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Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
“The book I wish every policymaker would read.”
― Ezra Klein, The New York Times
A bold call to reexamine how our government operates―and sometimes fails to ― from President Obama’s former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America
Just when we most need our government to work―to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats―it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.
But it’s not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today’s world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.
― Ezra Klein, The New York Times
A bold call to reexamine how our government operates―and sometimes fails to ― from President Obama’s former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America
Just when we most need our government to work―to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats―it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.
But it’s not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today’s world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published June 13, 2023
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June 21, 2023
As an Ezra Klein super-fan, I will pretty much read anything he strongly recommends, so I pre-ordered Recoding America as soon as he referred to it as "the book every policy-maker should read."
I'm not a policy-maker, but this book articulates certain dynamics I've seen frequently without knowing how to talk about them effectively. Specifically, Pahlka outlines the way that hyper-attention to compliance, process, and procurement (all interconnected) can lead policies to fail. While I don't work in government, I've spent nearly a decade managing public money through federal and state grants... so I've seen this. I've seen this a lot.
I understand why Ezra Klein recommended this book. When we (Americans) talk about politics, we're usually talking about policy, not so much about implementation. Pahlka is excellent at redirecting our attention on the implementation side, identifying the challenges and the opportunities. I want to give this book to half the people I work with so we can dig into these challenges and the ways they show up in our work.
But I think it is important to remember that she's a stakeholder in the solution she's pitching. I'm compelled by that pitch, so I often had to remind myself that this wasn't some journalist or researcher describing these dynamics: this was someone who served as Deputy CTO for Obama, the founder of Code for America... when she suggests that the United States Digital Service had a profoundly positive effect on the projects it touched, she is talking about the department she founded. When she praises agile project management techniques, she is promoting the approach that shehas worked long and hard to bring forward within government agencies.
I don't think she is wrong. I'm kind of already in her choir. It's just useful for me to remember she's not some disinterested judge.
One anecdote Pahlka comes back to frequently involves Kevin, a psuedonymous IT leader at the VA:
From that point forward, "concrete boat" becomes shorthand for any absurd project or specification that gets in the way of effective government services.
When I was talking about this book with my husband and I used the analogy, he stopped me. "But there ARE concrete boats."
And turns out he's right: https://www.ferrocement.org/
Pahlka references the "concrete boat" idea as if it is self-evidently foolish... but we're the fools here. Even if rare, there are times when a concrete boat is appropriate.
Anyway, I think this is emblematic of the "pitch" element of the book. Throughout, she barely acknowledges the advantages of the approaches she is critiquing, nor any of the disadvantages of the approaches she is promoting.
I've worked in waterfall project management environments and agile project management environments, and the truth is, I lean towards agile. But I've come to appreciate that both environments are flawed, and neither work all the time. Pahlka talks a LOT about the disadvantages of waterfall project management, but barely acknowledges the issues with agile.
Similarly, she often references the idea that "paperwork favors the powerful." This is undeniably true. But the idea that reducing paperwork inherently increases equity is not, and she frequently implies that the one follows from the other.
Despite this, I still will recommend the book to nearly everyone. It's a great springboard for discussion, and probably resonates in many workplaces, not just government tech. I will likely come back to the books "core concepts" (https://www.recodingamerica.us/concepts) regularly. They are oversimplified, yes. But they also serve as a useful shorthand for fighting the fetishization of compliance.
I'm not a policy-maker, but this book articulates certain dynamics I've seen frequently without knowing how to talk about them effectively. Specifically, Pahlka outlines the way that hyper-attention to compliance, process, and procurement (all interconnected) can lead policies to fail. While I don't work in government, I've spent nearly a decade managing public money through federal and state grants... so I've seen this. I've seen this a lot.
I understand why Ezra Klein recommended this book. When we (Americans) talk about politics, we're usually talking about policy, not so much about implementation. Pahlka is excellent at redirecting our attention on the implementation side, identifying the challenges and the opportunities. I want to give this book to half the people I work with so we can dig into these challenges and the ways they show up in our work.
But I think it is important to remember that she's a stakeholder in the solution she's pitching. I'm compelled by that pitch, so I often had to remind myself that this wasn't some journalist or researcher describing these dynamics: this was someone who served as Deputy CTO for Obama, the founder of Code for America... when she suggests that the United States Digital Service had a profoundly positive effect on the projects it touched, she is talking about the department she founded. When she praises agile project management techniques, she is promoting the approach that shehas worked long and hard to bring forward within government agencies.
I don't think she is wrong. I'm kind of already in her choir. It's just useful for me to remember she's not some disinterested judge.
One anecdote Pahlka comes back to frequently involves Kevin, a psuedonymous IT leader at the VA:
“I’ve spent my entire career training my team not to have an opinion on business requirements,” [Kevin] told me. “If they ask us to build a concrete boat, we’ll build a concrete boat.” Why? I asked. “Because that way, when it goes wrong, it’s not our fault.”
From that point forward, "concrete boat" becomes shorthand for any absurd project or specification that gets in the way of effective government services.
When I was talking about this book with my husband and I used the analogy, he stopped me. "But there ARE concrete boats."
And turns out he's right: https://www.ferrocement.org/
Pahlka references the "concrete boat" idea as if it is self-evidently foolish... but we're the fools here. Even if rare, there are times when a concrete boat is appropriate.
Anyway, I think this is emblematic of the "pitch" element of the book. Throughout, she barely acknowledges the advantages of the approaches she is critiquing, nor any of the disadvantages of the approaches she is promoting.
I've worked in waterfall project management environments and agile project management environments, and the truth is, I lean towards agile. But I've come to appreciate that both environments are flawed, and neither work all the time. Pahlka talks a LOT about the disadvantages of waterfall project management, but barely acknowledges the issues with agile.
Similarly, she often references the idea that "paperwork favors the powerful." This is undeniably true. But the idea that reducing paperwork inherently increases equity is not, and she frequently implies that the one follows from the other.
Despite this, I still will recommend the book to nearly everyone. It's a great springboard for discussion, and probably resonates in many workplaces, not just government tech. I will likely come back to the books "core concepts" (https://www.recodingamerica.us/concepts) regularly. They are oversimplified, yes. But they also serve as a useful shorthand for fighting the fetishization of compliance.
November 25, 2023
I almost didn't read this, unable to remember why I'd put it on hold at the library since it's not my usual reading material. Now, however, I think I'll buy a copy and hope I'll have the opportunity to put its insights into practice one day. I cannot believe I've just said that about a book that discusses agile project management and systems change...
Pahlka is the founder of nonprofit Code for America, and served as deputy chief technology officer under Obama. She explores why government has had such a hard time moving into the digital age, which unfortunately reinforces distrust in government and in collective public-minded solutions to the big problems of our age. Among other things, she pinpoints the high-minded disengagement of policy makers, who formulate policy and leave implementation up to others (even though their muddled accretions of years of policy are nigh-on impossible to implement), legacy systems and policies turn every attempt at improvement into an archeological exercise, a new and misguided passion for project management that accumulates and tracks completion of 'requirements' rather than focusing on evaluating what makes sense along the way, and enormously unwieldy out-sourced contracts for new systems (which benefit the IT consulting firms that win them, but not the public organizations that have fallen into a trap of outsourcing technological expertise).
I have to say US bureaucracy seems especially bad, but Pahlka's insights still resonated with and made sense of my own experience. Yes, I'm aware the author's services are part of the solution she proposes, but it was a great, thought-provoking read. I never thought I'd be sitting up in bed reading excerpts excitedly to my spouse from this kind of book...
Please excuse the many quotes for my own later reference:
"Because each successive leadership at an agency usually gets the budget or the mandate to deal only with the most pressing technology crises at hand, and because tech investments must always be pitched as adding some new capability to the system (rarely just renovating what already exists), each piece of the system gets built in different technology paradigms from different eras. But every new piece depends on everything that came before, so each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies. The system is not so much updated as it is tacked on to. Over time, new functionality is added, but the system never sheds the core limitations of the foundational technologies. At the same time, it becomes enormously complex and fragile. Updates require caution, as any change in one layer can have unforeseen consequences in the others. It becomes harder and harder to support the technologies in the lower, older layers, while the more recent layers require constant updates and patches. The paint cracks."
"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."
"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."
"[There's] the need for an approach that is more democratic (in the small-d sense of the word), more open to popular interpretation, than our current bureaucratic culture allows for. Such an approach would recognize that fussy, technically accurate readings of law and policy can be entirely unhelpful when it comes to creating services that make sense for people."
[1975 observation Gall's Law]"'A complex system that works in variably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked,' Gall wrote. 'A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.'"
"...[I]ssuing order, especially from a place of disdain or disrespect...only reinforces blind obedience to the hierarchy. You cannot get the benefits of product management and agile development in a top-down culture."
"Our elected leaders keep thinking in terms of money, regulations, and oversight because those are the levers they have most immediately at hand. When they see a need for change, they push those levers. How much money will it take to solve the problem? What new rules can we put in place? How do we monitor failures more closely and punish poor performance? These levers can be helpful, but they need to be directed at the problem underlying our delivery failures: the lack of skilled technologists within government who are empowered to make the necessary decisions."
"In his 1966 book The Nerves of Government, Karl W. Deutsch said, 'Power is the ability to afford not to learn.' When power flows one way - down the waterfall - from policymakers to implementers, from federal to local government, from those with high-priced lawyers and accountants to those without , even those the system appears to benefit lose out. Is it any surprise that the most powerful institutions within the most powerful country on earth have resisted the uncomfortable work of developing new and foreign competencies? If our timing is better in this moment, it may be related to our nation's loss of power."
Pahlka is the founder of nonprofit Code for America, and served as deputy chief technology officer under Obama. She explores why government has had such a hard time moving into the digital age, which unfortunately reinforces distrust in government and in collective public-minded solutions to the big problems of our age. Among other things, she pinpoints the high-minded disengagement of policy makers, who formulate policy and leave implementation up to others (even though their muddled accretions of years of policy are nigh-on impossible to implement), legacy systems and policies turn every attempt at improvement into an archeological exercise, a new and misguided passion for project management that accumulates and tracks completion of 'requirements' rather than focusing on evaluating what makes sense along the way, and enormously unwieldy out-sourced contracts for new systems (which benefit the IT consulting firms that win them, but not the public organizations that have fallen into a trap of outsourcing technological expertise).
I have to say US bureaucracy seems especially bad, but Pahlka's insights still resonated with and made sense of my own experience. Yes, I'm aware the author's services are part of the solution she proposes, but it was a great, thought-provoking read. I never thought I'd be sitting up in bed reading excerpts excitedly to my spouse from this kind of book...
Please excuse the many quotes for my own later reference:
"Because each successive leadership at an agency usually gets the budget or the mandate to deal only with the most pressing technology crises at hand, and because tech investments must always be pitched as adding some new capability to the system (rarely just renovating what already exists), each piece of the system gets built in different technology paradigms from different eras. But every new piece depends on everything that came before, so each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies. The system is not so much updated as it is tacked on to. Over time, new functionality is added, but the system never sheds the core limitations of the foundational technologies. At the same time, it becomes enormously complex and fragile. Updates require caution, as any change in one layer can have unforeseen consequences in the others. It becomes harder and harder to support the technologies in the lower, older layers, while the more recent layers require constant updates and patches. The paint cracks."
"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."
"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."
"[There's] the need for an approach that is more democratic (in the small-d sense of the word), more open to popular interpretation, than our current bureaucratic culture allows for. Such an approach would recognize that fussy, technically accurate readings of law and policy can be entirely unhelpful when it comes to creating services that make sense for people."
[1975 observation Gall's Law]"'A complex system that works in variably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked,' Gall wrote. 'A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.'"
"...[I]ssuing order, especially from a place of disdain or disrespect...only reinforces blind obedience to the hierarchy. You cannot get the benefits of product management and agile development in a top-down culture."
"Our elected leaders keep thinking in terms of money, regulations, and oversight because those are the levers they have most immediately at hand. When they see a need for change, they push those levers. How much money will it take to solve the problem? What new rules can we put in place? How do we monitor failures more closely and punish poor performance? These levers can be helpful, but they need to be directed at the problem underlying our delivery failures: the lack of skilled technologists within government who are empowered to make the necessary decisions."
"In his 1966 book The Nerves of Government, Karl W. Deutsch said, 'Power is the ability to afford not to learn.' When power flows one way - down the waterfall - from policymakers to implementers, from federal to local government, from those with high-priced lawyers and accountants to those without , even those the system appears to benefit lose out. Is it any surprise that the most powerful institutions within the most powerful country on earth have resisted the uncomfortable work of developing new and foreign competencies? If our timing is better in this moment, it may be related to our nation's loss of power."
August 13, 2023
A must-read for policymakers, civil servants, and anyone who wants to see what needs to be done to make the civil service better for people inside and outside of it.
July 9, 2025
One of the books that profoundly influences my worldview is
Seeing Like a State.
There, Scott describes the central problem of statecraft and of government as one of legibility; the state must make its citizens and their activities visible before it can appropriate revenue and orchestrate any plan for the general welfare. In the 19th century, this was a matter of censuses, maps, and ledgers. In the 21st century, it's about websites and databases. As anyone who has interacted with the American government experiences, this process of becoming legible is profoundly awful. Taxes suck, beyond the financial cost. The DMV is a pain in the neck. If you've been to the post office lately, you know (Bob's Burgers link, trust me). And god forbid you ever have to apply for social services or get the justice system to fix a mistake. The inability of government to do anything well, particularly anything involving digital service delivery, is a joke as tired as the deal with airline food. If statecraft is about seeing, the American government is stumbling around blind.
U.S. President Donald Trump looks up toward the Solar Eclipse while joined by his wife first lady Melania Trump on the Truman Balcony at the White House on August 21, 2017 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) (Mark Wilson, 2017 Getty Images)
Pahlka's analysis is based on her personal experience in the tech industry, leading her non-profit Code For America, and a year as deputy chief technology officer for government innovation in 2013, where she learned a lot of hard lessons in the Obamacare rollout. She's kept in touch with colleagues from that time. She has deep experience with the cultures of both tech and government. The American government's failures with technology over decades are primarily self-inflicted wounds, and one where there is a chance of hope, however slim, with a potential bipartisan
Pahlka's core premise is that there is basically a good way to write usable software, as developed by internet-era companies and described in the Agile manifesto. Start with something small and simple. Iterate rapidly, using user experience research to guide the development of the product. Trust the expertise of the people involved and their ability to make good decisions. Have someone empowered to make decisions in charge who doesn't lose sight of providing a success product to end-users. There's a lot of (justified) anti-Tech and anti-Agile opinions out there, but she isn't some kind of one-true-wayist or egomaniacal platform god-king. This is the mundane tech stuff of "How do we build and maintain a website that doesn't absolutely suck?"
The largest barrier is cultural. Government is a hierarchy. At the very top are We The People, who elect representatives who write laws, which are turned into policy by senior bureaucrats, the most exalted of whom are at the Office of Management and Budget, which become program requirements and bids negotiated by mid-level bureaucrats and contractors, which is built by software developers who have no agency, which becomes a system used by junior bureaucrats and inflicted on the public. This a classic waterfall method, which as Pahlka acidly observes is "a promise not to learn anything."
Hierarchies are also embedded into the details of the policy, which for any specific program will likely be a combination of Federal, State, and County guidelines, as interpreted by multiple agencies, including both the primary and partner agencies, judges, and a constantly updating set of legal changes and refines at multiple levels. Enacting policy is genuinely complex.
And finally, and most fatally, bureaucratic culture is built around consensus and avoiding blame. You get promoted by following the rules exactly, and saying "I followed the process" is the only shield when things go wrong. Which means that there is no one who can say "This requirement is dumb, and it is killing the rest of the program. I am removing it. If necessary, we can do it later", short of going all the way back to Congress or having a major lawsuit. Americans are rightfully suspicious of the super-bureaucrat in the vein of Robert Moses or J. Edgar Hoover, but in our fear of empowering a dictator, we've instead empowered nobody.
Culture aside, there are a few specific laws and norms which are particular pernicious. A longstanding interpretation of the Paperwork Reduction Act effectively prohibits agencies from surveying and interviewing their users without a full on Federal IRB. The Administrative Procedures Act requires a multi-step detailed bidding process for literally everything. Various civil rights decisions argue that if a program is not maximally inclusive,
And a variety of laws and norms say that Federal agencies should buy, not build, what they make. Which is all fine and dandy, except that while in many cases a lot of digital technologies are commodities, like web hosting and database servers, the specifics of the logic that is encapsulated ARE THE POLICIES! In a fight between a human's opinion of how code works, and the computer's reality of how the code is working, the human will lose every time. Agencies which do not have some in-house capacity to operate their own data systems are incapable of seeing like a state.
The end result is policy vomit as product. The entire program gets thrown into a poorly designed questionnaire with no particular organization, confusing wording, and an actively hostile attitude towards actually getting anything done. For example, unemployment relief basically relies on former paystubs, and good luck if you don't know where those are (I'm pretty organized, and I'd have to search), or had informal employment as a gig worker or something.
This book is full of horrifying tech war stories, elaborations of what you'll read at the excellent Statecraft blog on fixing the Veteran's Administration and the Department of Labor. The VA had an electronic form system which would only work on the specific versions of Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat installed on VA computers. The California Unemployment system collapsed under COVID because millions of people were dumped into a manual queue based on minor data entry errors associated with a 0.25% instance of fraud, which could only be remedied by a small number of 20+ veterans due to the arcane nature of the system. A next-generation GPS satellite kept missing latency targets due to a requirement to translate data from standard UDP to a complex enterprise service bus back to UDP because of a game of telephone from mid-90s IT standards. Most horrifyingly, Immigration was unable to reunite family after Trump's family separation policy because families who had previously been under a single case number were now under ones for adults and separate one for each child, and there was no possible way to link case numbers in the INS database.
Ironically, I finished this book in a DMV lobby, waiting two hours to submit a piece of paper in place of a broken website. But I agree entirely with Pahlka's critique and argument. My last job was at a bank, where I was an in-house dev responsible for automating a bunch of reports that were not being done properly by vendor software. I had a toaster's worth of compute, a few gigs of database space, and with that I could do things in two weeks which would take our vendors six months and $3 million.
Liberals want a government that delivers services. Conservatives want a government that is efficient and gets out of the way. In the 21st century, this will require a new mode of supplying government services, new types of leaders, and a culture that is willing to be accountable and learn from mistakes. We should automate what we can, and trust the discretion of human beings to what can't be automated. Better things are possible. After the fiasco of the healthcare.gov launch, a follow-up program to help Medicare pay more to doctors who keep people alive launched more or less smoothly. In countless ways, government is getting better. The question is if government can rebuild trust by being effective before cynics in positions of power bring down the whole state.
U.S. President Donald Trump looks up toward the Solar Eclipse while joined by his wife first lady Melania Trump on the Truman Balcony at the White House on August 21, 2017 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) (Mark Wilson, 2017 Getty Images)
Pahlka's analysis is based on her personal experience in the tech industry, leading her non-profit Code For America, and a year as deputy chief technology officer for government innovation in 2013, where she learned a lot of hard lessons in the Obamacare rollout. She's kept in touch with colleagues from that time. She has deep experience with the cultures of both tech and government. The American government's failures with technology over decades are primarily self-inflicted wounds, and one where there is a chance of hope, however slim, with a potential bipartisan
Pahlka's core premise is that there is basically a good way to write usable software, as developed by internet-era companies and described in the Agile manifesto. Start with something small and simple. Iterate rapidly, using user experience research to guide the development of the product. Trust the expertise of the people involved and their ability to make good decisions. Have someone empowered to make decisions in charge who doesn't lose sight of providing a success product to end-users. There's a lot of (justified) anti-Tech and anti-Agile opinions out there, but she isn't some kind of one-true-wayist or egomaniacal platform god-king. This is the mundane tech stuff of "How do we build and maintain a website that doesn't absolutely suck?"
The largest barrier is cultural. Government is a hierarchy. At the very top are We The People, who elect representatives who write laws, which are turned into policy by senior bureaucrats, the most exalted of whom are at the Office of Management and Budget, which become program requirements and bids negotiated by mid-level bureaucrats and contractors, which is built by software developers who have no agency, which becomes a system used by junior bureaucrats and inflicted on the public. This a classic waterfall method, which as Pahlka acidly observes is "a promise not to learn anything."
Hierarchies are also embedded into the details of the policy, which for any specific program will likely be a combination of Federal, State, and County guidelines, as interpreted by multiple agencies, including both the primary and partner agencies, judges, and a constantly updating set of legal changes and refines at multiple levels. Enacting policy is genuinely complex.
And finally, and most fatally, bureaucratic culture is built around consensus and avoiding blame. You get promoted by following the rules exactly, and saying "I followed the process" is the only shield when things go wrong. Which means that there is no one who can say "This requirement is dumb, and it is killing the rest of the program. I am removing it. If necessary, we can do it later", short of going all the way back to Congress or having a major lawsuit. Americans are rightfully suspicious of the super-bureaucrat in the vein of Robert Moses or J. Edgar Hoover, but in our fear of empowering a dictator, we've instead empowered nobody.
Culture aside, there are a few specific laws and norms which are particular pernicious. A longstanding interpretation of the Paperwork Reduction Act effectively prohibits agencies from surveying and interviewing their users without a full on Federal IRB. The Administrative Procedures Act requires a multi-step detailed bidding process for literally everything. Various civil rights decisions argue that if a program is not maximally inclusive,
And a variety of laws and norms say that Federal agencies should buy, not build, what they make. Which is all fine and dandy, except that while in many cases a lot of digital technologies are commodities, like web hosting and database servers, the specifics of the logic that is encapsulated ARE THE POLICIES! In a fight between a human's opinion of how code works, and the computer's reality of how the code is working, the human will lose every time. Agencies which do not have some in-house capacity to operate their own data systems are incapable of seeing like a state.
The end result is policy vomit as product. The entire program gets thrown into a poorly designed questionnaire with no particular organization, confusing wording, and an actively hostile attitude towards actually getting anything done. For example, unemployment relief basically relies on former paystubs, and good luck if you don't know where those are (I'm pretty organized, and I'd have to search), or had informal employment as a gig worker or something.
This book is full of horrifying tech war stories, elaborations of what you'll read at the excellent Statecraft blog on fixing the Veteran's Administration and the Department of Labor. The VA had an electronic form system which would only work on the specific versions of Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat installed on VA computers. The California Unemployment system collapsed under COVID because millions of people were dumped into a manual queue based on minor data entry errors associated with a 0.25% instance of fraud, which could only be remedied by a small number of 20+ veterans due to the arcane nature of the system. A next-generation GPS satellite kept missing latency targets due to a requirement to translate data from standard UDP to a complex enterprise service bus back to UDP because of a game of telephone from mid-90s IT standards. Most horrifyingly, Immigration was unable to reunite family after Trump's family separation policy because families who had previously been under a single case number were now under ones for adults and separate one for each child, and there was no possible way to link case numbers in the INS database.
Ironically, I finished this book in a DMV lobby, waiting two hours to submit a piece of paper in place of a broken website. But I agree entirely with Pahlka's critique and argument. My last job was at a bank, where I was an in-house dev responsible for automating a bunch of reports that were not being done properly by vendor software. I had a toaster's worth of compute, a few gigs of database space, and with that I could do things in two weeks which would take our vendors six months and $3 million.
Liberals want a government that delivers services. Conservatives want a government that is efficient and gets out of the way. In the 21st century, this will require a new mode of supplying government services, new types of leaders, and a culture that is willing to be accountable and learn from mistakes. We should automate what we can, and trust the discretion of human beings to what can't be automated. Better things are possible. After the fiasco of the healthcare.gov launch, a follow-up program to help Medicare pay more to doctors who keep people alive launched more or less smoothly. In countless ways, government is getting better. The question is if government can rebuild trust by being effective before cynics in positions of power bring down the whole state.
March 27, 2024
Great read on policy implementation and product management within the context of US Government. Pahlka offers clarity and insight with recent real life cases of government contracts and delivery failures
at local, state and federal levels. Discussions around waterfall vs agile, procedures vs outcomes, following the letter of the law vs the spirit of the law are invaluable. A must read for anyone who has a role in digital government services.
at local, state and federal levels. Discussions around waterfall vs agile, procedures vs outcomes, following the letter of the law vs the spirit of the law are invaluable. A must read for anyone who has a role in digital government services.
July 13, 2023
I read this book because it was highly recommended by Ezra Klein on his podcast and my current position is a Data Engineer for city government, so it is highly relevant to me.
The woman who wrote this book knows her stuff. She did a deep dive into her experiences working with various governments on failing tech projects. The key takeaway is that a failing tech project is usually a symptom of deeper problems: burdensome project oversight, bureaucratic risk-aversion, insufficient tech capacity, or designing for the process and not for the user. No amount of money, increase in oversight bodies, new technology or outsourcing would fix this. Instead, we need to train and support existing government workers, hire new people with digital skills into government, put user-focused public servants into positions where they can effect change higher up the policy ladder.
Her biggest criticism was of the waterfall software development cycle; while I knew of it already from a graduate course on the principles of software engineering, it should be familiar to anyone who has been told to build a project that fits a lengthy, outdated, confusing, or conflicting set of requirements and that does not pay attention to the needs of its customers. Policy often thrives or dies because of its implementation.
The lessons are critical, the anecdotes are mostly engaging, and the deep dives into government are illuminating.
P.S. I love her sharp criticisms of Oracle and its then senior vice president Kenneth Glueck for corporate greed and regulatory capture, as well as Elon Musk for arrogance and harming democratic institutions
The woman who wrote this book knows her stuff. She did a deep dive into her experiences working with various governments on failing tech projects. The key takeaway is that a failing tech project is usually a symptom of deeper problems: burdensome project oversight, bureaucratic risk-aversion, insufficient tech capacity, or designing for the process and not for the user. No amount of money, increase in oversight bodies, new technology or outsourcing would fix this. Instead, we need to train and support existing government workers, hire new people with digital skills into government, put user-focused public servants into positions where they can effect change higher up the policy ladder.
Her biggest criticism was of the waterfall software development cycle; while I knew of it already from a graduate course on the principles of software engineering, it should be familiar to anyone who has been told to build a project that fits a lengthy, outdated, confusing, or conflicting set of requirements and that does not pay attention to the needs of its customers. Policy often thrives or dies because of its implementation.
The lessons are critical, the anecdotes are mostly engaging, and the deep dives into government are illuminating.
P.S. I love her sharp criticisms of Oracle and its then senior vice president Kenneth Glueck for corporate greed and regulatory capture, as well as Elon Musk for arrogance and harming democratic institutions
August 28, 2023
Buy this book. It’s one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read. Jen gets it. Her extensive use of real-life examples and clear language make this one of the most important books anyone worried about American democracy and government could read. I’ve sent colleagues a ton of quotes from this book - some of the top ones are below:
“If we want to escape that fate, on climate change or any other existential issue we face, implementation can no longer be policy’s poor cousin. It cannot be beneath the attention of our most powerful institutions and it can’t be beneath our attention as a public.”
Government must deliver on its promises if it wants to keep and earn the trust of the American people.
You cannot legislate competence. It is an issue of people - getting more of the ones we need and allowing them to do what we need done
You learn that you need to think about the technically implementation fo a law when you write it. Otherwise, you’ve written a law that looks good on the books but doesn’t accomplish much at all.
“If we want to escape that fate, on climate change or any other existential issue we face, implementation can no longer be policy’s poor cousin. It cannot be beneath the attention of our most powerful institutions and it can’t be beneath our attention as a public.”
Government must deliver on its promises if it wants to keep and earn the trust of the American people.
You cannot legislate competence. It is an issue of people - getting more of the ones we need and allowing them to do what we need done
You learn that you need to think about the technically implementation fo a law when you write it. Otherwise, you’ve written a law that looks good on the books but doesn’t accomplish much at all.
October 12, 2025
Well told and researched with helpful examples to make occasionally abstract issues (ie. critical government IT infrastructure) understood.
Reading this towards the end of my time in the former ODS, I was nostalgic for parts of how things used to be: the promise of multidisciplinary teams tackling complex digital projects; relentless focus on user experiences and meeting people where they are; and leadership that understood the policy and process challenges and was committed to removing roadblocks. No matter how important and useful the work is shown to be, it needs consistent political and leadership buy-in to prevent decay. Still, I was inspired to continue my career in the public service reading this - the potential to create a responsive and responsible government to the public remains immense.
Reading this towards the end of my time in the former ODS, I was nostalgic for parts of how things used to be: the promise of multidisciplinary teams tackling complex digital projects; relentless focus on user experiences and meeting people where they are; and leadership that understood the policy and process challenges and was committed to removing roadblocks. No matter how important and useful the work is shown to be, it needs consistent political and leadership buy-in to prevent decay. Still, I was inspired to continue my career in the public service reading this - the potential to create a responsive and responsible government to the public remains immense.
February 11, 2025
Great insight on the intersection between tech and governance. This was recommended by my tech ethics course and I can see why! Perhaps this is informing a career change…
September 8, 2025
Unexpectedly useful for me. Also quite accessible, interesting, and informative. Well done! rtf
4.5ish Stars
Listened to Audible. The author narrated and she was excellent!
4.5ish Stars
Listened to Audible. The author narrated and she was excellent!
August 7, 2025
It's weird to read a book about my career. Not figuratively, but literally. The agency I work for, projects I've worked on, and people I know. This book describes the battles I fight every day--process over outcomes, overlapping administrative requirements, and the struggle against paying mega contractors for mega projects that never meet aspirations. There's plenty of blame to go around, but it's also not anybody's fault. I like to blame the lawyers in OGC who make me regulate everything in pedantic detail, which leaves no room for innovation. But they are risk adverse because they know that people will sue the federal government at the drop of a hat.
I'm not sure I got any solutions, but if you want to know what my life is like 9-5, this is it.
#longestreview #itslikeasocialmediapost #exceptiontoeveryrule #tomnovakknows #dontgiveup #hibecca
I'm not sure I got any solutions, but if you want to know what my life is like 9-5, this is it.
#longestreview #itslikeasocialmediapost #exceptiontoeveryrule #tomnovakknows #dontgiveup #hibecca
February 23, 2024
Eight years ago, I got to join a small group of incredible people to work on something we all knew was going to be bigger than us.
Over my career, I’ve mostly worked in the areas of digital governance, digital policy, and communications. I had carved out a small niche in being someone who could tell stories about technology in ways that made tech accessible to leaders and decision-makers. It wasn’t always the most interesting skill, but I was good at it and proud of what I did.
Eight years ago, a handful of us came together to create a digital organization within our provincial government. Our thinking was simple: if government was to serve people in a digital era, it needed the skills, expertise, and structures to think digitally. We knew that the success of any government program was “3am government”: the ability to deliver service to people in the ways they wanted and expected that service, when they needed it most.
Our motley crew eventually became the Ontario Digital Service, a not-so-small group of people who not only worked across government to help build better services, but also worked with people across government to rethink what it meant to deliver services in a digital world. (I’m still working here; the name has changed over the years, but the ethos remains the same: we’re here to make government work for people.)
Reading Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America was a perfect reminder of why I do the work I do; why a few of us got together eight years ago to build something new. Pahlka provides a number of examples of how thinking differently about the way we deliver services leads to better outcomes for people, and how thinking differently requires having digital talent inside government. Policy and legislation isn’t enough: implementation needs to be built into the decisions we make, and that requires having people who have the skills, expertise, and experience to understand what good implementation looks like—and then give them the space and power to make the necessary decisions.
Pahlka clearly makes the case for embedding digital practitioners into the public service:
This is why I’ve devoted the recent part of my career to digital talent: good people in good environments lead to good outcomes, and we need to make sure our public service has the right skills and tools necessary to lead towards those outcomes.
I think every policymaker should read Recoding America, but I think everyday citizens should read it too, to get an understanding of how government works and how we can make it better—and maybe inspire people to help make it better too. Pahlka says is succinctly:
I’ve spent the latter part of my career trying to fix it, and I’m excited to keep doing that in the years to come.
Over my career, I’ve mostly worked in the areas of digital governance, digital policy, and communications. I had carved out a small niche in being someone who could tell stories about technology in ways that made tech accessible to leaders and decision-makers. It wasn’t always the most interesting skill, but I was good at it and proud of what I did.
Eight years ago, a handful of us came together to create a digital organization within our provincial government. Our thinking was simple: if government was to serve people in a digital era, it needed the skills, expertise, and structures to think digitally. We knew that the success of any government program was “3am government”: the ability to deliver service to people in the ways they wanted and expected that service, when they needed it most.
Our motley crew eventually became the Ontario Digital Service, a not-so-small group of people who not only worked across government to help build better services, but also worked with people across government to rethink what it meant to deliver services in a digital world. (I’m still working here; the name has changed over the years, but the ethos remains the same: we’re here to make government work for people.)
Reading Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America was a perfect reminder of why I do the work I do; why a few of us got together eight years ago to build something new. Pahlka provides a number of examples of how thinking differently about the way we deliver services leads to better outcomes for people, and how thinking differently requires having digital talent inside government. Policy and legislation isn’t enough: implementation needs to be built into the decisions we make, and that requires having people who have the skills, expertise, and experience to understand what good implementation looks like—and then give them the space and power to make the necessary decisions.
Pahlka clearly makes the case for embedding digital practitioners into the public service:
The degree of government's reliance on the digital realm has grown steadily for decades, without a corresponding growth in digital literacy.
This is why I’ve devoted the recent part of my career to digital talent: good people in good environments lead to good outcomes, and we need to make sure our public service has the right skills and tools necessary to lead towards those outcomes.
I think every policymaker should read Recoding America, but I think everyday citizens should read it too, to get an understanding of how government works and how we can make it better—and maybe inspire people to help make it better too. Pahlka says is succinctly:
It's easy to complain about government but more satisfying to help fix it.
I’ve spent the latter part of my career trying to fix it, and I’m excited to keep doing that in the years to come.
January 6, 2024
Incredible, honest stories of how large US government bureaucracies function and examples of when their flaws have been surmountable as well as insurmountable. Gave me hope that government can improve, and a sense of urgency to push them to do so, whether from the inside or outside. Very important book.
August 24, 2023
I read this with my colleagues, because it’s talking about our field. I’m giving this 5 stars for existing and because it’s headed in the right direction. If I rated it based on my enjoyment (like I do all other ratings on here), I’d give it 4 stars.
In my opinion, the author has 3 main points: 1) Government needs to hire better for IT; 2) government IT needs to use agile development and run far away from waterfall development; and 3) while policy is a crucial first step in making changes we all need to care about the actual operationalization and implementation of all policy changes. (One of my colleagues would say that another main point was that people shouldn’t sue the government as much because it creates administrative burdens that don’t result in better outcomes for citizens anyway. I personally didn’t hear that point come through all that loudly, though.)
I don’t disagree with the 3 main points I took away from this. What I wrestled with was my suspicion that this author has never once hired a real IT staffer in an operating division of federal government without Direct Hire authority — so sure, government needs to hire better for IT, but DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO HIRE ANYONE AT ALL IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT?! If that’s one of the main points, there needed to be at least a whole chapter (or half the book) dedicated to why it is so hard to hire and how she envisions that changing so you can hire better. I just think it’s way too easy to say “government needs to hire better” as if that is something that can happen easily. As a career civil servant, it’s hard to read this sentiment without a show of deeper understanding of what a hiring official is up against.
I guess I also wrestled with the third point. I mean, I love that she included it in her book. What I wonder about is how you get people—society—to care about ops and admin. So once again, sure you can just say it needs to happen, but how do you actually get anything to change?
But even though this book comes across very much as an outsider writing about government, I appreciate where she was trying to go and am happy a book could be published about it. Much of my struggles with the book relate to the fact that I’m an insider and it’s clear she’s writing about us from the outside, with an outsider’s level of knowledge.
In my opinion, the author has 3 main points: 1) Government needs to hire better for IT; 2) government IT needs to use agile development and run far away from waterfall development; and 3) while policy is a crucial first step in making changes we all need to care about the actual operationalization and implementation of all policy changes. (One of my colleagues would say that another main point was that people shouldn’t sue the government as much because it creates administrative burdens that don’t result in better outcomes for citizens anyway. I personally didn’t hear that point come through all that loudly, though.)
I don’t disagree with the 3 main points I took away from this. What I wrestled with was my suspicion that this author has never once hired a real IT staffer in an operating division of federal government without Direct Hire authority — so sure, government needs to hire better for IT, but DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO HIRE ANYONE AT ALL IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT?! If that’s one of the main points, there needed to be at least a whole chapter (or half the book) dedicated to why it is so hard to hire and how she envisions that changing so you can hire better. I just think it’s way too easy to say “government needs to hire better” as if that is something that can happen easily. As a career civil servant, it’s hard to read this sentiment without a show of deeper understanding of what a hiring official is up against.
I guess I also wrestled with the third point. I mean, I love that she included it in her book. What I wonder about is how you get people—society—to care about ops and admin. So once again, sure you can just say it needs to happen, but how do you actually get anything to change?
But even though this book comes across very much as an outsider writing about government, I appreciate where she was trying to go and am happy a book could be published about it. Much of my struggles with the book relate to the fact that I’m an insider and it’s clear she’s writing about us from the outside, with an outsider’s level of knowledge.
June 26, 2025
I’m a government contractor who has worked on two of the digital modernization teams mentioned in this book!
Anyone who wants to participate in our democracy should read at least a few chapters of this book. Pahlka explains how hard-won policy changes often have minimal impact because our legislative system is biased against the realities of implementation.
(Other stuff too but that’s the central component that resonated most with me.)
As an implementer myself, I stress all the time about how the voting public doesn’t know that their support for reformed unemployment insurance/education/healthcare/SNAP or food stamps/any other public benefit is only as good as their support for the paperwork and logistics needed to make it possible.
Maybe 95% of tech work is contracted out to about a dozen private firms, who are incentivized to do the job slowly and badly, usually at the expense of the poor and underserved. It’s stupid. It’s expensive. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare.
However, after my initial burst of enthusiasm, later chapters lost my attention. I’m not sure I’m quite as optimistic as Jennifer Pahlka. She’s a superstar in this space. One time I almost hit her on my bike after she gave a talk in DC. Glad I didn’t. If she writes another book I’ll read it!
Anyone who wants to participate in our democracy should read at least a few chapters of this book. Pahlka explains how hard-won policy changes often have minimal impact because our legislative system is biased against the realities of implementation.
(Other stuff too but that’s the central component that resonated most with me.)
As an implementer myself, I stress all the time about how the voting public doesn’t know that their support for reformed unemployment insurance/education/healthcare/SNAP or food stamps/any other public benefit is only as good as their support for the paperwork and logistics needed to make it possible.
Maybe 95% of tech work is contracted out to about a dozen private firms, who are incentivized to do the job slowly and badly, usually at the expense of the poor and underserved. It’s stupid. It’s expensive. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare.
However, after my initial burst of enthusiasm, later chapters lost my attention. I’m not sure I’m quite as optimistic as Jennifer Pahlka. She’s a superstar in this space. One time I almost hit her on my bike after she gave a talk in DC. Glad I didn’t. If she writes another book I’ll read it!
August 2, 2023
I heard Pahlka on the Pivot Podcast with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher and thought her book would be worth checking out.
If you, like me, are someone who works in, or tangential to, technology implementation in the Government then I think this book will massively resonate with you. Jennifer helps characterize and illustrate many of the problems I have observed in my time selling and implementing government technology. To name a few:
- data being used as a way to measure the outcomes at the end of a project instead of consistently being used to observe and change
- Waterfall-driven development leading to late deliveries of bloated products
- A culture that generally promotes handing off all work to contractors who rotate out with tribal knowledge consistently
It felt good to basically be told in book form that my observations were valid and not crazy, but also Jennifer provides some ideas on how to actually fix these issues as well as people driving change within various agencies, giving me hope that with the right top-cover our Government agencies can reach the same levels of service as companies like Amazon.
If you, like me, are someone who works in, or tangential to, technology implementation in the Government then I think this book will massively resonate with you. Jennifer helps characterize and illustrate many of the problems I have observed in my time selling and implementing government technology. To name a few:
- data being used as a way to measure the outcomes at the end of a project instead of consistently being used to observe and change
- Waterfall-driven development leading to late deliveries of bloated products
- A culture that generally promotes handing off all work to contractors who rotate out with tribal knowledge consistently
It felt good to basically be told in book form that my observations were valid and not crazy, but also Jennifer provides some ideas on how to actually fix these issues as well as people driving change within various agencies, giving me hope that with the right top-cover our Government agencies can reach the same levels of service as companies like Amazon.
August 16, 2023
It says a lot about me that this was an utter page-turner for me, had me up late at night wondering how our heroes were going to surmount arcane contracting rules AND stubborn bureaucrats AND oversimplified politically motivated “solutions”… AND private (and sometimes non-profit!) contractors who just want to keep the money flowing to them no matter how wasteful it is.
This really should be required reading for anyone who cares about government and making government work.
The conclusion is the weak point; Pahlka shifts into hopeful, speech-making mode when I’m not sure she has really outlined a reason to be hopeful. I don’t disagree with any of the particulars of the conclusion but I do disagree with it as a rhetorical choice. The rhetoric we need about this problem - how government harms itself and fails to serve by being overly concerned with process and not concerned enough with outcomes - needs to be urgent and clear and radical. Government needs to reorganize itself to work for the people and it needs to do it now, or the forces that want to undermine the institution of government itself will continue to win.
This really should be required reading for anyone who cares about government and making government work.
The conclusion is the weak point; Pahlka shifts into hopeful, speech-making mode when I’m not sure she has really outlined a reason to be hopeful. I don’t disagree with any of the particulars of the conclusion but I do disagree with it as a rhetorical choice. The rhetoric we need about this problem - how government harms itself and fails to serve by being overly concerned with process and not concerned enough with outcomes - needs to be urgent and clear and radical. Government needs to reorganize itself to work for the people and it needs to do it now, or the forces that want to undermine the institution of government itself will continue to win.
October 23, 2025
I think I'm reading this book at a point where the prescriptions Pahlka describes are patently pipe dreams in the face of an authoritarian takeover of our bureaucracy, and so I can only hope there are still vestiges of our institutions left to rebuild off of post-Trump...if a post-Trump era will even exists...Irrespective of these...trying times, Pahlka paints a clear picture of the challenges government faces in delivering on its promises, from the unintended consequences of well-intentioned statutes, calcified and antiquated model of software development, sidelined technologists, the cramp professionalization of policy implementation that is severely risk averse, etc. etc. The list goes on and on and on, but just as the many actors in the book were able to overcome seemingly insurmountable roadblocks, I hope that there are still people in government who believe that government can do good, in spite of their odds, simply because it should.
December 3, 2023
This is a good book, but it is written for specific people. If you are interested at all at digital implementation of governments' laws, this book should be required reading. Pahlka provides a perspective on the hurdles of implementation across all governments in the United States that is very valuable. In summary, it needs new thinking and what we do now is not very helpful--regressive even. There are a few bright spots to learn and iterate on--Pahlka highlights the web forms to receive covid-19 tests. Takeaways from this book will help me in my line of work.
September 19, 2025
There are three types of people that can appreciate this book
* Anyone who has ever developed business application software
* Anyone who has ever used a government website, particular one that is clunky and difficult to use
* Anyone who is a government policy maker or charged with implementing government policy that requires a digital technology solution.
I'm in the first category but my spouse keens every time she has to use the California EDD (unemployment insurance) site to report wages for household services individuals.
Pahlka is clear-eyed about diagnosing the ills of the public sector implementation process, a process that often generates expensive "concrete boats". Such concrete boats are systems that take years to deliver, run wildly over budget, and ultimately fail to be useful to the end users. (Pahlka singles out Oracle for lobbying to change laws to make it more likely that concrete boats get built. This no pulling of punches makes the book refreshing to read).
Pahlka is also not shy at pointing the finger at government - who for decades eschewed developing any in-house technology implementation expertise, wrote policy that would be exceptionally difficult to implement, and was/is governed by risk avoidance -- hence larding up requirements with everything under the sun so no special interest can claim they were excluded. Equally a problem is super-long procurement processes to select a vendor, all to avoid having to deal with vendor protests from the non-selected vendor. At times, the goal seemed to be to avoid being called on the carpet by some grandstanding politician by being able to say at all times that "the process was followed". That no actual useful system got delivered would not be the agency's fault.
Now, the book is not a screed and in fact outlines many successful projects done by the US Digital Service in the 2014-2020 period (along with related units as well as work that her company Code for America that did California agency projects). These projects are how Pahlka figured out the prescription for change that she ably describes. People who work for commercial enterprises and are involved in software delivery will readily recognize the efficacy of these prescriptions. And, as such, the book is optimistic and hopefully will be influential.
To a general audience, the book is most entertaining when describing shortcomings in certain systems and how evangelists overcame these using strategies that broke the procedural logjams. There's a bit of revisiting healthcare.gov but more time is spent on other systems like VA benefits that haven't been quite in the news.
Readers of Ezra Klein's Abundance that argues for the importance of actually delivering on services rather than pandering to special interests as a key to preserving democracy will see a fellow traveler in Pahlka who is not afraid to skewer those policy types who fall on their swords for "equity" to the detriment of delivering anything to the citizenry.
Overall, I recommend this book to help the US citizen understand better why many government services are poorly executed in digital form (and where there are rays of sunshine). As states roll out Medicaid work requirement systems, they'd do well to read this book first to avoid falling into the trap of creating systems that are unusable and deny benefits to those entitled.
---------------------------------------------
To any American, it was startling to learn that the IRS's Individual Master File is based on COBOL (I already knew that) but also assembly language (!!!!) and VSAM (!!!!). Skills for all these technologies are literally in the hands of retirees. There's a replacement project for this (due 2030) but a prior replacement project failed and as we know, the Republican Congress loves to cut funding from the IRS. Although Pahlka's book was written before Trump was elected in 2024, we are perhaps closer that we think to relying on tariffs as the sole government revenue source if this modernization effort does not come to fruition and all technical expertise for the current system "ages out" of existence.
* Anyone who has ever developed business application software
* Anyone who has ever used a government website, particular one that is clunky and difficult to use
* Anyone who is a government policy maker or charged with implementing government policy that requires a digital technology solution.
I'm in the first category but my spouse keens every time she has to use the California EDD (unemployment insurance) site to report wages for household services individuals.
Pahlka is clear-eyed about diagnosing the ills of the public sector implementation process, a process that often generates expensive "concrete boats". Such concrete boats are systems that take years to deliver, run wildly over budget, and ultimately fail to be useful to the end users. (Pahlka singles out Oracle for lobbying to change laws to make it more likely that concrete boats get built. This no pulling of punches makes the book refreshing to read).
Pahlka is also not shy at pointing the finger at government - who for decades eschewed developing any in-house technology implementation expertise, wrote policy that would be exceptionally difficult to implement, and was/is governed by risk avoidance -- hence larding up requirements with everything under the sun so no special interest can claim they were excluded. Equally a problem is super-long procurement processes to select a vendor, all to avoid having to deal with vendor protests from the non-selected vendor. At times, the goal seemed to be to avoid being called on the carpet by some grandstanding politician by being able to say at all times that "the process was followed". That no actual useful system got delivered would not be the agency's fault.
Now, the book is not a screed and in fact outlines many successful projects done by the US Digital Service in the 2014-2020 period (along with related units as well as work that her company Code for America that did California agency projects). These projects are how Pahlka figured out the prescription for change that she ably describes. People who work for commercial enterprises and are involved in software delivery will readily recognize the efficacy of these prescriptions. And, as such, the book is optimistic and hopefully will be influential.
To a general audience, the book is most entertaining when describing shortcomings in certain systems and how evangelists overcame these using strategies that broke the procedural logjams. There's a bit of revisiting healthcare.gov but more time is spent on other systems like VA benefits that haven't been quite in the news.
Readers of Ezra Klein's Abundance that argues for the importance of actually delivering on services rather than pandering to special interests as a key to preserving democracy will see a fellow traveler in Pahlka who is not afraid to skewer those policy types who fall on their swords for "equity" to the detriment of delivering anything to the citizenry.
Overall, I recommend this book to help the US citizen understand better why many government services are poorly executed in digital form (and where there are rays of sunshine). As states roll out Medicaid work requirement systems, they'd do well to read this book first to avoid falling into the trap of creating systems that are unusable and deny benefits to those entitled.
---------------------------------------------
To any American, it was startling to learn that the IRS's Individual Master File is based on COBOL (I already knew that) but also assembly language (!!!!) and VSAM (!!!!). Skills for all these technologies are literally in the hands of retirees. There's a replacement project for this (due 2030) but a prior replacement project failed and as we know, the Republican Congress loves to cut funding from the IRS. Although Pahlka's book was written before Trump was elected in 2024, we are perhaps closer that we think to relying on tariffs as the sole government revenue source if this modernization effort does not come to fruition and all technical expertise for the current system "ages out" of existence.
May 31, 2025
Autorka bola U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer v Obamovej administratíve a založila Code for America. V knihe píše o tom, ako štát nezvláda implementáciu politík, a to najmä v digitálnej oblasti.
Policy, štátne služby a digitálne technológie sú čoraz popretkávanejšie. Máloktorá policy dnes nefunguje na základe databázy alebo webu. Napriek tomu boli tieto funkcie v governmente desaťročia oddelené. Implementácia politiky bola len akýsi detail. Dôležití ľudia riešili „policy“, prípadne politiku.
Hlavným terčom kritiky v knihe je „waterfall“ projektový manažment, ktorý sa začína plánovaním, pokračuje definovaním požiadaviek a prípravou implementačného plánu. Úspech projektu sa následne vyhodnocuje podľa plnenia požiadaviek. Proces dominuje nad dopadom. Projekt pritom niekedy môže trvať aj viac ako 10 rokov. Nie je preto prekvapením, že práve pri digitálnych službách, kde je technologický vývoj rapídny, takýto prístup spôsobil problémy.
"Waterfall is a pledge by all parties to not learn anything during the development."
Odpoveďou (aj keď government vždy bude government) je agilnejší prístup založený na identifikovaní užívateľských potrieb, iterácii produktu a testovaní. Komplexnejšie systémy sú vytvárané na základe jednoduchších a užívateľsky testovaných riešení.
To si vyžaduje skutočný produktový manažment – rozhodnutia o tom, čo za produkt sa vôbec ide robiť. Tieto rozhodnutia sa často nerobia, niektorí manažéri v záujme znižovania vlastného rizika „postavia aj betónové lode, ak bude taká požiadavka.“ Produktový manažment so sebou nesie aj skutočné trade-offs – populárne v USA sú napríklad požiadavky, aby systém (aj počas krízovej situácie pandémie) fungoval v N-jazykoch kvôli inkluzívnosti. Výsledkom často je, že nefunguje ani v jednom. Pre funkčné služby je nevyhnutné urobiť rozhodnutia o desiatkach takýchto trade-offs. A tiež zabezpečiť manažérov, ktorí takéto rozhodnutia vedia (je im umožnené) urobiť v záujme užívateľov.
Toto však vo verejnom sektore nemôže dobre fungovať bez toho, aby sa aktívne riešila a menila policy. Príkladov v knihe je mnoho, spomeniem poistenie v nezamestnanosti v Kalifornii, ktoré počas covidu úplne vybuchlo. Príručka pre referentov (caseworker guidance) pritom mala 800 strán a mnoho kľúčových rozhodnutí o dávke mohli robiť ľudia až po 5, 10 či 15 rokoch praxe. Pre zlú politiku sa dobrý web robí ťažko.
Za kľúčové považuje práve schopné verejné inštitúcie, splnomocnených manažérov, kontrolu podľa výsledkov, a nie podľa procesu. Rovnako je dôležité prestať robiť dopredu nadefinované „megaprojekty“, ale pracovať v stupňoch a aktualizovať projekty na základe poučenia.
Kniha neprináša revolučné myšlienky v tom, ako by mali digitálne služby fungovať. Aj autorka priznáva, že priamou inšpiráciou sú digitálne služby v UK. Za veľmi prínosné však považujem prepájanie princípov uvedených vyššie s úvahami o byrokracii, kapacite a schopnosti štátu, verejnom obstarávaní, štátnej službe, konzultantoch, zákonoch, dodávateľoch a demokracii v 21. storočí. Kniha je tak dobrým čítaním pre každého úradníka, nielen pre toho z oblasti digitalizácie. Zaujímava je aj pokračujúca práca autorky v Niskanen Center a na substacku https://www.eatingpolicy.com/
Policy, štátne služby a digitálne technológie sú čoraz popretkávanejšie. Máloktorá policy dnes nefunguje na základe databázy alebo webu. Napriek tomu boli tieto funkcie v governmente desaťročia oddelené. Implementácia politiky bola len akýsi detail. Dôležití ľudia riešili „policy“, prípadne politiku.
Hlavným terčom kritiky v knihe je „waterfall“ projektový manažment, ktorý sa začína plánovaním, pokračuje definovaním požiadaviek a prípravou implementačného plánu. Úspech projektu sa následne vyhodnocuje podľa plnenia požiadaviek. Proces dominuje nad dopadom. Projekt pritom niekedy môže trvať aj viac ako 10 rokov. Nie je preto prekvapením, že práve pri digitálnych službách, kde je technologický vývoj rapídny, takýto prístup spôsobil problémy.
"Waterfall is a pledge by all parties to not learn anything during the development."
Odpoveďou (aj keď government vždy bude government) je agilnejší prístup založený na identifikovaní užívateľských potrieb, iterácii produktu a testovaní. Komplexnejšie systémy sú vytvárané na základe jednoduchších a užívateľsky testovaných riešení.
To si vyžaduje skutočný produktový manažment – rozhodnutia o tom, čo za produkt sa vôbec ide robiť. Tieto rozhodnutia sa často nerobia, niektorí manažéri v záujme znižovania vlastného rizika „postavia aj betónové lode, ak bude taká požiadavka.“ Produktový manažment so sebou nesie aj skutočné trade-offs – populárne v USA sú napríklad požiadavky, aby systém (aj počas krízovej situácie pandémie) fungoval v N-jazykoch kvôli inkluzívnosti. Výsledkom často je, že nefunguje ani v jednom. Pre funkčné služby je nevyhnutné urobiť rozhodnutia o desiatkach takýchto trade-offs. A tiež zabezpečiť manažérov, ktorí takéto rozhodnutia vedia (je im umožnené) urobiť v záujme užívateľov.
Toto však vo verejnom sektore nemôže dobre fungovať bez toho, aby sa aktívne riešila a menila policy. Príkladov v knihe je mnoho, spomeniem poistenie v nezamestnanosti v Kalifornii, ktoré počas covidu úplne vybuchlo. Príručka pre referentov (caseworker guidance) pritom mala 800 strán a mnoho kľúčových rozhodnutí o dávke mohli robiť ľudia až po 5, 10 či 15 rokoch praxe. Pre zlú politiku sa dobrý web robí ťažko.
Za kľúčové považuje práve schopné verejné inštitúcie, splnomocnených manažérov, kontrolu podľa výsledkov, a nie podľa procesu. Rovnako je dôležité prestať robiť dopredu nadefinované „megaprojekty“, ale pracovať v stupňoch a aktualizovať projekty na základe poučenia.
Kniha neprináša revolučné myšlienky v tom, ako by mali digitálne služby fungovať. Aj autorka priznáva, že priamou inšpiráciou sú digitálne služby v UK. Za veľmi prínosné však považujem prepájanie princípov uvedených vyššie s úvahami o byrokracii, kapacite a schopnosti štátu, verejnom obstarávaní, štátnej službe, konzultantoch, zákonoch, dodávateľoch a demokracii v 21. storočí. Kniha je tak dobrým čítaním pre každého úradníka, nielen pre toho z oblasti digitalizácie. Zaujímava je aj pokračujúca práca autorky v Niskanen Center a na substacku https://www.eatingpolicy.com/
March 23, 2025
This book has completely changed the way I view government. I often think about the policies I would implement to make the United States a better place. Healthcare reform, public transit - you get the idea. What this book made me realize was that none of that matters if you cannot actually execute your policies effectively.
Through decades of well-intentioned policymaking, government has tied itself down in so many ways that it's become a pain to do anything. And when it does do things, it oftentimes fails to actually achieve its goals. We cannot get hungry people their SNAP benefits. We cannot process unemployment claims. We cannot deliver the benefits our veterans deserve. It is a technical and moral failure of the highest order.
In a more sinister vein, this has eroded the public's trust in government. And rightfully so. We pay taxes - where is all of this money going? It must just be a waste.
This enables fraudsters to go in and wreck everything in the name of "efficiency." Government is not useless. It just needs to be fixed. And it will take a collective effort on the part of all of us to make government a better place. If you are at all interested in public policy, this is a must-read.
Through decades of well-intentioned policymaking, government has tied itself down in so many ways that it's become a pain to do anything. And when it does do things, it oftentimes fails to actually achieve its goals. We cannot get hungry people their SNAP benefits. We cannot process unemployment claims. We cannot deliver the benefits our veterans deserve. It is a technical and moral failure of the highest order.
In a more sinister vein, this has eroded the public's trust in government. And rightfully so. We pay taxes - where is all of this money going? It must just be a waste.
This enables fraudsters to go in and wreck everything in the name of "efficiency." Government is not useless. It just needs to be fixed. And it will take a collective effort on the part of all of us to make government a better place. If you are at all interested in public policy, this is a must-read.
April 2, 2024
Great book and would highly recommend to anyone designing, implementing, evaluating, or using U.S. government services which is, well, most people in my sphere?
I loved that the narrative follows various people (not only policies or projects), some of whom are at odds, but all of whom are trying to do what’s best for the people they serve, at some level. There is a sense that when a government service is delivered badly there are people somewhere in the process who wanted it to fail. This book convincingly demonstrates that that is rarely the case and dives into actual pitfalls and mistaken assumptions that result in people losing trust and confidence in their government.
Overall, the chapters offered really strong examples of problems that, from another writer, I might have struggled with as technical or in the weeds. But here, challenges of contracting or user interfaces or data collection are explained clearly and in a context that ties it to the myriad decisions made throughout government (and by people outside with a certain view of what government can and can’t do).
I loved that the narrative follows various people (not only policies or projects), some of whom are at odds, but all of whom are trying to do what’s best for the people they serve, at some level. There is a sense that when a government service is delivered badly there are people somewhere in the process who wanted it to fail. This book convincingly demonstrates that that is rarely the case and dives into actual pitfalls and mistaken assumptions that result in people losing trust and confidence in their government.
Overall, the chapters offered really strong examples of problems that, from another writer, I might have struggled with as technical or in the weeds. But here, challenges of contracting or user interfaces or data collection are explained clearly and in a context that ties it to the myriad decisions made throughout government (and by people outside with a certain view of what government can and can’t do).
March 11, 2024
The hopelessly dysfunctional administrative state is this way for a reason, and it’s all pretty cynicism inducing. This information is very important for general consumption, and thankfully it is presented in a very accessible and entertaining package here. Highly recommended.
September 20, 2024
STRONGLY recommend to all my government employee pals, and everyone else too.
December 24, 2023
Must read for anyone in government or government adjacent roles.
February 7, 2024
partaking in one of my favorite pastimes - getting big mad about the government
August 27, 2024
Would recommend to anyone interested in either technology, how the us government works or both. The author does a great job telling stories and explaining the issues to the technologically challenged (me). Meant to be a call to action but almost made me less hopeful?
March 25, 2025
For people familiar with complaints about government paperwork but not what’s behind them, this book is great. Summary: throwing tech at a problem won’t solve it if you don’t have institutional knowledge and product management in mind, and simplicity will often win over complexity.
But my main concern is what is between the lines that this books - I think - leaves out: the money and time (read: money) it takes to make changes to streamline work or increase efficiency. I am not sure how many of her examples were subject to the same issues other gov agencies face, but her teams coming in and picking out projects to address does not reflect realities of enormous workloads per person, constantly shifting priorities, etc. We’d all love a chance to implement ideas - often ones we already have but just haven’t had the time and money to get to yet. Increase funding and cultivate a workforce with diverse professional backgrounds and these problems could go away with relative ease.
But my main concern is what is between the lines that this books - I think - leaves out: the money and time (read: money) it takes to make changes to streamline work or increase efficiency. I am not sure how many of her examples were subject to the same issues other gov agencies face, but her teams coming in and picking out projects to address does not reflect realities of enormous workloads per person, constantly shifting priorities, etc. We’d all love a chance to implement ideas - often ones we already have but just haven’t had the time and money to get to yet. Increase funding and cultivate a workforce with diverse professional backgrounds and these problems could go away with relative ease.
April 3, 2025
An engaging and clear breakdown of why it is challenging to do tech work within the US govt, along with some optimism and a call to action.
Shares story of tech in govt from approx 1980 onward, with emphasis on personal experience in the 2010-2024 era... Code for America, USDS, 18F, and internal shifts to existing govt orgs ...
A few major arguments:
- govt delivery is stuck in waterfall mindset.
- policy is often seen as the "real" work with lower tier operators only implementing it.
- need product owners with actual ability to make hard tradeoffs, instead of huge committees with a million stakeholder requirements
- the user is the US citizen! Not the many govt offices that are stakeholders
Reminder that there are places to do great, and meaningful(!), tech work outside VC-land.
Shares story of tech in govt from approx 1980 onward, with emphasis on personal experience in the 2010-2024 era... Code for America, USDS, 18F, and internal shifts to existing govt orgs ...
A few major arguments:
- govt delivery is stuck in waterfall mindset.
- policy is often seen as the "real" work with lower tier operators only implementing it.
- need product owners with actual ability to make hard tradeoffs, instead of huge committees with a million stakeholder requirements
- the user is the US citizen! Not the many govt offices that are stakeholders
Reminder that there are places to do great, and meaningful(!), tech work outside VC-land.
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