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February 17 - February 22, 2024
People on the left like to talk about reducing administrative burden. They don’t want families in need to have to struggle through a 212-question form to get assistance. People on the right like to talk about reducing regulatory burden. They want companies to be able to focus on their businesses, not on confusing, time-consuming government paperwork, like submitting an entire year’s worth of documentation for a program doctors are going to be exempt from. Digital and service design skills in government address both these problems.
Ultimately, those of us who advocate for transforming government digital practices will need to take our own medicine. We advocate for incremental, user-centered, agile development; we must accept that change will also have to be incremental, to meet people where they are, to emerge from the work as we learn along the way.
16 I want to push government forward in part because, while I am grateful for the conveniences of Zoom and the engagement of Twitter, I still want to live in a democracy. Rule by tech is just another form of oligarchy.
More hangs on this difference than we realize. “I think a lot about how, fifty years from now, I’m going to explain to young people what happened, when we’re all huddled around a tire fire for warmth after the climate collapse,” Lucas Merrill Brown told me. Lucas worked with Yadira as part of the USDS team assigned to the MACRA rollout and has gone on to environmental policy roles in the Biden administration, advising on the implementation of the infrastructure bill and the IRA. “Most days,” Lucas says, “I’m convinced I’ll have to tell them that lot of people worked really hard to build
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If we lack that faith in government, perhaps we need to reframe the question. “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”18 We have chosen our battles. Now we must fight them.
