Hon. Lloyd Levine (ret.)

Lloyd Levine is a former member of the California State Legislature where he served as Chair of the Assembly Committee on Utilities and Commerce. Currently, Mr. Levine serves as T-Mobile for Government’s National Senior Executive for State Government Strategy and is a Senior Policy Fellow at the UC Riverside School of Public Policy. 

While in the Legislature, Mr. Levine established himself as one of California’s leading experts in energy, telecommunications, and technology policy. Consistently tackling some of the most challenging and significant statutory policy changes, Mr. Levine authored numerous pieces of historic legislation which became national models in telecommunications, technology, energy, and environmental policy.

Mr. Levine served as a member of Governor Schwarzenegger’s Broadband Taskforce and was a Founding Member of the Board of Directors of the California Emerging Technology Fund. Mr. Levine currently serves as a Founding Member of the Advisory Board for the UC Riverside School of Public Policy, where he and the school’s Dean, Anil Deolalikar, co-founded the Center for Technology, Policy and Society.

Because of his policy expertise, and his unique perspective as a former legislator, Mr. Levine has appeared on television and radio programs across the country and has been published and cited widely in print media, with articles published in everything from daily newspapers to legal publications. Mr. Levine is a frequent panelist and keynote speaker at energy, and technology conferences around the world, and has been a guest lecturer in many universities and law schools. 

As a Senior Policy Fellow, Mr. Levine has focused on technology, including broadband and the digital divide, with numerous publications, including on the following subjects:

• COVID-19, the Digital Divide, Distance Learning: Strategies and Policies to Avert an Education Crisis
• Broadband adoption in urban and suburban California: information-based outreach programs ineffective at closing the digital divide
• Energy Policy and the Digital Divide: Broadband Deployment and Adoption are Insufficient to Meet the Needs of Demand Response and the Smart Grid
• Closing the Digital Divide: A Historic and Economic Justification for Government Intervention

In addition to setting up the new unit in T-Mobile, currently, Mr. Levine is finishing an edited book volume on the intersection of technology and government titled, “Technology vs. Government: The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object, which will be published later this year. 

Mr. Levine currently resides in Sacramento with his wife, KCRA Anchorwoman Edie Lambert and their two children. 

What are your proudest accomplishments?

My proudest accomplishment is easily my family. In the professional realm I am very fortunate. A combination of hard work, timing, and luck has afforded me numerous accomplishments in which I take great pride. However, number one would have to be my work as a state legislator successfully tackling some of the most challenging issues facing the state. That work was very fulfilling, and I can truly look back and say I made an important, positive difference on many issues.

Which research would you be interested in collaborating with students on?

I genuinely love working with students and would be happy to collaborate with them on a number of issues. I do try to stay in my “lane” and would want to work with them on projects that focused on things in which I have expertise.

What advice do you have for public policy students? 

While UCR’s program is specifically public policy, I think there are two very important, pragmatic concerns that all policy students must be aware of. 

1. Don’t forget about the administration aspect of crafting policy. The best policy in the world won’t do any good if it can’t be implemented and administered. 
2. Understand the impact of politics on policy. While we should aspire to the ideal, to craft the best possible policy, it is also important to understand that political realities won’t always let you achieve what you want. You need to achieve what is possible. As Otto von Bismark said, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best. ”It is important, even essential to have values and principles, but progress is also important. It is important to recognize that while pushing to achieve what we believe is necessary, we also need to make progress. Seldom, if ever, do we get what we want the first time. We only get where we need to go by taking one step at a time. And politics will often dictate how far each step will be. Rather than looking at this as a defeatist attitude, I actually find that people who understand this and can understand the motivations of the other actors can be better policy makers. 

What do you think policy students will be faced with as they graduate in this time of COVID-19?

Students graduating in the time of Covid face two primary challenges. Both challenges are workforce related - one exogenous to the circumstances of the pandemic, and the other facilitated and accelerated by the response to the pandemic. 

Externally, students entering the workforce in policy making capacities will have to deal with the same challenges as society at large, a fractured, polarized, decentralized media marketplace driven by cable news, the internet and social media. They will also be facing a hyper-partisan political/policy climate, and an era where truth and facts are not necessarily important to some. The challenges posed by this are myriad and vary, increase or ebb in impact based on the level of the policy making body and the motivations of the actors involved. But, for academically trained individuals looking to make positive policy changes, the confluence of these factors can be difficult to navigate and demotivating.

Specifically relating to COVID-19, newly graduated students entering a workforce will be entering under completely different circumstances than those who entered in 2019. During the pandemic, a staggering array of jobs became remote, enabled by rapidly changing computing and communications and collaboration technologies. Nearly overnight our workforce shifted from an office-centric model to a home-centric one. High-speed broadband, webcams, Zoom and other technological advances allowed many to maintain productivity despite not being in the same physical location. To be sure, these technologies were being developed and implemented prior to the pandemic, but the pandemic accelerated their adoption and integration.  There is now talk at all levels of government about some of these changes being permanent. Students entering the policy making arena may not have a traditional office to go to. That could work for some, but also pose huge challenges in other circumstances.

What have you noticed are the effective ingredients associated with getting policy makers to take notice of “evidence?” Another way to think about this is that sometimes policy analysts believe that once you provide the numbers that suggest one policy is “better” than another policy, that’s the end of it.

This is an excellent question, especially in an era where facts seem to matter less. It’s also a question I get asked frequently, so often in fact that I published an entire paper on the topic (Connecting research to policy: Understanding macro and micro policy-makers and their processes | First Monday). In the paper I discuss the impediments that stand in the way – chief among them the proximity and familiarity barriers. Most of the time, academic experts are both distant from and unfamiliar to policy makers. But even for analysts who are engaged on a daily basis, the significant force exerted on issues by politics and external interests can make it challenging to get evidence entered into the policy making sphere. 

To overcome these challenges, I suggest a number of concepts, including working with intermediary groups who are interested using data and research to shape policy, but are also more familiar and physically closer to policy makers. Coalition building and grassroots work can also be useful in helping to drive policy. And, from the outset, it is very helpful if analysts and policy makers understand the motivations of the various actors and the political and economic tensions involved.