Recoding America Quotes

“Both sides need to understand that investing in digital competencies will save far more money than it costs. The USDS tallied up $3.5 billion in savings and cost avoidance (that is, helping agencies find better, less expensive ways to address their needs) in 2019 alone. Given the unit's relatively small budget, that came out to a seventeenfold return on investment (USDS Impact Report 2020, pg. 17).”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“Decisions are made by those who show up.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”14 The same is true of government.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“The best solution of all would be to hold public servants accountable to outcomes over process.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“turns out that if the tech people you bring in spend time understanding the problem instead of trying to apply predetermined solutions, government actually buys less tech, not more, and at a lower cost, while delivering better outcomes.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“Employing tech for its own sake is often as unhelpful, and sometimes as harmful, as staying stuck in a fully manual mode.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“If you collect hundreds of formal requirements and just start building software for all of them, you’ve generated a whole lot of work for skilled and dedicated project managers, but you haven’t made any real choices.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“Rigid, overly specific interpretations of law and policy are hard to avoid when those doing the interpretation can’t evaluate the work for themselves.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“Requirements are the foundation of software development processes in government, and the source of many of its failures.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“You should not be satisfied with your elected representatives’ legislative record. You must ask us to ensure the legislation we enact actually works.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“«Se nos vendió internet como un bien público. De hecho, así empezó: surgió de un proyecto financiado por el Departamento de Defensa. Sus primeros creadores y usuarios veían su arquitectura fundamental —sin gestión ni control centralizados— como algo que, por naturaleza, habilitaba valores como el acceso abierto a la información, la libertad de expresión y un marco de colaboración horizontal entre iguales. El bien que haría en el mundo parecía inevitable. Y, en efecto, ha hecho un bien enorme, pero los motivos estructurales por los que muchos creyeron que siempre sería así no se sostuvieron. Una internet dominada por empresas cuya principal obligación es generar valor para sus accionistas también ha causado un daño enorme.»”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“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.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“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 built on a foundation of bedrock, not landfill.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“The pledge of 'a government of laws, not men' promises to protect us from the biases of flawed human beings and to ensure equal treatment for everyone. But when pervasive legalistic thinking turns our government services into policy vomit, the burden that it creates undermines both those values. The point of the law is fairness but when law gets applied without a thoughtful delivery framework it is rarely fair”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“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.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“Finally, it’s not clear that government and the tech industry are competing for exactly the same people. The biggest bidding wars among the tech giants and startups is for technologists who work with advanced technologies like AI and machine learning. Outside of national security and defense (where such skills are very much in demand), government is rarely competing for this talent pool. The skills most needed in government are good product management and service design. The work is hard not because the tech is complicated but because the environment is. Arrogance can be an asset in startups; in government, humility is not only necessary but soon acquired if one doesn’t start out with it. While emotional intelligence matters in all jobs more than the Silicon Valley caricature allows for, it is critical in public-sector work, which is more about change and human responses to change than about technology. The same goes for ethics: a sense of responsibility to the common good and a willingness to think deeply about what harm might come from your actions are assets in any field, but if you’re not already considering these factors, working in government will bring them front and center. When entrepreneurs say that government will never do tech well because lower pay means it won’t get the best people, it’s worth asking what they mean by “best.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“but nowhere in government documents will you find a requirement that the service actually works for the people who are supposed to use it.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“It’s a classic government problem, what my friends describe as “yesterday’s technology tomorrow.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“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.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“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. If you collect hundreds of formal requirements and just start building software for all of them, you’ve generated a whole lot of work for skilled and dedicated project managers, but you haven’t made any real choices.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“After spending the day in a school vaccination clinic, a colleague of mine quipped: “Every time you add a question to a form, I want you to imagine the user filling it out with one hand while using the other to break up a brawl between toddlers.”6 Applications for government benefits might be completed under similarly chaotic circumstances. 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. If they’re asked for documentation, the documents need to be ones they have access to. If they need to correspond with the program, there has to be a way for them to do so even if they lack a stable mailing address. If they have family who are undocumented immigrants, they may need reassurance that applying for a program won’t get them or their relatives in trouble.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“We should acknowledge that government carries a higher burden than the private sector, without letting that burden add to the risk aversion that makes delivery even harder.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“For the country to choose the path of digital competence, of user needs over government needs, hundreds of thousands of people in appointed and career positions across a wide variety of functions—including purchasing, finance, human resources, program management, oversight, and of course IT—would all need to decide to reject the status quo at approximately the same time. Wholesale change rarely happens so quickly.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“We can’t have it all, but we can have so much more than we have now,”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“The question of our government’s capacity is an afterthought in our public dialogue,”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“It’s easy to complain about government but more satisfying to help fix it.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“the question of whether government should have digital capacity is moot, because no one with the skills to build digital products should waste their time working in government.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“need for government to modernize processes as a precondition to modernizing tech.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“degree of government’s reliance on the digital realm has grown steadily for decades, without a corresponding growth in digital literacy”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

“Hierarchical, one-directional, top-down communication is built into the structure of the entire country.”
― Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better