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

by Jennifer Pahlka

This way of thinking has deep roots. The British civil service traditionally divided the work of government into two categories: the intellectual and the mechanical.6 Although Koskinen wouldn’t have used those terms, it would have been easy to mistake the field of digital technology in 1995 for just the latest evolution of mechanical work. It didn’t belong in OMB or anywhere else in the White House, where intellectuals were engaged in important, strategic work. It belonged wherever mechanicals bought things that carried out those strategies. So even as computers and the internet began reshaping society as we knew it, government leaders simply handed off anything digital to purchasing officers. They had more important things to think about. They did policy.

So misguided