakers. And they remember—they will remember for years, I promise. They’ll remember for years that on January 26th, you showed up at their hearing in Lansing, Michigan, and you were supportive and helped them. It’s much more valuable, that time. So showing up is another big one.

Peter Lipsett: Those are—that’s all great advice, all really good. I think there’s a lot the groups can take away from everything you’ve shared, and a lot donors can take away, in terms of how they’re working with the groups they give to, and cutting through the noise of who’s really effective—because it’s hard to parse out. There’s a lot of moving pieces, a lot going on behind the scenes. And if the groups can be thoughtful about how to work with elected officials, and not view them as the enemy but as partners in getting some of this stuff done, we can hopefully advance a lot more good policy. Scott Centorino, thank you so much for joining us—this was terrific.

Scott Centorino: Thank you, Peter.

Peter Lipsett: Well, I was excited to record that episode, but it turned out even better than I expected. There was so much great, interesting information—nice inside-baseball stuff—probably so many more stories I could have asked Scott about from his time there. Not every group out there wants to be heard and seen by elected officials—Scott referenced the ideas stage, people in the incubator stage of creating ideas. But a lot of the groups out there that you may support do want to move the needle with elected officials, with their staffs, with legislatures. And if that’s the case, they need to do it in a smart way—they need to know what they’re up against and some of the challenges. Policy groups can make the job of staffers and politicians so much easier by doing their homework, having plans ready to go, knowing the arguments on both sides—the good arguments and the miserable arguments—and then being ready to move quickly. And, as Scott said, don’t forget to be humble—there’s still a role for promoting our work, just be careful about it. And of course, some of it is just raw luck. But the groups that are out there trying to make their own luck are going to get farther, because when opportunity comes, you want to be prepared.

Well, I want all the groups that DonorsTrust supports to be successful, to change things for the better. And you, I imagine, want the same thing—you wouldn’t be listening otherwise. So encourage the groups you give to, or groups you may be on the board of, to take a listen to this episode. There could be some invaluable advice to help them have more impact with their work, which in turn lets your dollars have more impact, and ultimately lets America have more impact by being a freer, more prosperous place. So that’s a virtuous cycle we can all get behind. Well, I very much appreciate you listening and tuning in. If you are already working with DonorsTrust, thank you. And if you’re not, think about how we can be an invaluable piece of your charitable giving. With our donor-advised funds, our philanthropic advising, our legacy protection—we are here to serve donors who care about limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise. If that is you, we would love to work with you. Well, until next time—thank you for being a giver. We’ll talk more soon.

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