More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 16 - January 23, 2024
advance of a usability test is impossible—it’s a conversation.”4 To the law’s credit, the fine print of the Paperwork Reduction Act excludes much of what counts as user research from its purview, including “facts or opinions obtained through direct observation by an employee.”
The United States Department of Agriculture tried this when it was about to issue a rule regarding the minimum peanut content in peanut butter. Advocates wanted it to be at least 90 percent peanuts, manufacturers wanted to require only 87 percent peanuts, and adjudicating that 3 percent difference under the formal rulemaking process took the Food and Drug Administration twelve years of the 1960s and 1970s. The case went almost all the way to the Supreme Court, and the oral hearing alone took twenty weeks and produced a 7,736-page transcript.12 (The advocates ultimately prevailed.) Since then,
...more
“I understand that it’s complicated,” she told the MITRE team. “But it needs to make sense to a person.”
“Professional” isn’t often meant to be derogatory. But it’s an expert with specialized knowledge who will insist on nine different definitions of a group. Sometimes it’s lawyers who do this, but other experts in niche subjects are just as likely to. Their identity—and the measure of their value—can become deeply tied to the specialized knowledge they possess. And that knowledge, which ought to serve the goals of the program, instead begins to serve its own, often conflicting goals. It becomes master of the people who wield it.
But more importantly, courts tend to hold agencies accountable not for their outcomes but rather for their fidelity to procedures, compounding the accountability trap the bureaucracy is already stuck in.
But however just the cause, every lawsuit over process and procedure has an undeniable impact not only on the culture of the agency it targets but on the zeitgeist of government. Each one is a cautionary tale for another agency or another jurisdiction. Each one makes government less tolerant of risk.
Her first answer (there were other reasons too) was that the agency had “vomited the policy into the forms.”
HUD wanted to create … a new program that small cities could apply for that would provide help with applying to other programs. Our suggestion that HUD instead simplify the grant applications for all cities was not well received. Paperwork is often a necessary evil, but when not managed thoughtfully to reduce administrative burdens, it can become the very problem it’s trying to solve.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
As Jake puts it, “Our services disdain those they are envisioned to help.”
Dave Guarino, one of the three creators of GetCalFresh, says that technocrats’ desire for a comprehensive screener is a misunderstanding of client needs. The way he recommends screening clients instead is very simple: “Made less than $X last month? You may be eligible.”5 As he explains, “Oftentimes people have an acute need that triggers them to go get that specific need met—like food. People just want to know if it’s worth their time to apply.” Given that the burden of applying for even one safety-net program, like SNAP, is often quite high, it defeats the purpose to have clients start with a
...more
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.”
Mike’s modern-day estimate resonates with a 1975 observation known as Gall’s Law, named for pediatrician and systems design theorist John Gall. “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked,” Gall wrote. “A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
Product management as an official discipline is rare in government, but it’s not just that there’s no job classification for it. In the most extreme cases, it feels like it simply cannot exist here: not only are implementers not empowered to make choices but the people above them aren’t even willing to consider the option.
Monitoring software can’t fix a culture where the leader hangs up on you when you deliver bad news. But ignoring leadership’s outbursts and staying focused on priorities can help, and that’s what both the surge team and the career civil servants wound up doing.
This is a best practice in the broader tech industry: teams have a better chance of shipping big, complex software projects if they first ship small, simple ones.
When Natalie averted the Facebook for Doctors disaster, she had to pit her interpretation of the law against that of agency lawyers and policymakers. But she wasn’t arguing that they should ignore Congress’s explicit directions. Yadira isn’t arguing anything either; she’s just getting the job done. “We’re not following the letter of the law,” she admits. “But we’re producing the results that we know Congress intended.” That’s a level of product management—of taking charge and deciding what to do—that even the USDS, with its power as a White House unit, would find daunting. “I’m not worried,”
...more
You need to find tools (like sticky notes!) that let everyone speak a common language.
As the USDS team is fond of saying, “Decisions are made by those who show up.”
Tech “solutions” to policy difficulties is exactly what Oracle and its ilk preach—that’s how they make their money, though they rarely solve the problem. But as Cecilia noted it’s not the tech, it’s the tech people. “We need to bring technologists into all levels of government, so digital practices and concerns are built into policy decisions from the beginning. We need technologists to apply user-centered design to policy and put citizens and their needs at the center of the policy-making process.”
The most important outcome, however, wasn’t the performance of the site. It’s that tests started showing up in people’s mailboxes within days.
We desperately need to simplify and rationalize the policy that has accrued over many years and bogs down our systems, to clean up the sludge that decisions made decades or even centuries ago have left behind.
Third, we must put user-focused public servants in many roles where they can have an impact upstream, and we must connect them across disciplines.
In his 1966 book The Nerves of Government, Karl W. Deutsch said, “Power is the ability to afford not to learn.” When power flows one way—down the waterfall—from policymakers to implementers, from federal to local government, from those with high-priced lawyers and tax accountants to those without, even those the system appears to benefit lose out.
Kalil, Tom. “Policy Entrepreneurship at the White House: Getting Things Done in Large Organizations.” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 11, no. 3/4 (2017): 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1162/inov_a_00253.
Nitze, Marina, and Nick Sinai. Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team. New York: Hachette Go, 2022.
Sunstein, Cass R. Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do About It. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.
