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

by Jennifer Pahlka

To public servants everywhere. Don’t give up.

Prop 64 made hundreds of thousands of people statewide eligible to have their felony convictions expunged. But given the marathon of logistics, hardly anyone even tried to start the process. A year after the passage of the law, the San Francisco district attorney’s office had a whopping twenty-three petitions to seal marijuana-related records. Not even twenty-three expungements: twenty-three people who’d gotten as far as filing the initial paperwork. Voters had spoken. The law had changed. Marijuana was no longer a crime. The city was abuzz with a new chance for entrepreneurship. But the previously incarcerated were still felons. For them, things were the same as ever.

But the Schoolhouse Rock! video ended when a bill was passed. What was supposed to happen next was not clear to my preschool brain, but I now understand that somewhere, someone (actually, lots of someones) must figure out how to implement and enforce it.

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.

There is not even really a machine at all. These dysfunctions derive from core issues that are human rather than technological, complex rather than just complicated.

Chief among them is a structure and way of thinking deeply rooted in American culture: hierarchy.

America is a pretty un-hierarchical place...

The temporal, organizational, structural, and cultural gaps between policy and tech teams, and between tech teams and the users of that tech, make it hard to try out strategies, learn what works, resolve ambiguities, and readjust. Instead of active collaboration and co-learning, implementing government policy through digital technology resembles a game of telephone, in which each party in sequence fumbles the translation a bit until, many stakeholders later, the message is mangled beyond recognition.

It’s no coincidence that the trust Americans have in their government is now fraying and breaking.

Yes it is. Perhaps a more effective government would be more trusted but theres no reason to believe an even less effective government would be less trusted. The trust factor is not unique too the usa

Joe Soss, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, found in the 1990s that participating in means-tested programs—benefits that you must prove that you are poor enough to qualify for—significantly reduces the chance you will vote.13 Applying for those programs can be a lot like applying for record expungement: hard to start, confusing, often insulting, and impossible to succeed at for many people. “Because clients interpret their experiences with welfare bureaucracies as evidence of how government works more generally, beliefs about the welfare agency and client involvement become the basis for broader political orientations,” Soss explains.

Even the process of getting a construction permit, registering a vehicle, or just filing taxes can erode faith in our system of government.

We can’t afford this downward spiral of poor service leading to alienation and decreased political participation, which in turn lead to poorer service. The implementation crisis threatens our democracy.

As Clay Shirky, who writes about technology and society, puts it, “A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”14 The same is true of government. Although government must adapt to an increasingly digital world, the heart of the adaptation isn’t mobile apps, cloud computing, or even artificial intelligence. It is a willingness to put the needs of government’s many users ahead of the needs of the bureaucracy, and to learn while doing.

but only a tiny fraction of the calls were even being answered (I would later learn it was about one in a thousand)

Yikes

Moments like that served to remind me that when people talk about government technology and ask “how hard could it be?” the answer is almost always: really, really hard.

And going through the work items was far from intuitive. While we were trying to determine the right way to count backlogged claims, for example, we came across a work item called “Stop Payment Alert—Claim Review.” There were 730,023 open items of that type. It seemed alarming, but EDD staffers explained that this work item is merely an automatic system-generated notice and could be ignored—in fact, most of those claims were probably fine to pay. But there was a different alert called “Stop Payment Alert” (without the “Claim Review”) that did mean what it sounded like and required attention. But nobody had cleaned up the automated system notices, so these work items cluttered the queues and threw off the reporting when staff didn’t exclude them. We saw dozens of idiosyncrasies like this one.

Yup. Seems right

just weeks away from awarding a modernization contract that it had been working on for ten years. With the EDD in the spotlight, the legislature paid particular attention to this pending contract and noted, with horror, that the modernization effort was projected to take another eleven years.

Hahhahaahahahahahahaa oy vey

When we speak of “legacy systems” in government, it does not mean simply that they are old. It means that we are grappling with the legacy of decades of competing interests, power struggles, creative work-arounds, and make-dos that are opportune at the time but unmanageable in the long run.

There was not a soul in sight, but an aggressive turkey lurked by the entrance and lunged at her each time she approached. When you’re given a near-impossible task like clearing a backlog of 1.2 million unemployment claims, an obstacle like an angry turkey feels like a fitting warm-up act. Marina retreated and advanced a few times until she was finally able to dash through the doors.

It was right there in black and white: every new person the EDD hired made it slower—not faster—to get a benefit check to an unemployed Californian.

the policy and processes that govern unemployment insurance take seventeen years to learn.

They envision a system, not a bunch of tenuously connected layers that function by way of awkward work-arounds. But they also don’t understand that those archaeological tech layers are an expression of archaeological policy layers.

But the policy, especially the granularity of docking by the day, feels miserly, and the administrative burden imposed on both the claimant

There was another difficulty: regulations regarding equity. In theory, the EDD could have updated the wording of the certification questions on its website to bring them more in line with the new federal guidance. But updating the paper version of the certification form was another matter. The EDD could issue a new form, but the old one was around at all sorts of advocacy and support agencies, some of whom would likely miss the changeover. It was also all over the web as a PDF. And there are a variety of policies at both the state and federal levels that dictate that the applicant experience should be the same across different groups and channels. If online claimants got a different question from paper claimants, it could violate these equity policies.

Backfire

But equity policies are often interpreted to mean that the questions asked across the different channels must be exactly the same, which is why you see government websites that clearly could leverage such branching logic but don’t do so.

Why pile new policies onto a department that’s shown little ability to implement the current ones?

Lawmakers often have good intentions, but they continually add policy layers with too little understanding of (and, sometimes, regard for) how what they add will interact with the layers that are already cluttering the delivery environment. That’s why a department like the EDD ends up with an eight-hundred-page training manual and a seventeen-year journey to becoming a competent but still inexpert claims processor.

Programs like unemployment insurance need to be able to scale up, and they need to be able to scale down.

Modernizing technology without rationalizing and simplifying the policy and processes it must support seldom works. Mostly, it results in much the same mess you had before, only now in the cloud.

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.

If we want services that scale to meet people’s needs, it’s not just a matter of building new technology. It’s a matter of clearing out the clutter it rests upon. The systems that run our government need to be built on a foundation of bedrock, not landfill.

My job was to work with the director of the EDD, whom I’ll call Paula,

Is the director of the EDD not google able

It was not long before her name began to appear in front-page articles almost daily, and she was accused of everything from incompetence to intentional deception.

Why are you giving her an alias then???

When systems or organizations don’t work the way you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.

Waterfall development is still very much alive and well, particularly in government. But most of the software that has changed the world around us in the past two decades was not made this way. Government’s attachment to waterfall development seriously hinders its ability to build software that works well for the task at hand, whether it’s distributing unemployment insurance or providing food benefits or processing tax returns.

Our task force was assembled to deal with problems with the EDD’s technology, which itself had been produced through waterfall development. But there was another, larger waterfall that wasn’t really about technology—technology was caught in it. Blaming software that fails gets us little in the way of fixing the problems that government faces. More helpful is to understand the structures and culture that created the software, because they determine not just how the software works but how the whole system operates.

And nothing will make you long to go back to a pre-computer world more than trying to look through a bunch of pieces of paper, only instead of thumbing through them, you click to the next page and wait. And wait. And wait.

(In real life, concrete boats do exist, and can float; hundreds of barges were built out of concrete during World War II due to steel shortages.4 But it’s hardly the best material for the job. And Kevin clearly wanted his teams to build whatever they were told even if it meant the project would sink like a rock.)

Lol

For people stuck in waterfall frameworks, data is not a tool in their hands. It’s something other people use as a stick to beat them with.

If you got a digit wrong when you typed in your Social Security number, your claim was flagged. (This error was common because almost half the claimants applied using a mobile phone, but the UIOnline site worked very poorly on phone browsers, and you couldn’t really see what you were typing.)

Today, if there’s any relationship between inaccuracy of the applicant data and fraud, it’s an inverse correlation. Our world is awash in databases of stolen identities from breaches at credit monitoring services, retailers, and employers, and these stolen identities are freely traded on the dark web. Fraudulent applications using these sources will not get flagged: the data entered on the application will exactly match the sources the EDD checks against, because it is usually a copy of precisely that data. The data is also not likely to be accidentally entered wrong, because criminals with access to large databases of stolen identities will submit applications in bulk, automatically, using computer scripts.

If we want systems like unemployment insurance to work when we rely on them the most, we need more than better technology. And we need more than momentary permission to push insights back up the chain of a hierarchy. What we need has to do less with updating rigid 1950s code than with updating rigid 1950s thinking. We need a fundamentally different way of delivering on the promise of policy. We need to retire the waterfall.

GPS provided dramatically greater coverage and accuracy than radio or radar navigation, but it was supposed to be available only to the military. 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.

They succeeded by changing the frame of the debate. The outcome mattered more than the process.

(Congressional committees held ten separate hearings on healthcare.gov in a single month in 2013, all as the people being called to testify were otherwise working night and day to get the site back up.)

But Mike’s biggest problem wasn’t the deadline or the procurement rules themselves—it was the prevailing operating model that says that government staff manage but they don’t implement. Especially not when it comes to digital. They rely on contractors for that.

When I arrived in DC in 2013, I heard a lot of talk about “building a government fit for the twenty-first century,” as if we were not well into that century already.

Government knows how to acquire technology. What we need to acquire are capabilities.

The lead company on the project was a firm called CGI Federal.9 It was known at the time mostly for enterprise resource planning software—a category of back-office software you don’t need to understand, other than to recognize that asking CGI to make a website that practically a third of the entire country would use made about as much sense as asking the military to build Instagram.

Small teams work, if they have the right mindset and the right skills. And the reality was that many of the thousands of people from the thirty-four outside vendors did not have the skills. One of Todd’s recruits told me about finding a flaw in the code and asking one of the contractors to log in and make a change. The contractor was a member of the technical team, but this recruit had an uneasy feeling about him, so he wrote out exactly the change the contractor was to make in the code. The next day, the error had not gone away, so Todd’s group asked to look at the codebase. There was the change, just as directed—but it was preceded by two forward slashes. Two slashes before a line designated a comment, essentially a note programmers leave for the next programmer who’ll come along. The slashes told the computer not to read that line as code but to ignore it. Why did the contractor do that? “I saw other lines had these slashes so I thought I should put them in too,” he explained. This supposedly technical staff member had never written a line of code.

lawmakers who voted to cut the federal workforce in the 1990s, just as digital technology was starting to truly reshape our lives, wanted smaller government. But starving government of know-how, digital or otherwise, hasn’t made it shrink. It has ballooned it.