“The public servants responsible for the interminably drawn-out modernization efforts are neither lazy, stupid, nor malicious,” Pahlka writes. “I’ve met hundreds of them, and they are overwhelmingly dedicated, conscientious, and often quite creative. IRS employees managed to send monthly child tax-credit payments to nearly forty million families and to mail out over $800 billion in stimulus checks during the pandemic, all while relying on systems that were never designed to change so quickly or handle such enormous volume.” The problem is that the systems they are updating have become “complex
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