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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”14
When we speak of “legacy systems” in government, it does not mean simply that they are old. It means that we are grappling with the legacy of decades of competing interests, power struggles, creative work-arounds, and make-dos that are opportune at the time but unmanageable in the long run.
Like a hoarder, government rarely throws out the old to make room for the new.
The systems that run our government need to be built on a foundation of bedrock, not landfill.
In government, culture eats policy. Even when legislators and policymakers try to give implementers the flexibility to exercise judgment, the words they write take on an entirely different meaning, and have an entirely different effect, as they descend through the hierarchy, becoming more rigid with every step.
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obsession with requirements—voluminous, detailed requirements that can take so long to compile the software is obsolete before it’s even bid out—stems from a delusion that it’s possible to make a work plan so specific that it requires no further decision-making.
Highly diffuse decision-making frameworks can make it very hard to build good digital services for the public. But they are rooted in laws that go back to long before the digital era.
Klein’s diagnosis is not specifically about implementation. He’s describing a problem with how liberals approach policy in general—overly technocratic expertise substituting for a larger sense of purpose.
the more information you ask for, the more you reward administrative capacity, and the harder it is to help those who need it most.
“Our services disdain those they are envisioned to help.”3
There’s a lot of mending needed—low trust in government erodes our ability to fight climate change, to respond to public health threats, and to maintain our national security and our democracy. There’s never been a more important time to show the American people that their government can put their needs first.
Mike Byrne, the guy who built the broadband map for the FCC, estimates that most government tech projects could cost 10 percent of what they do and still provide 85 percent of the functionality.5 I hereby dub this “Byrne’s Law.”
When there are too few resources and not enough time to fulfill all the requirements that have been handed down, the only response our political class seems to have is to throw money at the problem—massive amounts of it.
Teams building new products usually worry about the quality of their design and engineering, the size of the marketing budget, the strength of the sales force, and so on. They forget to worry about something much more important: whether anyone wants the product at all.
you can’t make a good website for a bad program.
