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

by Jennifer Pahlka

It’s not only because the government policies they are attempting to digitize are enormously, needlessly complex. It’s not only because they have to spend so much of their time on procurement, since the actual code writing and interface design must all be outsourced. It’s not only because seemingly arbitrary aspects of their work have been wildly overspecified by distant rule makers with little understanding of the problems at hand. And it’s not only because we put the people who build vital government technology at the bottom of the hierarchy, where they have little voice or power. It’s also because the administrative agencies many of them work for were designed—on purpose—to be unable to make the kinds of decisions that good software development requires. A lot of people still don’t want them to. But that desire makes the agencies into the very thing those people fear.