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

by Jennifer Pahlka

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