by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
An article in BBC Science Focus highlights the difficulties of “multi-tasking,” handling several things at a time, which apparently most of us don’t do very well. “In an ideal world, we’d focus on one task at a time, get it finished and only then move onto something else.” But in real life, “It’s all too common for you to be making great progress on one thing, when… BAM! You suddenly need to deal with something else.”
That is common, not only in our personal lives, but also in government. In the decade I worked on Capitol Hill, no crisis happened on any Monday morning. Instead, whenever we were winding down some big project, a new crisis would appear, usually at 4 p.m. on Friday. Multi-tasking wasn’t a popular term back then, but it aptly describes many situations in government.
Multi-tasking became a hot topic when TV host Maria Bartiromo interviewed new Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. She had just completed a segment about Chinese ownership of farmland in the U.S. and asked him to comment. He replied that federal land ownership was a much bigger issue.
“The real issue that is slowing us down is not that China owns what is really a small, small percentage of land in U.S. I mean, they should not own any, but they own a small percentage. It’s the fact we’ve got 700 million acres of federal land…” In other words, he pivoted to a much larger issue he wanted to talk about, one that is the core of his responsibilities.
