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

by Jennifer Pahlka

The distance between tech leaders and real power speaks volumes about how little government culture values the work of implementation, technology included.

With this threat looming, suddenly the most important policy of the administration would live or die by its implementation.

While the UK government would still, of course, use outside vendors, the GDS insisted that there were certain functions that could not be contracted out and that having digital expertise inside government was critical to getting good results from contracting.

“You tech people think tech can solve all problems,” one leader told us when we brought it up.

But now they had people on their team who could look at the code, not the contract terms. That, it turned out, made all the difference.

“Government constructs its self-image in terms of size. It thinks of itself as huge. The harsh truth for governments all over the world is that many digital public services could be developed at a fraction of the size by very small teams.”

Just as government’s core competency has been in contracting with vendors, some vendors’ core competency has been in getting those contracts.

They may have lots of people who do account management and project management, but they don’t always have the people who can make the websites work.

They could see that having tech expertise was a matter not of taking over from an agency team but of supporting it.

Intellectuals versus mechanicals. Policy people versus operational peons. You can almost hear Koskinen reminding Congress that the digital world was “operational in nature” and didn’t fit with OMB’s policy role.

Sure, there are fewer public servants, but we spend billions of dollars on satellite software that never goes to space, we pay vendors hundreds of thousands of dollars for basic web forms that don’t work, and we make applying for government services feel like the Inquisition.

Highly diffuse decision-making frameworks can make it very hard to build good digital services for the public.

The justification is that approval “minimizes risk,” though what they mean is that it minimizes the official’s personal risk while increasing the risk to the project.

The formal process requires that agencies provide private parties potentially affected by a new rule with an oral hearing in which they can present their witnesses and cross-examine opposing ones, taking the judicial metaphor entirely literally.

Today, when digital professionals come into government ready to build services for the American people, they are shocked at how hard it is to build anything at all.

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.

But our fear of concentrated power has made that incredibly difficult.

“If all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”

“As they captured the heights of the legal profession,” he says, “it captured them. Their thinking became defensive. Their thinking became small and cramped, professional.”3

But his analysis captures the need for an approach that is more democratic (in the small-d sense of the word), more open to popular interpretation, than our current bureaucratic culture allows for.

Such an approach would recognize that fussy, technically accurate readings of law and policy can be entirely unhelpful when it comes to creating services that make sense to people.

“I understand that it’s complicated,” she told the MITRE team. “But it needs to make sense to a person.” Making sense to a person is something that often gets lost along the way.

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. Each one makes the bureaucracy more technically correct but entirely less helpful.

LITIGATION IS EXPENSIVE, which is why agencies try so hard to avoid it. But when defensive legalistic thinking pervades government agencies, that is expensive too, and not only because it increases the complexity of their work and slows down decision-making.

Conversely, even what seems like a very simple interaction can become burdensome when legal and policy thinking trump service design.

Because the agency’s overriding goal was not to design a service but to avoid being sued.

But paperwork favors the powerful.

A fifth of low-income families eligible for the earned income tax credit fail to claim it, while the wealthy have armies of lawyers and accountants looking for every opportunity to use the enormously complex tax code to their advantage.

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

In government, the roles are usually reversed. If a digital design competency even exists, it is too often in service of the lawyers, instead of the user.

A few months later, the GDS published its first piece of doctrine, a set of design principles for government digital services.

We can’t fix this until we understand that in government, we’re not starting a new relationship, we’re repairing a deeply broken one.

“Our services disdain those they are envisioned to help.”

Defenders of the waterfall process will tell you that gathering requirements, the first stage of waterfall project management, is when the team understands the needs of the users.

But software requirements are not user needs.

Actually understanding user needs often doesn’t look anything like what we think of as software development in the first place. It looks like building empathy.

Users who have a lot else going on in their lives need to be able to apply for the service without an undue burden of time, technology, and cognitive overhead.

There is one need, however, that can be assumed across all government services: the need to be treated with dignity.

There’s a lot of mending needed—low trust in government erodes our ability to fight climate change, to respond to public health threats, and to maintain our national security and our democracy.

When the GetCalFresh team made these choices, they were practicing a discipline called product management. It is frequently confused (especially in government) with project management, but the two are distinct, and the difference between them is crucial.

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.

armchair quarterbacks

If I had to pick just one thing that maybe, just maybe, would have made a difference, it would be this: the site had a lot of project managers but no product manager.

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.”

It didn’t matter. The lawyers were adamant. The regulations would require Facebook for Doctors.

In my head, a thousand food policy advocates screamed at me that these barriers are politically motivated, intentionally added to keep poor people from getting benefits.

So Congress didn’t want the site, and the lobbying companies wanted the opposite. The policy team was at the joke end of a big game of telephone.

The difference, though, is that it might never have been shuttered, even if hardly any doctors used it. Once a program is established in government, its value is rarely measured by usage or utility.

Waterfall development isn’t just an arbitrary choice of methodology in this context. Hierarchical, one-directional, top-down communication is built into the structure of the entire country. It’s everywhere you look, from the organization of federal agencies to federalism itself. But even the people issuing the orders are getting fed up with the outcomes of this dysfunctional waterfall. It doesn’t serve them either. It serves no one.