Rhett Buttle’s Take on America’s Most Underrated Policy Tool
American economic policy is facing a crisis that cannot be solved simply by an election. The biggest economic problems of the moment, workforce shortages, small business fragility, and innovation gaps between regions, are stubbornly resistant to the usual solutions. More government alone does not fix them, and more markets alone does not fix them. Something in the middle has to do the work.
Rhett Buttle has built a career on naming that something. As the founder and CEO of Public Private Strategies, Buttle is one of the clearest public voices making the case for what he calls the most underrated policy tool in American life: genuine collaboration between the public and private sectors.
Consider the terrain. Workforce development in the United States is a patchwork of federal grants, state agencies, community colleges, workforce boards, and employer programs that, in too many cases, do not talk to one another. Small business support is spread across the Small Business Administration, the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and a plethora of state programs, most of which require a sophistication that first-time entrepreneurs do not have. Policy ping-ponging among research and development funding, regulatory tweaks, and procurement reform rarely aligns in ways that change outcomes on the ground despite the intentions.
In each of these cases, the real work happens at the intersection of government capacity and private sector execution. A workforce program is only as good as the employers willing to hire from it. A small business program is only as good as the lenders willing to deploy the capital. An innovation program is only as good as the companies willing to adopt what gets funded.
The Public Private Strategies Thesis
Public Private Strategies is the institutional expression of that argument. The organization’s thesis is that the gap between public intent and private capacity is where the greatest leverage lies, and that most organizations are structurally ill-equipped to cross it. Government agencies tend to be built for compliance. Corporations are often built for quarterly performance. Neither is built to design programs together and stick with them long enough to produce results.
This is where Public Private Strategies comes in. That can mean helping a federal program reach Main Street, helping a private sector partner build a supply pipeline with measurable outcomes, or helping a philanthropic effort coordinate with state agencies to avoid duplicating efforts. The common thread is translation. Two sectors that use different languages are asked to build something together, and Buttle’s organization is present in the room to ensure the translation happens.
The Proof
The Small Business Roundtable, which Buttle helped build, is often cited as the recognized example of this approach. It brought together organizations representing small business owners across industries, regions, ethnicities, and political preferences. It did so not as a press stunt but as a durable coalition capable of speaking with a single voice and several voices when needed.
During the small business capital crises of recent years, the Roundtable became a key interlocutor for federal decision-makers seeking to design programs that would actually land. The communication was not one-directional. Small business organizations learned how federal programs were constructed. Federal agencies learned what would happen at a community level when programs rolled out. The result was faster iteration and programs that reached the businesses they were designed to help.
The Entrepreneurship Exchange, another initiative by Buttle, applies the same logic to global entrepreneurs. It creates a space where business owners, policymakers, and corporate leaders can actually hear one another on issues that impact the world. Anyone who has sat in an entrepreneurship policy conversation without actual entrepreneurs in the room knows how badly their voice is needed.
Rhett’s work with the Aspen Institute on economic mobility adds a third layer. Aspen’s convening power, combined with Buttle’s coalition experience, has produced a body of work focused on how to move Americans from lower-income brackets into the middle class and beyond
Why It Keeps Getting Underrated
Public-private partnership is unfashionable in certain quarters for predictable reasons. On the one hand, it is accused of corporate capture of public goods. On the other hand, it gets accused of regulatory overreach into private markets. Both critiques have valid arguments and others that are lazy.
The inert argument assumes that any collaboration between the sectors must compromise one of them. The valid one notes that design matters, accountability matters, and the worst public-private partnerships are the ones that obscure who is responsible for what. Buttle’s answer to the valid version is largely to agree with it. The Public Private Strategies approach is rigorous about governance, about measurement, and about transparency for exactly this reason. You do not get credit for collaborating if the collaboration fails the people it was built to serve.
What a Serious National Conversation Would Look Like
If the country decided to take Rhett Buttle’s thesis seriously, the shift would show up in three places.
First, federal and state program design would put the private sector in from the beginning, rather than bolt it on after the policy was written. That would require agencies to build new muscles in partnership management. It would also require Congress and state legislatures to fund those.
Second, the private sector strategy would stop treating government as only an obstacle and start treating it in the right circumstance like a potential partner. Some firms already do this well. Many do not.
Third, philanthropy would stop operating as a parallel system to both and start actively backing the intersections. The most interesting philanthropic bets of the last decade on small-business recovery, workforce infrastructure, and community capital have tended to align with public and private counterparts.
Buttle’s case is that these shifts are not theoretical. They are already happening at the margins, and they work when they happen. The policy failure is not that the tool does not exist. The policy failure is that the country still treats it as exotic.
“Entrepreneurship is the basis for everything we do,” Buttle has said of his own work. The same logic, applied nationally, would sound less like a mission statement and more like a strategy. In an economy that keeps presenting problems neither the government nor the private sector can solve alone, Rhett Buttle’s answer is starting to look less like a niche view and more like a clear one.
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This story was distributed as a release by Jon Stojan under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
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