Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

by Jennifer Pahlka

For once, thanks to an extraordinary crisis, Democrats and Republicans had (mostly) come together and acted with speed and resolve. But their best intentions were being dashed on the ugly rocks of implementation.

if the law changes and the act that made you a felon is no longer a crime, nothing is really different for you until the database is updated. The magic of law is now inextricably tied to the bits and bytes of computer code.

what now widens the gap between policy intentions and actual outcomes is the messy task of implementation through digital technology, and the ways government makes working with that technology uniquely complex.

When all your time is spent answering questions and writing reports for other people inside government, it’s mighty hard to be focused on the people outside government you’re supposed to serve.

The temporal, organizational, structural, and cultural gaps between policy and tech teams, and between tech teams and the users of that tech, make it hard to try out strategies, learn what works, resolve ambiguities, and readjust. Instead of active collaboration and co-learning, implementing government policy through digital technology resembles a game of telephone, in which each party in sequence fumbles the translation a bit until, many stakeholders later, the message is mangled beyond recognition.

We can’t afford this downward spiral of poor service leading to alienation and decreased political participation, which in turn lead to poorer service. The implementation crisis threatens our democracy.

Lawmakers often have good intentions, but they continually add policy layers with too little understanding of (and, sometimes, regard for) how what they add will interact with the layers that are already cluttering the delivery environment.

“waterfall amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.”

For people stuck in waterfall frameworks, data is not a tool in their hands. It’s something other people use as a stick to beat them with.

What we need has to do less with updating rigid 1950s code than with updating rigid 1950s thinking. We need a fundamentally different way of delivering on the promise of policy. We need to retire the waterfall.

Requirements are the foundation of software development processes in government, and the source of many of its failures.

Government’s obsession with requirements—voluminous, detailed requirements that can take so long to compile the software is obsolete before it’s even bid out—stems from a delusion that it’s possible to make a work plan so specific that it requires no further decision-making. You hand it off and the developers just do exactly what they’re told. Why not let those developers choose the best tool or platform for the job?

the perverse effects of glorifying process are far greater in technology, for the simple reason that there are so few people in government who understand tech.

Government knows how to acquire technology. What we need to acquire are capabilities.

The way the administration managed the program, he said, looked “almost as if they thought that actual governing, the nuts and bolts of governing, is for peons. And they are policy people.”

But as Jake saw, the way you get 212 questions on a form for food assistance is not concentrated power, it’s diffuse power. And diffuse power is not just an artifact of the complexities federalism can bring, with decisions delegated down to local government and then aggregated back up through mechanisms like the county consortia. The fear of having exercised too much power, and being criticized for it, is ever present for many public servants. The result is a compulsion to consult every imaginable stakeholder, except the ones who matter most: the people who will use the service.

Liberals’ penchant for suing to enforce regulations contributes to the cramped professional thinking that loses sight of the big picture.

To administer programs or regulate industry, we must have some paperwork (or the digital equivalent). To administer them more equitably, we often need more data, which means more paperwork. But paperwork favors the powerful.

PAPERWORK FAVORS THE POWERFUL👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

“When you get in the weeds with Jazmyn’s team and see how this actually works, you learn that you need to think about the technical implementation of a law when you write it.” Otherwise, you’ve written a law that looks good on the books but doesn’t accomplish much at all.

the degree of government’s reliance on the digital realm has grown steadily for decades, without a corresponding growth in digital literacy in the government workforce or leadership.

Public servants of all stripes used to be exposed to service delivery in their daily routines and intimately connected to its development. Now the digital world tends to separate them from it. No wonder policy decisions so often seem to be made without sufficient thought to how they will be delivered. Policy and delivery breathe increasingly different air.

The need to fix that, not some vague desire to use an algorithm, drove the development of the tech. Employing tech for its own sake is often as unhelpful, and sometimes as harmful, as staying stuck in a fully manual mode.

Can government teams aim to serve the people in a way that builds trust and faith in the institution, or will they forever labor diligently and thoroughly to meet thousands of arcane requirements without fulfilling their actual purpose?

Our digital age is different from previous eras not because information is sent electronically instead of physically but because technology has changed people’s needs, expectations, and behaviors. And native digital practices—user-centered, iterative, agile practices—allow for fast learning to keep up with those changing needs. The capacity government needs today is multifaceted, but one thing that’s clear is that digital can no longer be an afterthought. To borrow from our British counterparts again: “You can no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they understand economics or ideology or propaganda.”22

they need to be directed at the problem underlying our delivery failures: the lack of skilled technologists within government who are empowered to make the necessary decisions.

To most people, digital services are policy.

Is it any surprise that the most powerful institutions within the most powerful country on earth have resisted the uncomfortable work of developing new and foreign competencies?

“Most days,” Lucas says, “I’m convinced I’ll have to tell them that lot of people worked really hard to build political consensus to fight the climate crisis. We passed half a trillion dollars in funding. And then we kept using fossil fuels because we couldn’t figure out the permitting.”