Today, when digital professionals come into government ready to build services for the American people, they are shocked at how hard it is to build anything at all. It’s not only because the government policies they are attempting to digitize are enormously, needlessly complex. It’s not only because they have to spend so much of their time on procurement, since the actual code writing and interface design must all be outsourced. It’s not only because seemingly arbitrary aspects of their work have been wildly overspecified by distant rule makers with little understanding of the problems at
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