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

by Jennifer Pahlka

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.

You can have systems that do every possible thing policymakers can think of to ensure “program integrity” (in other words, making sure no one is getting a dollar more than they should) or you can have systems that scale. You can’t have both. And most of what policymakers do to ensure program integrity ends up costing far more in administration than the program saves on paying out benefits. Those costs include the failure of the system when the benefits are most needed.

General Stanley McChrystal put it this way: “I tell people, ‘Don’t follow my orders. Follow the orders I would have given you if I were there and knew what you know.’”6 But Paula didn’t give that direction to the people who reported to her, probably because she had never been given that direction herself. Following the orders as handed down had worked for her for decades.

In 1983, however, the crew of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, flying from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska, made an error in their navigational calculations and accidentally strayed into the prohibited airspace of the USSR. Mistaking the airliner for a spy plane, the Soviets shot it down, killing all 269 people aboard, including Larry McDonald, a US congressman from Georgia. Recognizing that GPS could have prevented this tragedy, President Ronald Reagan directed the Department of Defense to make GPS freely available for civilian use. As a common good, it became even more powerful than Reagan could have imagined.

We’ve been training our public servants to master procurement rules so complex and processes so drawn out that the technology they buy is outdated or irrelevant by the time it gets delivered.

But sometimes what government leaders mean is that the core of their work is policy. In the case of, say, unemployment insurance, they’re busy establishing the myriad rules governing the benefit: who gets it, how much, under what circumstances, with what limitations. The systems needed to actually pay out the benefit are merely a detail of implementation. The obvious problem is that although the website and the plumbing behind it are “just how you get your check”—or your health insurance, or your construction permit, or the custody of your child—they are too often why you don’t get your check (or insurance, or permit, or child). You don’t get it when the website is broken and won’t let you start your application at all, or when you start the application process and run into a wall of incomprehensible questions, or when you get through the process but your application winds up stuck in an enormous backlog. To the laid-off worker waiting months for unemployment benefits, the argument that those are merely

But when I went into government, it was the engineers and other digital team members who were more often on the receiving end of comments that were “technically correct but entirely unhelpful.” And it wasn’t other coders they were getting them from. It was bureaucrats invoking the law.

the more information you ask for, the more you reward administrative capacity, and the harder it is to help those who need it most.

Project management is the art of getting things done. Product management is deciding what to do in the first place—and also, as in the case of the benefit screeners, deciding what not to do. If you collect hundreds of formal requirements and just start building software for all of them, you’ve generated a whole lot of work for skilled and dedicated project managers, but you haven’t made any real choices. That’s how you end up with a 212-question SNAP application, or a website that works only on computers in your building, or a system so complex it takes seventeen years to learn.

“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.”

Although government workers often feel that they can’t do what’s right lest they be fired or sued, leaders like Yadira assume the right to reinterpret law and policy when the outcome is at stake—to do what is needed rather than what was ordered. She is the kind of fighter General McChrystal would praise for following the orders he would have given if he’d known what she knows.

If the goal is to deliver on the promises of our policies, dialogue once again beats directives.

We’ve increased oversight to the point where one tech leader at the Department of Homeland Security counted eighty-seven documents, eleven “stage gate” reviews, and twenty-one different oversight roles on a single project.4

As for developing the next generation of digital talent, while 16 percent of IT professionals in the US are under thirty, across cabinet agencies in the federal government only 4 percent of them are.

10 And we hamstring the technologists we do have by holding them accountable to two wildly different expectations: they are somehow supposed to follow processes that don’t work yet deliver software that does. It is time we recognized that this is not at its heart a problem of more money, rules, or oversight, though changes in each area could be helpful. You cannot legislate competence. It is an issue of people—getting more of the ones we need and allowing them to do what we need done.

The left and right may disagree about how much of a safety net the government should provide or what kinds of constraints it should put on private companies, but both are equally frustrated that interactions with it are so much harder than they need to be. And each will gain from the other’s successes. Streamlined benefits processes can lead to lower administrative costs, which the right likes. Streamlined regulatory processes can mean higher rates of corporate compliance, which the left likes. Improving delivery won’t resolve all our political tensions, but it gives us something to work on together. And working together helps us find more common ground.

want to push government forward in part because, while I am grateful for the conveniences of Zoom and the engagement of Twitter, I still want to live in a democracy. Rule by tech is just another form of oligarchy.