The Unbearable Heaviness of Government
A conversation with Jennifer Pahlka about her new book, Recoding America
Thank you so much to those of you who have subscribed! This newsletter is only possible because of your support, and I’m grateful for you! If you’ve enjoyed reading this content and haven’t upgraded, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. And if that isn’t possible for you right now, please do hit the like button anyway! ❤️
Cities and technology are interdependent. Think of Rome and its aqueducts, London with its subway system. But for the past 30 years as technology has become less associated with infrastructure and more with digital communication, local governments have slowed and stumbled. Despite widespread adherence to the idea of “smart cities,” few American cities have figured out how to harness all the data they collect to, say, solve congestion or do a better job of picking up the trash.
This is not just a local government problem. The “agile” methodology of digital product development — which requires developers and users to collaborate for continuous improvement and easy user experience — is the opposite of most contemporary government leadership and service delivery. This tension between the nimble, user-centric approach of digital tech, and the process and regulation orientation of government, provides the central conflict of Jennifer Pahlka’s new book, Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
Pahlka founded and led Code for America, a nonprofit organization launched in 2009 with the mission of working with “community organizations and government to build digital tools and services, change policies, and improve programs.” Some examples of their work include a civic engagement app, Textizen, and the Get Your Refund app, which helps people get their Earned Income Tax Credit. Code for America took complicated aspects of government — getting a broader swath constituents to engage in citymaking, or encouraging low-income residents to make the most of their tax returns — and mitigated them with smart, simple digital tech.
Why then is government service delivery so hard and why isn’t it easier for governments to deploy innovative apps like these with more frequency and consistency? The answer you might expect is that government just needs more technology and digital natives, like the fellows from Code for America. But as Pahlka explained when we spoke last month about her book, “I didn’t want to write what everyone expected me to write. I got a reputation for being ‘government just needs better technology’ and I fundamentally believe something very different from that.”
During a decade at Code for America, Pahlka took leaves of absence to serve as the U.S. deputy chief technology officer during the Obama administration from 2013-2014, and as a member of the Defense Innovation Board. Then in 2020, after she left her role at Code for America, she was asked to co-chair a “strike team” to investigate and in turn help California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) as it dealt with a backlog of 1.2 million claims for unemployment benefits in the wake of COVID-19.
As Pahlka recounts in her book, throughout these experiences she was struck by how few problems with government service delivery could be solved by “modernization,” consultants, or bigger budgets — the panaceas that politicians and advocates often espouse. During its backlog crisis, California’s EDD received funding to hire 5,300 new workers to deal with the backlog — but those new workers ended up slowing the system down because they required training. The real problem was that only the most highly trained specialists could deal with an inordinately complicated claims verification process. In turn, government ends up rewarding the most senior employees (at one point in the book, Pahlka recounts meeting an employee who after 17 years at the EDD calls himself the “new guy”) and can’t highly function in a world where the average job tenure for young people is under 3 years.
Throughout the book, Pahlka tells several stories of how good policies and intentions are thwarted by clunky, overly wrought systems. For example, to apply for SNAP benefits, applicants must get through a form with 212 questions on it. When California changed its drug laws through Prop 64, people could expunge marijuana-related offenses from their criminal records, but because of a “marathon of logistics” only 23 (!) of the thousands of eligible people initially took advantage of this new law. For the average citizen, these interactions with government are needlessly complicated, and they would probably still be unchallenged were it not for Code for America creating simple, user-friendly apps and programs to solve them. The book explores other examples of how savvy implementers were able to hack government’s bureaucracy, and the many reasons why these interventions are the exception rather than the rule.
But Code for America is a relatively small intervention for the U.S. government, which employs more than 18 million people. I wondered if government should mandate a certain level of digital literacy to work in government — after all, if you are going to run an agency, shouldn’t you know a thing or two about user experience? But Pahlka wisely suggested that would just add to the “compliance mindset” that pervades government. Instead, government should evaluate leaders based on their interest in and ability to lead implementation. Too often we select leaders based on their big ideas — but who actually has shown their ability to implement, not just legislate, smart policies?
Indeed, it’s the culture of government that Pahlka diagnoses as the problem. “Risk aversion, culture eating policy, good people trying to get stuff done but really stymied by a system that’s not working well,” Pahlka says. When I asked how to escape that fog of bureaucracy, Pahlka told the story of a government employee who said her MO was to try to get fired every day. Pushing hard enough against the status quo will probably require risking your job.
The inability for government to successfully implement its policies due to technology and HR challenges is no small matter — it can have life and death consequences, as we saw with the infamously bad launch of Healthcare.gov in 2013 and more recently in the case of the Ukraine-Russia war. When I asked Pahlka for an example of a government that is best in class for its digital savvy, she pointed out that Ukraine’s success in its war effort is in part due to its comprehensive digital access to benefits and identification through people’s phones. Ukraine has made it possible for its citizens to use its app, Diia, to do everything from apply for small business aid to report the presence of Russian soldiers.
In her book’s conclusion, Pahlka writes that the public can do our part to improve government by keeping expectations high and accountability strong. “It’s a dwindling spiral of what people believe… People believe that if government is not good at it, we shouldn’t try,” Pahlka said. Recoding America will make you believe that we must keep trying — our cities and so much more depend on it.
Learn more about and read an excerpt from Pahlka’s book here.