Jared Kushner has been tasked with helping the federal government solve some of America’s most vexing public policy crises — from streamlining Veterans Affairs to fixing the opioid epidemic — by bringing the acumen of the business world to the White House.

On Monday, President Donald Trump announced that he’d tapped his son-in-law to lead the newly formed “White House Office of American Innovation.” Its charges include fulfilling key Trump campaign pledges like “fighting the opioid crisis” and “reforming care for veterans,” according to the Washington Post.

Kushner has never held government office before taking this post. He oversaw his father’s Manhattan real estate company in the mid-2000s and later bought and ran the New York Observer, a small newspaper in New York City. His main qualification for the task appears to be that he advised his father-in-law’s presidential campaign.

“We should have excellence in government,” Kushner told the Post in an interview in his West Wing office. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”

Government experts are, to put it mildly, skeptical that the 36-year-old will really be able to transform the federal bureaucracy — and it’s not like it hasn’t been tried before. (Kushner has also been tasked with achieving Middle East peace, despite his close ties to Israel and lack of any experience in foreign affairs.)

In 1993, the Clinton administration launched the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, which wound up giving hundreds of agency-specific recommendations to federal agencies.

Elaine Kamarck, who served as a senior aide to then–Vice President Al Gore for the effort, said in an interview that Kushner’s plan to tap Silicon Valley for “the latest innovations” doesn’t add up. She noted, for instance, that most civil service reform has to come through the assistant secretary position — and that the Trump administration has simply failed to fill these positions so far.

“The real power of implementation in the federal government is at the assistant secretary level. And they simply don’t have any,” said Kamarck, a Brookings scholar who is also the author of Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again.

So how could Kushner revolutionize the federal bureaucracy? “I have no fucking idea,” Kamarck says. “And they don’t either.”

A transcript of my interview with Kamarck on Monday follows.

Jeff Stein

So Trump comes out and announces this big office for innovation and puts his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge. I know you were involved in the ’90s [in] helping Gore improve the federal bureaucracy. What’s your reaction to this plan?

Elaine Kamarck

Kushner faces three big challenges.

He's right that there are lessons the government can learn from the private sector, but these lessons are at the operational level. They're way down in the bureaucracy. For instance, I am sure the Army's motor pool can learn lessons from [car rental companies] Avis and Hertz. They have to get cars cleaned, get them running, and get them to the people who need them. That's what a motor pool does too.

But it may surprise people to know that ever since the National Performance Review, the government regularly benchmarks its performances against private sector entities that do similar things.

Insurance companies take in benefits and process benefits and send out money — that's what a big piece of the government does. And frankly, in that respect, the government does a pretty good job. Nobody complains about not getting their Social Security on time, do they?

The second problem is that much of what the government does, there is no private sector analogy for. Fifty percent of the discretionary budget of the government is devoted to the Defense Department. The private sector does not fight wars. The war-fighting goal has no private sector analogy. You’ve got that problem.

And finally, this government, this presidency, isn’t staffed up. They could come up with some brilliant ideas, but even if they did, they don’t have any people in place to do them. They don’t have any assistant secretaries in these agencies. They have got some kids and some ideologues from the campaign, who didn’t need Senate confirmation.

The real power of implementation in the federal government is at the assistant secretary level. And they simply don’t have any.

Jeff Stein

Your point is that you need people much closer to the ground. How did this work under Gore, and how is the Trump administration’s plan at odds with what the team you worked on pursued?

Elaine Kamarck

We created a very large, 400-people task force composed almost exclusively of civil servants. And what the civil servants did was work on reform ideas in conjunction with the agency. We reviewed them and reviewed them, and Al Gore brought them to President Clinton for approval, and then we stayed in business for all eight years of the Clinton administration implementing them.

So we were successful in getting a big procurement reform bill [which created new rules for government agencies bidding on competitive contracts] through Congress. We were not successful in getting a civil service reform bill through Congress, but we got FAA reform; we got a reenginering of the Social Security Administration’s phone system, which affects millions and millions of people.

The problem here is — well, let me read you a portion of my book Why Presidents Fail, in the chapter “The Buck Stops Here”:

The revenue of the federal government in 2014, $3.02 trillion, is slightly larger than the combined revenues of the 16 largest companies in the Fortune 500. In terms of employment, the federal government’s 4.2 million workers — that includes military — equals the total employment of the six largest US companies, Walmart through Target.

It’s the biggest organization in the history of the world, and it is also the most complex organization in the history of the world. Because it does everything from protect the nuclear arsenal to employ biologists who have to review drugs for the safety of the public to [hand] out trillions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare benefits. So not only is it large, not only is it expensive, but it has also had a vast variety of complex tasks. So there isn’t any one analogy. There’s not going to be any one analogy to it.

If Jared Kushner gets someone, say, from Boeing to work on this, the guy from Boeing is going to know a lot about the defense industry in buying and making imports. What the hell can they tell you about processing Social Security checks?

Absolutely nothing. They don’t know a damn thing about it. What can they tell you about drug approvals and getting clinical trials through the FDA? Nothing.

What you have to do to do government reform is to recognize the complexity of the task. And then you have to assess task by task and find the correct expertise, and ideas, to look at it.

So, I’m sorry. Someone out of the airline industry will not be very good at labor reform. Simple as that.

Jeff Stein

There was a line in the Washington Post story about how Kushner will work to solve a wide range of problems, from the opioid crisis to caring for veterans. What does that look like?

Elaine Kamarck

I have no idea. I have no fucking idea, and they don’t either. The level at which you would fix the opioid epidemic is the state and the local level, because that’s where the actual operations go on of drug rehabilitation centers, etc.

The federal government is a big ATM when it comes to social problems — it gives money to the states and localities, but it’s the states and localities that actually spend the money and perform the tasks. So you’re looking at a vast array of drug treatment centers around the country, and [they] do exist. Are they doing a good job with the opioid crisis? Probably not.

But it isn’t something that necessarily gets fixed from above, with the sole exception of spending more money on it, which is not something they want to do.

Jeff Stein

That seems like the heart of it: They don’t want to spend more money to solve the problem [as reflected in Trump’s budget], but they did promise to solve the problem — ergo, let’s use an innovation office with input “from the tech world” to accomplish both goals at once.

Elaine Kamarck

There’s no “tech world business” that does a good job getting drug addicts off of drugs. Sorry. It doesn’t exist. It’s not a business.

If it were business, people would be in it. There’s no profit to be made from this. The Republicans are engaged in magical thinking here when it comes to shrinking the government.