Recoding America By Jennifer Pahlka
Criminally, my friend lost his identity. For half a decade, his name and social security number were linked to an individual convicted of an impressive assortment of misdemeanors and felonies in a city more than 2,500 miles from his home, in a state he had never visited. His attempts to correct the error went as you might imagine. Government phone trees with dead branches. Municipal employees with neither competency nor care. Instructions that, when followed, were said to be incorrect. New instructions that netted the same. More than one voicemail blaming 2020 COVID restrictions for lack of staff—in 2023.
“We get the government we invent,” says Harvard Business School professor Mitchell Weiss. Do we, though? The labyrinthine systems lawyers are required to navigate wouldn’t be the preference of any citizen. (Except perhaps the lawyers.) Opaque processes, indecipherable paperwork, impenetrable layers of desks and plexiglass, inscrutable codes and terms, and threatening notices. It’s hardly what any of us would design, much less what we deserve.
Undoubtedly, though, we get the government someone invented. Jennifer Pahlka has spent a career trying to make sure that someone, wherever they are, works inside a paradigm that builds for “user needs, not government needs.” To enable this work, she founded Code for America, a technology nonprofit aiming to make government services more accessible and efficient, and then went in-house, founding the United States Digital Service in the Obama administration. Said another way: She did not choose the easiest career.
California’s supplemental nutrition assistance program. The support portal for the largest unemployment claims office in the country. New Jersey’s Department of Labor. The procurement process in the Department of Defense. Where most of us aim to spend as little time as possible, Pahlka has aimed to spend as much time as she can. “How,” she wonders, “did we get to 212 questions required to apply for food assistance?” “Why,” she ponders, “are we still using a clunky Enterprise Service Bus to manage some of the most sophisticated satellite instruments in the world?” “Why can’t we,” she asks, again and again, “make government interfaces make sense to humans?”
The answers to these queries are neatly summarized in Pahlka’s generous assessment: “When systems or organizations do not work the way you think they should, it is not because the people inside them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.” In such a system, Pahlka argues with compelling empathy, it’s not that the architects of the process or those managing last-mile delivery don’t want to be user-centered systems thinkers. It’s that the indulgences and necessities of the government milieu—the multitude of requirements that accrue across stakeholders and regulations, the competing interests, workarounds, bolt-ons, and power struggles—render it rarely possible.
But not totally impossible. Pahlka’s title may lead with failure, but her pages are populated by the often-dashed but never-daunted backstage heroes who keep working to make government delivery better than it was, if infrequently as good as it could be. The stories deliver the unexpected: In a book positioned as an analysis of process and policy thickets, it’s the humans that cut through, bloodied but unbeaten, with lessons that can inform a better way of making government processes work for the humans they’re meant to serve.
The locus of Pahlka’s attention may be the gap between policy and implementation, a space filled by exasperating and staggering inefficiencies and waste. Still, her premier solution set doesn’t include the typical levers of politics: money, regulation, oversight. The solution is people. “The problem underlying our delivery failures,” she writes, “is the lack of skilled technologists within government who are empowered to make the necessary decisions.” Pahlka proves an effective recruiter, and one can only hope her call to service is heard through the din of start-up clusters. The shortcomings of government service delivery are felt everywhere, each contributing to our frightening faithlessness to the government’s first promise: to be an instrument of good.
