---
id: "workshop:recoding-america-why-government-is-failing-in-the-digital-age-and-how-we-can-do-better"
type: "InnovateUS workshop"
title: "Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better"
url: "https://innovate-us.org/recoding-america-why-government-is-failing-in-the-digital-age-and-how-we-can-do-better"
date: "2023-09-07"
duration: "90 minutes"
language: "English"
instructors: ["Jennifer Pahlka"]
recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbAiEvUaFpc"
transcript: "automatic, from the recording"
source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)"
licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org"
---

# Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

InnovateUS workshop · 7 September 2023 · 90 minutes

Join us for a 90 minute virtual workshop with Jennifer Pahlka, former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama, founder of Code for America, and co-founder of the United States Digital Response. In her recently released book, *Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better*, Jennifer makes the case that 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 - and that government is often hamstrung by a rigid, Industrial-era culture, where policy is set from the top-down and not enough focus is placed on the details of implementation. In this workshop, Jennifer will share examples from her experiences working inside and outside of government and offer lessons learned on how we can move towards a system where we create bottom-up solutions in government, bring more people to the decision-making table, and insist on policy and process simplification to get systems that work for people in government and the residents they serve.

## Learning goals

- Hear examples from Jennifer’s experience working inside and outside of government.

- Learn how we can move towards a system where we create bottom-up solutions in government.

- Discover how to bring more people to the decision-making table.

- Learn how to insist on policy and process simplification to get systems that work for people in government and the residents they serve.

## Speakers

- **Jennifer Pahlka**, Former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Code for America

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbAiEvUaFpc

## Transcript

Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. The transcript alone: https://innovate-us.org/recoding-america-why-government-is-failing-in-the-digital-age-and-how-we-can-do-better.txt (plain text) and https://innovate-us.org/recoding-america-why-government-is-failing-in-the-digital-age-and-how-we-can-do-better.json (every segment with its start and end second).

**Unknown speaker**

[0:01](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1) Okay, Steve, on to you. Great. Thank you, Hannah. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Most importantly, thank you, Jen. Jen, I hope you can see that I'm promoting the book.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[0:17](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=17) I can, and I like that it's right next to results. Thank you.

**Unknown speaker**

[0:22](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=22) That's my little thing, but I think they're good companions. And I love the idea that you took a leave of absence to go work for the federal government. The idea of a leave of absence is often to do something even less strenuous, but you jumped right in. We really appreciate you making the time today. I really appreciate everybody making the time today. Jen, you have been super busy with getting the word out on your book. I've seen at least four different terrific interviews. I'll try to match a couple of them. This is your audience, Jen. This is an audience of people in the public sector who are all about wanting to do good work and all about knowing how hard it is to do good work. I love that your book starts in the dedication with, to public servants everywhere, don't give up. And I really appreciate that being a longtime public servant myself. So before we get into the book, I'd like to actually have you talk more about your background. And I want you to talk about two different things.

[1:39](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=99) One is Code for America in the early days, because there's some neat history there that's important for people to understand. I particularly love the city of Boston example, one, because I'm sure. And secondly, there's this neat intersection between the British government's digital services and your call with Todd Park and how you ended up taking your leave of absence. So go at those things in any way that you think make the most sense.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[2:13](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=133) Great. I do feel like I'm among my people. And I feel honestly, just honored to be here with all of you. I'm looking at all of these names and where you all are. I know some of you and not all of you, but it is the highlight of my week when I get to be with people who are doing the work you do. And yes, not giving up. That's a lot of emotion, actually, to all of these conversations. And I want to honor and feel that before we start. So thank you. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Hannah. And thanks, all of you. Code for America in the early days was a big learning experience for me. This has not been the lessons that I have learned through working with government are hard one. And I look back at 2010 me, and I feel very naive. When we did our first fellowship year, and by the way, touch Sykes is on this call, and she was one of our first fellows.

[3:19](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=199) So maybe she can wave her hand a little bit. Some of the stuff that we did working in Boston really set the pattern for work we would do in the future and really helped me understand what this work would mean. We went in to do an ambitious project on data regarding the school system and after school care and what was working and wasn't. And we never got that data. And so we never did that project. That was learning number one, you don't always get the data. But we did have a team that ultimately was able to work on a problem that was very, very present and urgent, which was the fact that Boston had changed the criteria by which students were assigned to schools in order to make schools more walkable. And the way they were communicating this information was in a 28 page printed brochure with seven point type, but they didn't help you figure out if you were eligible because it didn't tell you whether these schools were in your walk zones. And part of the team quickly took this on, put up a sort of alpha or beta or demo page essentially of this. And I believe it was 11 weeks we got something live. And it was sort of a revelation, I think, for the folks in Boston because it looked more like consumer software than what we typically thought of as government software back then, changed a lot since now.

[5:01](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=301) It went up not quite in time, but almost in time. The director of the public schools at the time said to Joel Mahoney, who was doing this project, you're changing our relationship with parents. And I hadn't thought about it that way, but it was building trust. But most importantly for me, I learned, and I didn't know at the time, that had that had to go through a procurement, Nigel Jacobs and Chris Osgood at the time told us that would have taken two years and two million dollars. And it was a small team for about 11 weeks for the original prototype that became discoverbps.org. Now I don't want to spend too much time on it because we've got so much stuff to go through, but it really wasn't the end of the story. I learned later how much that team had to have a back and forth with the policy team in Boston and how rare it is to have that ongoing conversation between people with hands on keyboards making a website that allows you to put in your address and it immediately tells you what schools your kid is eligible to attend.

[6:15](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=375) And the people who are crafting this actual policy, including the fact that it turns out that the way it was originally written did not specify whether it was one and a half miles from the home as the crow flies or walking distance. And crow flies really didn't work out for a lot of people. And so they were iterating on the policy through what they learned from the digital implementation of the policy. And the ability to just walk over to somebody and talk about it was incredibly valuable and so often not the case and really taught me a lesson, I think, about the relationship between delivery and policy. Now, at the same time, of course, it's the folks in the GDS in London who right around this time were starting this organization and they were talking about the relationship between delivery and policy as they were getting the government digital service stood up. And I'd highly recommend, though I know it's sort of a relic at this point, Mike Bracken's post at the time, the strategy is delivery. But yes, I think, Steve, you're referring to the fact that I happened to be in the GDS visiting them for the first time, having my mind absolutely blown about the ambition of bringing delivery and implementation into the center of policymaking when Todd Park called and asked me to come to the federal government. And so that was a big moment for me that led to so much else and

**Unknown speaker**

[7:52](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=472) so much growth and learning for me. Thanks, Jen. I so appreciate that you're starting off right away with this idea of policy and implementation and how they relate. And your book pays homage both to the failure of government and to the possibility of successes. I would go further and say it pays homage to the importance not just of policy, right, but of the necessary and often overlooked companions in execution and implementation. Jen, though, why did you write this book?

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[8:28](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=508) It's such a good question. I started out writing it because I felt like people on the outside, not in our circles, not folks who work in government, were asking for more cogent explanations of why things weren't working. And I was trying to answer them in sort of Twitter-length answers. Or for a long time, I felt like I was asked this at every cocktail party. And I was like, I can't give you an answer over a glass of wine, the socially accepted amount of time that someone can talk at a cocktail party. And I wanted to really dig in and not just sort of blow off the answer and do justice to the people who are doing this work and the difficulty of it. But as I wrote it, it became clear to me that there are so many people pushing this ball up this hill of trying to change not just the practices, but the structures that enable the practices of our work. And my hope with the book became that it would be read beyond the circle of people who are doing it. There's an enormous amount needed still for us all to share our learnings and support each other and hone the practices and just get better at the job.

[9:46](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=586) But we also need people outside our circle understanding what would enable this work to go better and faster and enable the kinds of collaborations that just so rarely exist right now. So I wrote it for those who could help us change the environment in which we all work. And I hope

**Unknown speaker**

[10:08](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=608) some of them are listening. Thank you for saying that because I've been trying to read into who's your audience. It's a beautifully written book, but that really helps. And having just written a book and you interviewed me on this, our audience was the inside folks. And so it's a nice companion. So let's get into the book. And I also want to say, and I don't know if everybody picked this up from Hannah, but if you have questions that you want to ask Jen, then if you could put them into the chat as we go, and we probably won't get to all of them, but we'll try to get to some of them. Jen and I will go back and forth for about an hour and try to leave about 20 minutes for your questions. So, okay. I'm going to mix things up between reading some of your excerpts, which I love Jen, and I hope you don't mind me doing that. And then asking you questions. So in fact, I think all of my, almost all of my questions are based upon a little excerpt that I'll read. So you describe an inherent hierarchy or bias in how some in government think and how in the public and the media often think about government. You say policy, this is a, you're talking about a particular situation, but policy people tend to see those who implement the policy decisions they make as being far below them in the pecking order, perhaps even at the bottom of it.

[11:53](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=713) OMB, the office of management and budget was the pinnacle of that pecking order. In other words, no, thank you. That's lowbrow stuff. That's not the kind of thing we do in powerful places in government. Why does this matter, Jen? And what do you mean by intellectuals and mechanicals?

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[12:13](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=733) Getting right at the juicy stuff, Steve. That section comes from talking about what happened when Congress was debating what became the Klinger-Cohen Act in 1996, which had originally asked Congress, sorry, in the original version, Congress was asking OMB to take a much more forward-leaning role on digital back then. Of course, the White House did somewhat later when Barack Obama came into office, but the proposed law got watered down because OMB did not want responsibility for digital. And there was a quote from, who was a wonderful man, by the way, who I have a lot of respect for, but the person who was the deputy director of management at the time saying these duties are operational in nature and therefore inconsistent with the policy role of this institution. And I think that's a completely defensible statement to make, but I do fundamentally criticize it, I think, from the standpoint of my understanding of that distinction and frankly, large distance between policymaking and its implementation as the root cause of so much of our problems. And I felt that a lot when I worked in the White House. There are good reasons the White House does not want to touch implementation, but of course, I happened to work there during the failure of healthcare.gov when there wasn't an option, it had to. And I think that situation has come up much more, but I think what you get out of that is not, oh, wow, we should fight fires, but oh, there's a different way to do this that is going to result in fewer fires. I had shared the chapter that this is in with Mike Bracken. He'd come to visit in the US, of course, many years after our collaborations

[14:15](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=855) and his mentorship of me when I was at the White House and had him read it. And he said, oh, yes, what you're talking about is this distinction that is written into the British Civil Service as dividing them amongst, between intellectuals and mechanicals. And I mean, you can read anything you want, but essentially, if that's how we think about how public service gets done, we have some serious rethinking to do that's not just, you know, how do we do agile center user centered development, because we're trying to do as user centered development, which is fundamentally about creating feedback loops within an environment, which is sort of a class system, and that class system forces a waterfall framework in which important decisions are made at the top, and the lower you go, the less you are supposed to really exercise judgment over those decisions, and you don't have that feedback loop. And that gets back to your earlier question, Steve. I'm trying to call out why it's not just helpful to sort of point fingers at implementers and say, you know, this website didn't work, or this rollout didn't work, when we're not creating the environment in which we could make them, and it is so much more fundamental than just a set of day-to-day practices.

**Unknown speaker**

[15:43](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=943) I think we've got someone who needs to mute. Yeah, just try manually muting the person. But for all of those who are not speaking, which is everyone but Steve and Jennifer, please mute yourselves until we get to the Q&A. Thank you. So there's, I'm going to pick up on this. There's, you have, I love the titles of your chapters, and I love the content. This chapter that I'm going to focus on, you've got a chapter called the procedure fetish, which everybody in any kind of government will know a lot about in terms of immediately what that means, but the way you framed it is beautiful. You start the chapter. This is you speaking. There's an old joke I used to love when I started working in software. It goes like this. A man flying in a hot air balloon realizes he is lost. He spots someone below and descends to him. Excuse me, he shouts. Can you tell me where I am? Yes, the man below replies. You're in a hot air balloon hovering 30 feet above this field. You are between 42 and 44 degrees north latitude and between 88 and 90 degrees west longitude. You must be an engineer, says the balloonist. I am the man, replies. How did you know? Well, says the balloonist.

[17:04](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1024) Everything you told me was technically correct, but it is entirely unhelpful, and I'm still lost. This is, again, you speaking, Jen. When I went into government, it was the engineers and the other digital team members who were more often on the receiving end of comments that were technically correct but entirely unhelpful. It wasn't other coders they were getting this from. It was from the bureaucrats invoking the law. This is a fundamental theorem or principle of your book. Can you give us an example? I keep thinking concrete boat,

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[17:44](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1064) but you might have another one. I think I'll share some of them that come later in the book with the stories at CMS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. First, I must say the procedure fetish, all credit to Nick Bagley. I put his article, which is well worth reading in the chat if you haven't read his article. It's absolutely his phrase, and he does a beautiful job explaining what it is and where it comes from. Yes, I talk about a team that's trying to implement the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act in 2015, and they run up against a bunch of these. I'll give a slew of examples. Actually, I bet someone from this call was on that team, so raise your hand if you were. The first one was that this is a law designed to pay doctors better for better quality care, and doctors are already quite frustrated, probably with a lot of things, but first and foremost with how confusing it is to interact with Medicare. You're supposed to put quality data in now, and it feels like it's a black hole. You never know if you've formatted it right, and it's just so confusing that they are on the verge of revolt. When the team is aware of this but starting to implement the new law, which will, of course, require a new way of submitting your quality data, which they assume will be just as confusing as the old one and will require retraining, the team is like, okay, what's the first thing that doctors have to do? They have to tell us whether they're a sole practitioner or part of a medical group, but there are nine different legal definitions of a medical group, which means the first interaction they will have with Medicare under this new scheme

[19:44](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1184) will be just like a day of legalese, basically, and the point is that those folks who are telling the delivery team, those folks within CMS, that there are nine different legal definitions of a group are much like this engineer. They are technically correct, absolutely, and they have all this arcane specialized knowledge, which is they're completely understandably really proud of. They want people to understand all of these intricacies, but it's the job of the delivery team to say, I understand why that's valuable to you, but it is incredibly destructive to the goals of the legislation, which were to improve the quality of care, and if we have a mass exodus from Medicare of doctors in sole practitioners and small practices because they don't have the administrative resources to train on this new program and they leave and people, especially in rural communities, now have no doctor to go to, we will have degraded the quality of care, and so it's pulling back to that and saying, wait a minute, we can't just stay lost. Yes, that information is technically correct, but let's pull back and actually look at the question that's being asked and deliver on that.

[21:06](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1266) By the way, read on for like six or seven more different sort of technically correct, but totally unhelpful fights that that team sort of went through in order to get to the rollout of what ended up being called the Quality Payment Program, QPP, which launched because of those fights to enormous success. Doctors were actually confused only because the site was so easy to use that they thought it couldn't have become out of CMS, and it shipped on time, under budget, and delighted its users.

**Unknown speaker**

[21:46](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1306) I think as a implementer and, you know, I don't say an experienced bureaucrat, just your phrase, technically accurate but not helpful, should be in everybody's lexicon, their weapon book, and it's a way to honor them if it's said correctly, but say, okay, now let's, how do we make it helpful? I just think that phrase alone is just super, super helpful, and I'm going to add to it. I'm just a little stickers of some of the phrases from the book, and I didn't have that one on the list, so I'll see if I can have one made, and then you can put a little sticker that says that on your laptop. Great, thank you, and I'm going to add to this. You talk about service designers and product managers, not project managers like everybody knows what they are, and we don't, and we especially don't know what they are in the public sector. It's just not a common term. I can tell you in Massachusetts state government, it's novel, and in the book, there's this quick quote, when a service designer like Natalie says, I understand it's complicated, but it has to make sense to a person.

[23:14](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1394) She's rejecting elite professional authority in favor of something more accessible, practical, and common sense. She's also invoking a historically deep-rooted notion that we, the people, are allowed to interpret law in a way that makes sense to us. What was the background here? What was happening in this situation? Why is it important? For me, this is a way to bridge

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[23:41](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1421) into, again, not a commonly understood concept, but user research and what that means and how to use that. I believe that this phrase actually comes out of that first fight that the CMS team had with some of the lawyers and regulators in the agency. Yes, I get that there's nine different definitions, but this has to make sense to a person, and they say that a lot, and I think we could all say that a lot, and it would be great. But I think it's this battle between a mindset that I quote as reclined calling, small and cramped, over-professionalized, legalistic thinking, as opposed to the more popular sense that Natalie and her colleagues and Yadira Sanchez, who I talk about later in that chapter, are saying, yes, I understand we're all very smart here, and we've learned about all these nine different definitions, but we can actually interpret those. We can say there's a lot in common amongst those nine different definitions, and with just a little bit of common sense and judgment, we can narrow those nine different definitions down, and they hoped to get to one, but they got to two. So it's really taking control, I think, away from that particular mindset and putting it in a mindset that, you know, and I talk about Larry Kramer in the book being one of the big voices on this. He talks in his book about this historically deeply rooted notion that ultimately we can't just absolve ourselves as citizens of the job of interpreting law to professionals, that it's

[25:46](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1546) important that we, the people, have it, and someone like Natalie, who doesn't understand all of that law, and she can read it and engage with them, has a voice at the table, and we can't just

**Unknown speaker**

[25:56](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1556) silence her because she's not a lawyer. Let me also talk about, I think, this is probably the place to create that definition or re-up that definition of distinction between product management and project management. Well, actually, maybe we'll do that later. So the fighter

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[26:17](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1577) pilot story that I used to get to this concept of user research is really just the story of the difference between something that is technically works but doesn't work for people. So you had these fighter pilots, this great new plane that came out that like flew really fast and had like met all the definitions of what it was supposed to do to be a great fighter against the enemy, but because the controls were so confusing, most of them were never getting into the air. You had the, you know, control for one thing that right next to the other one, and so it was really easy for the pilots to make a mistake and end up crashing this plane, and what we had thought about were the technical specs and what we hadn't thought about is what you'd call in the consumer world just a reasonable user interface. And it was two pilots in the Air Force who worked on redesigning them. So, you know, the one that got you up had the, you know, was yellow and round, and the one that you needed to not confuse it with was red and square, and you're just much less likely to make that mistake, which means that this whole world of, you know, of user research and user experience design that says, you know, what's really at the end of the day most important is can people use it, all that actually came from the government, and then we spent some time losing it, but I think in large part due to the work of all the people on this webinar, it is coming back, and I love that we can claim its roots in government and not just have to point to what everyone calls the private sector. Yes, you know, the consumer web has done a lot on that, and there's great things to learn from it, but let's actually draw on the roots of it in government and match it to our values so that it feels more and more authentic, and we feel more proud of our work.

**Unknown speaker**

[28:17](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1697) Jen, thank you. You've a whole section of your book that's called User Needs, Not Government Needs, and it follows along this beautifully, and you have a couple of laws, and then I'm going to call something else a theorem, but Byrne's law, you say, it estimates that most government technical projects could cost 10% of what they do and still provide 85% of the functionality. Then you refer to Gall's law. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. Then you've captured the extreme of these concepts in your book when a colleague described the act of translating complicated policies and rules and just plopping all of them directly onto the forms. You say they vomited, or your colleague said, they vomited the policy onto the forms. I'm going to call that the throw-up theorem, Jen.

[29:30](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1770) These two, for me, were also super helpful ways to cut through a lot of thinking and to actually have nuggets of ways to talk to people about the phrase, don't let the perfect be the enemy. The good is way overused, and yet the things that you're talking about here really get at what we're trying to do. Can you give examples of some? And of a mess. And I think you've probably given some examples of a mess, but maybe it's the CalFresh piece or some examples that you have of the simplicity here and how 85% of something at 10% is actually pretty damn good.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[30:19](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1819) This is probably the place to give my somewhat cribbed definition of product management. If project management is the art of getting things done, which is so important, and we should worship great project managers in government, product management is the art of deciding what to do in the first place. And I really blame our find-all-the-requirements, fulfill-all-the-requirements framework for putting us in a situation where we have sort of a bucket of oftentimes literally thousands of requirements that are supposed to be fulfilled to launch a new system or upgrade an old system that are just unprioritized and undifferentiated and untested with users. And because we're just throwing them all in a bucket and charging implementers with writing features that will fulfill these requirements, nobody is actually deciding what's important.

[31:20](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1880) And I can't talk about CalFresh. I think that an example everyone will get was healthcare.gov in the sense that, yes, we all know that there were problems with scalability on that site. But part of the reason healthcare.gov had such a hard time when it launched was not just all of the errors with handling the load, but the complexity of the site. And I apply Byrne's law to it by saying, if they had said, let's make sure that at launch we can handle users with these very common cases and ones who have very difficult edge cases, like very few people have this and it requires a data lookup elsewhere, etc., they would have been able to launch a site that probably either would have worked on launch or would have been able to be fixed pretty easily with just sort of the server issues that they had.

[32:24](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=1944) But we're told that you can't serve some of the people and push others to other channels for equity reasons. But the problem with those equity reasons is that you would end up serving no one. And frankly, those with really complex edge cases probably would be better served by the in-person service centers or the call centers because somebody needs to walk them through their choices and ask them, you know, clarify a bunch of questions, etc. And over time, you can add the functionality to serve those edge cases. But that is an act of product management, which can be very hard to do in government when you have lawyers saying things like, no, there can be no user who is unserved by this and then we end up serving no users. Since there are so many EDD folks on this call, I mean, I think that was part of our issue on the unemployment insurance during the pandemic.

[33:25](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2005) The legislature was harassing essentially and passing more what I considered unnecessary laws mandating that the EDD translate their site into more languages during a crisis of trying to get a backlog cleared. That was not the best way to serve non-English speakers. The best way to serve them would have been to remove a requirement that made the call center employees get permission before referring a non-English speaker to a translation service. Remove requirements, don't add them. Then do a plain language review of the site, reduce the number of questions as we did with Get CalFresh, test it for understandability in English first, then do all that again in other languages. But taking what you have that's just a big undifferentiated, untested mess and throwing more mandates on it is a road to disaster.

[34:31](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2071) And by the way, EDD folks, I blame your state legislature.

**Unknown speaker**

[34:37](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2077) So actually that question has come up a couple times in the chat and we'll come back to it in terms of how to talk to legislators and policy leaders.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[34:48](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2088) You're going to have to teach me that one, Steve. I'm still learning that.

**Unknown speaker**

[34:52](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2092) Well, that will be a great. The folks that are asking the question probably also have some great ideas in terms of how to respond. Jen, you know that we like to say people are policy for its people who have the capability and the capacity to act. I love that you've noted some really, I'll call them heroes and heroines in the book. And I'd love to meet Yadira. Could you talk about her and could you tell a little bit of her story? Because for so many of us who have been in government for decades, her story and the way you told it is really inspiring. So if you could talk a bit about her, please.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[35:38](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2138) Thank you. Yeah, getting to know her has been one of the best parts of writing this book. And of course, I did it during the pandemic, so I never met her in person until my book launch in D.C. in June and we both hugged each other and cried. It was amazing. So Yadira came to CMS as her first job out of school. And so she's been there, I think, 27 years now. And she thinks she always colored outside the lines a little, so to speak, as an IT project manager, you know, really inherently and instinctively wanting to understand what users thought of these systems. That IT was handing them, how they used it, what parts they didn't use. And I would argue that she was already very user-centered, but she wasn't exposed to terms like user-centered design or agile development until she was part of the team that helped rescue healthcare.gov.

[36:47](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2207) And she got all those terms from my boss's team, Todd Park's team that came in to help. But of course, people like Yadira deserve probably the lion's share of the credit for actually getting the thing back up again. But coming out of that, she's really energized by the awareness that these things that she was sort of attracted to instinctively are actual frameworks that are valid ways of doing software development and meeting users' needs. And she continues to partner with folks that have, you know, come over from, you know, places who have, you know, do this as their standard way of operating, including Natalie Cates, who we talked about earlier. But she's very, I'll take a moment here to say that Yadira gets very uncomfortable when I spotlight her because she is a natural servant leader and she wants everybody to know that I'm putting way too much focus on her and not enough on her team.

[37:53](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2273) So forgive me when I say Yadira and her team, she, you know, it is a larger group than that. But Yadira and her team are really convinced that after healthcare.gov, they can redeem CMS's reputation on macro, which we talked about earlier. So she's part of this group that bands together to say, I'm sorry, it's complicated, but it needs to make sense to a person. And she's gotten really good at things like agile development and sort of how to run a team that way. But I think what she's really doing that's powerful is essentially product management and forcing a feedback loop where the policymakers get to hear the unintended consequences of the words that they have written. So we talked about the nine different definitions of a group. There's another one that I think sort of sets up her approach to this, which is in the law, it states that doctors with very few Medicare patients are exempt from this new program.

[38:58](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2338) They shouldn't need to learn the whole new thing and get new software and retrain their staff. But the way the regulators in the agency are writing the requirements, it's that every doctor, regardless, who takes Medicare patients will go through it in the first year, and then they will determine who's exempt, which is going to make those doctors drop Medicare. They're going to just stop taking Medicare patients for sure. And she's like, there's just no need to do this. We can make them, we can exempt them from this program based on last year's data. It seems like such a small choice. But that's not, and many of you know, the idea that someone responsible for implementation is pushing back and sort of refusing essentially to implement a requirement that's come down from people who believe it's their job to interpret the law is a very courageous thing to do. And she continues to do it past the success of MACRA, to the point where when Congress sends her team this law that just says we're going to provide quarterly data extracts of pharmaceutical data, and she says, well, quarterly data extracts, they take us nine months to package up.

[40:16](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2416) It's very expensive, it's very time consuming, and you're only offering that ecosystem a moment in time where we live in a world where you could write an API, an application programming interface, and let people have, you know, safe access to that data on an ongoing basis for far cheaper in the long run. Why wouldn't we do that? And that's what she does. It is, I think, an unremarkable thing to do in the tech world where that just seems like the right thing to do, and a remarkable thing to do in the world of the hierarchy of government where she has literally not done exactly what Congress asked her to do to the letter of the law. But we need to highlight that and recognize that what she is doing is what Congress would have asked her to do if they'd understood the value of an API in this situation. And I've been in a lot of situations where technical folks knew that there was a better decision, wanted to implement it, and couldn't get the approval from others to, you know, create that feedback loop or sort of push back.

[41:25](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2485) And because others believed that Congress would be angry that it would evoke, you know, enormous oversight, it would just be inviting a big problem where people would, you know, essentially, you know, get everybody in trouble and then all the resources start going to handling the auditors and the oversight folks. And I totally understand that. But until we start saying that that's the kind of behavior that Congress actually wants, we're not going to help those people get to that right decision.

**Unknown speaker**

[41:56](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2516) You know, Jen, this conversation is making me think of three kinds of people whose titles start with P and how important it is that they relate to each other. The product manager, the project manager, and the policymaker. And there's a world within a world that needs to, all of that needs to be brought together to actually deliver and do things in a way that makes sense. Well, one day I hope that I can meet Yadira and you could see that she's really a servant team leader because of just how you described her. I haven't had a chance to meet her.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[42:50](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2570) She's incredibly humble.

**Unknown speaker**

[42:52](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2572) Yeah.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[42:54](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2574) Amazing.

**Unknown speaker**

[42:56](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2576) Go ahead. Focusing on tech, I've come to believe in these two concepts for success. A, talented people and being data-driven are not sufficient. Results require an understanding of how things work, a method, this is project method, and the know-how how to make it happen. B, tech might be the answer, but first define the problem. Take the time to look at the facts and determine the problem to solve. Tech alone is rarely the remedy. Take the time to understand how tech is part of the solution package. Good tech needs good operations and vice versa. A successful tech component needs an equally successful operations component. The opposite is also true. A win in one area but not the other is only half a result. How tech works and how ops works must be one. Can you comment on that and what you see as critical for successful implementation? And one of the important concepts, again, in your book that came through to me is agile versus waterfall. I love your term, up the waterfall. But can you comment on that in terms of what are the things that you think are critical for successful implementation?

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[44:15](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2655) I would agree with you that tech might be the answer. I would take that a little bit further and say tech is often not the answer. But it often helps to have people who understand what's possible within technology and can analyze data and access and analyze data to help decide what problem we're trying to solve and what are the options for solving it that often are not the development of a large system or the addition of many features. In the book, sort of at the end, I quote Cecilia Munoz, who was the head of the Domestic Policy Council when I was in the White House, who I think really saw this through her policy eyes. in the most insightful and I think correct way where, you know, we were both surrounded by people saying the problem in government is that we haven't invested in technology. That's sometimes true and sometimes blatantly untrue if we are spending billions of dollars.

[45:18](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2718) We have invested in technology. What we haven't invested is exactly in what you say, Steve, is we haven't understood the problem. We've just thrown tech at it. And so what she says is we don't need more tech. We need more tech people who can be at the table to truly define the problem correctly. So many of the other stories about Marina Nitza, who is in the first part of the book and again in the VA, that didn't make it into, you know, this book, have to do with Marina sort of short-stopping these ideas for, you know, large technology developments by just saying, you know, there's a way to do this that's very simple and needs very little tech. For instance, in the child welfare system, trying to figure out why we are losing prospective foster parents in the sort of pipeline was a matter of some degree of data analysis. And then realizing that, you know, a lot of them understanding all the actual places are falling off and removing requirements, not making some big app and having, you know, maybe we need an app to like keep them in the pipeline or explain things better. It's like, no, you don't need more things. You need less things. And understanding that retakes the skills that she has, but not necessarily developing new software, new technology. So I absolutely agree with that. And I guess to your first point, I would just add that we do need these methods, but we need much broader understanding of the reasons for these methods beyond just the technology group, beyond just contracting all, as you say, further out into the policymaking, into the operations, you know, the legal team. We need a much greater consensus about the reason we are approaching the problem with this method and how we're going to, on an ongoing basis,

[47:19](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2839) understand the problem instead of push towards a solution that has been predetermined through a requirements process. Yeah.

**Unknown speaker**

[47:32](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2852) You've said a lot in your book, and there's a lot to unpack here. We're getting close to the hour, so I'm going to ask you maybe one or two more things. And then, Hannah, I think I'll pull one or two questions. I probably missed some. But then, again, I'm taking this as a reminder for folks that if you have questions, could you please put them in the chat? And I'll grab a couple. Jen, you might see some. And Hannah, you'll keep us honest. But I was struck near the end of the book, you talk about what's different today and what's needed. You said, our digital age is different from previous eras, not because information is sent electronically instead of physically, but because technology has changed people's needs, expectations, and behaviors. And native digital practices, user-centered, iterative, agile practices allow for fast learning to keep up with those changing needs. The capacity government needs today is multifaceted. But one thing that's clear is that digital can no longer be an afterthought. Say more about what are your thoughts that are needed? And you started to do this in your previous question. But we are in a different time. You've had a boatload of experience at a whole bunch of levels. Talk more about a look forward in terms of things

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[49:10](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=2950) that are needed. I'll try to be brief because there's a lot of meat under these. But at the highest level, I am the book asking for a greater focus on talent. I'm frustrated by what I hear from folks in agencies that it's taking longer to hire, not less time, that we are still not using the assessments the way we should. I'm a big fan of the subject matter expertise qualifying assessments that OPM and USDS did at the federal level. And I hope states and municipalities use them too. I also talk about funding and oversight. There's a thing between the talent and the funding, which is this idea of, well, what the Brits would say, teams over tech. And I made much less punchy and said, OPEX before CAPEX, which means you cannot contract out well until you have the right internal team. Again, to Cecilia's observations back when we were just leaving the healthcare.gov era. But there's more to the funding piece too. I think I think many of you would agree that oftentimes implementations are doomed before they even start by the way that they're funded because we're locked into, as you say, Steve, solutions that didn't understand the problem. They're funded in such a way that we cannot learn as we go.

[50:44](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3044) Love that line from Clay Shirky that's in the book. The waterfall method is a pledge by all parties not to learn while doing the actual work. And then the third piece is oversight. I have a lot of respect for people who do oversight. I think there's a deep need for it, but the way we do it today increases risk aversion in a way that I don't think we can afford. There's many pieces of that, but my shorthand for one piece of it is, why aren't we highlighting the Adiras as much as we are vilifying the Henry Chow's? And nothing against Henry Chow. He's the one who sort of took the blame for healthcare.gov. So there's all this focus when things go wrong, but very little effort put towards elevating what good looks like. So every public servant knows 7,000 ways they can get in trouble and very few ways that they can be celebrated for the incredible work that they have done. And the oversight community needs to take responsibility

**Unknown speaker**

[51:49](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3109) for that. Yeah. Having worked both in the public sector and the private sector, this idea of know-how and examples is so important. Jen, are there... This is my last question, or maybe my second to the last question, and then I'll go to the audience. But are there examples of projects that you want to highlight that you haven't talked about in the book or jurisdictions that you'd like to highlight that people could look to for examples and go to? You mentioned a really interesting one in one of your other interviews and it made me go look there. And that was Estonia, which I hadn't heard anything about before.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[52:47](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3167) Oh, yeah. No, Estonia is amazing. I think Estonia has... And in fact, Lucas, who's the CIO there, has just done some amazing talk that I'm getting a bunch of texts about. I'm sure some of you are following this. I would say Estonia has a very different problem than we do. They don't have the same legacy policy complexity that they do as a younger and smaller country. Lots to learn from them and I think lots to collaborate with them, but I do want people to understand what's different about our problem. Two quick things I would point to, the New Jersey Department of Labor in collaboration with the Office of Innovation in New Jersey, I think is an excellent model that I would actually like to understand the mechanisms of better of this idea of OPEX to improve your CapEx. They've really invested in having some people there that mean that while they don't have a giant budget to modernize their unemployment insurance systems, they are making just visible progress at a better system kind of week by week instead of like, oh, in two years, this vendor will deliver this thing. Oh, wait, no, no, it's three years. Oh, wait, now it's four.

[54:04](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3244) So they're great. And then there's so many. And then I would just say the ongoing transformation at the VA, and I want to mention that in part because the way the book came out, I kind of talk about some of the, I guess, more depressing stories from the VA, but like check out the VA today. And is it perfect? No. Have they fixed everything? Of course not. But there is an absolute undeniable trajectory towards, I'll just say all of the things that I think make it more possible for us to serve veterans in the way that we should. And that is like not overnight. That started in 2013, and it'll take another decade. Now, that might have been the last agency I would have thought to look at for an example. So thank you. Very quickly, like during the pandemic, veterans got a text message saying you can sign up for your vaccination, click a link, couple clicks, had a vaccination appointment, about a thousand times easier than any of the

**Unknown speaker**

[55:14](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3314) rest of us experienced. And that's as it should be. Thanks, Jen. I think I'm going to go to a couple of questions, Hannah, from the audience. And I apologize to those if I'm collapsing them or if I'm butchering them. But Jen, a couple people have asked, how do you suggest we work with, influence, talk to legislators, leaders in terms of better understanding? And this is actually a lot about what your book is about. Better understanding, not to overrequire, but the importance of simplification and the importance of being clear about what you'd like some of the results to be without completely stipulating everything from when the offices should be open to, you know, on and on. But I could feel people's frustration in writing their comments about this idea of how do we talk to our legislators? And I know we aren't the first group to ask you this. So what are your

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[56:33](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3393) thoughts about that? Well, I think Allison's is getting voted up. Can we yell at them? I really want to yell at them. Sure. Let's also have some other stuff. But I wanted to yell at them several times as well. The short answer is I don't know. And I'm trying out some frameworks and hope I don't really have enough opportunities to test them to, you know, hopefully I'll have more. But like you're just going to test your messaging, right? I guess I would say two things. The metaphor I'm using recently to legislators is you think you are gardeners and that's great. But you think what your job is, is to plant seeds, which is write new legislation, plant it in the ground. And, you know, then it's the bureaucracy's job to grow it. But you are planting it in soil that is depleted. We have not paid attention to the, and I'm sorry that public servants in this metaphor become soil, but we're just going to go with it until somebody gives me something better. It is also the job of a gardener to water and fertilize and the soil, make sure that it has sun tested for its pH. And we don't do that there. It's an extractive practice of our legislators right now. They want their outcomes. They want to be able to be you know, put these bills on their websites when they're getting reelected. But they're not doing the other part of their job to make sure that the bureaucracy is set up to do that.

[58:15](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3495) And that's unacceptable. I don't think they're going to change unless I think the donor class starts asking them about this. And so whenever I meet people who donate to political candidates a lot, I kind of, I try to get this out there and we'll see if it starts spreading. But I also have asked myself many times, like, where is the public constituency for implementation? And you could frame it any way you want. It doesn't have to be in that. But you know, if our legislators don't believe that that's what the public wants from them today, how might that change? Ultimately, it will have to change because the public holds them accountable differently. And then I realized that there's like two million public servants in the U.S. and that's actually a pretty good start for a constituency. We understand the problem. And we have friends and neighbors that we can talk to about the problem. And I would wager that if every, like, House party that a, you know, state legislator has when in their reelection thing, even one person asked them about their record on implementation, their attention to the health and well-being of the civil service, that we might start to shift a little. But this is ultimately something I do not have a good answer for.

**Unknown speaker**

[59:37](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3577) Yeah. And I think the current 24 by 7 media cycle doesn't help. The current polarization in the media doesn't help. And yet, you know, and others have noted in other publications, is that a government that doesn't Word turns off more people to democracy. And I think it was in your interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter, she talked about a quote, which I'm probably not going to get right, but from our former Madeleine Albright, democracy, you know, I'm paraphrasing, democracy is a better form of government, but it has to work. And so this is a really critical thing that I think all of us should spend time on. And Hannah, this topic is a really ripe topic for this audience and the, you know, the 2 million minus the 175 people on this call who are, you know, are primed for Jen. Jen, I'm going to ask another question and then I think I'll either turn it to you or to Hannah, but a couple of comments in here talk about the possibilities and the perils of AI and the possibility of AI to quickly cut through and get at the simplification of requirements, simplification of forms. You can super, you can do translations super fast, a whole variety of very positive things for client services, delivery of services, and the potential, you know, threats of AI and other technologies in terms of threats to privatization and so forth. So

[1:01:48](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3708) I, you know, I don't know if AI was as front and center as a possibility now as I know it wasn't when you were doing your earlier work, but how do you think about it? How

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:02:02](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3722) do you think we should think about it? It depends on what we want to use AI to do. Like the fact that we have not been allowing for product management enough is not an AI problem. Like if you want to use AI to do it later and AI is good at it, I'm fine with it. The point is we don't do it. We don't let people do it. So let's start with that. I mentioned the New Jersey Department of Labor and my aha moment about AI occurred there. I was visiting and a designer was there redesigning the forms, not the forms, like the communications, emails, paper letters for, you know, people who are in the process, people whose claims are being adjudicated. We all know that if these forms are written by the lawyers or these letters are written by the lawyers, people get them. They don't actually understand what is being said. Like you need to show up at this time or you need to send us this thing. And Janice Cho was at the time sort of one by one trying to understand, trying to understand them, rewrite them in plainer English. Then she would go back to the policy team. They do a couple of rounds, like, is this accurate? Like it's simpler, but is it accurate? That same back and forth that Yadira and Natalie were doing with the policy team over the definitions of a group. And then she would, you know, make the call to action big and bold.

[1:03:30](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3810) And, you know, like then these letters would start to go out and make much more sense. You'd have higher response rates. And when I was there, ChatGPT was like three weeks old or something, or publicly available, I should say. And she was like, oh yeah, now I just feed the letters into ChatGPT with the prompt, rewrite this so I can understand it better. Still then, you know, does her own pass at it, takes it to the policy team, works it, does a couple of cycles. But she's just like, I'm getting through them a lot faster because I have this little helper here. And sometimes they're actually really good. Sometimes they're terrible, but she's smart. She can tell the difference. And what I liked about that is that is AI helping government make sense to people. What I'm afraid of, though, is, you know, going back to that over-complexity of law, policy, and regulation. We didn't talk about that so much, but I see an EDD head nodding. Thank you. Who is that? Let me see. Paulette, yes. So I tell a story at the beginning of the book of Marina talking with the claims processors at ED who kept saying, I don't know the answer to that. I'm new. I'm new. And finally, she says, how long have you worked here? And he says, oh, I've only worked here for 17 years. It takes 25 years to learn how to do this. That's not the tech. It is the almost 90 years of accumulation of policy cruft since the 1935 Social Security Act. It is so complex. So people hear that and they go, oh, well, that's so complex. Let's have AI just, you know, sort it out for us. And that is an attempt to let our public servants, and I mean our electeds and those who work for them, off the hook for the policy simplification that must happen if we are going to continue

[1:05:35](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3935) to deliver unemployment insurance. The idea that we're going to keep blaming the people who run these systems is absurd. The idea that it's going to work well in the next downturn is absurd. And while there are many, many problems, none of the other solutions to any of those problems will be ineffective if we don't do policy rationalization and simplification on this program. Maybe that means it needs to be federalized. I don't know, but I do know that pointing fingers is not going to work, and I do know that we have not

**Unknown speaker**

[1:06:13](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3973) solved the problem. Wow, I sound very energized. I'm thinking in part the way that you described the New Jersey experience can be helpful in the understanding and simplification of all of

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:06:36](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=3996) garbage and rules behind things to get to what you need. Well, to your point earlier, Steve, and to the point that Jennifer Flanagan is making, if we just say this is incredibly complex and this other stuff is incredibly complex and the AIs will work it out, we have created a government that we don't understand, and I believe that that is an incredible threat to

**Unknown speaker**

[1:07:00](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4020) democracy. Yeah, fair, fair. On multiple dimensions, including the fact that the public just won't buy it. Yeah, fair, fair. Beatrice from Spain was asking about what is your experience and what might you have done in terms of evaluating evaluation practices in the delivery.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:07:31](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4051) Beatrice, I know I just butchered that, but- Evaluation of development practices?

**Unknown speaker**

[1:07:39](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4059) No, of your... Let me just find it. If you want, I've got it here. Please, go ahead. Beatrice from Madrid asks, Jennifer, how you see the use of evaluation practices in the delivery and implementation of public services as a way to contribute to policymaking from the street level of governments? For example, initiatives like the performance monitoring of HISPs in the US.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:08:11](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4091) It's a great question and I have two conflicting answers to it, I think. The positive one is that none of this works without an ongoing feedback loop and data from users is really, really important in that. The second is that somebody pointed me to the fact that there's an actual law, I mean, we talked about Burns Law and Gall's Law, apparently there's also Goodhart's Law, somebody put up the link in if you've heard of this. I only found out about it after I was reading the book, which says basically once you declare a metric as the measurable thing, it ceases to become useful. I relate that in the book to my framework of is data a compass or is it a grade? If it's just a grade that you get after the fact and you can't do anything about it, you have a very negative relationship with it. But data, of course, can be a compass and then it has to be sort of much more real time. If it is going to be a tool in your hands as the public servant that says, oh, I can see we're going off course, let's change direction, and you can interpret that in many different ways, then it is a thing you care about and it is helping you. And if somebody wants to grade you after the fact, that's fine because you've already used it to improve the quality of the service that you're delivering. And so it really depends to me on how it's done. And I think what looks, you know, if it looks in its day-to-day use like performance evaluation is a compass in the hands of the civil servants responsible for the service, then I think it's great. If it becomes something that people are managing to that they expect to just be simply graded on, it is tends not to be as useful and in fact can be harmful because then they're just gaming towards that metric.

**Unknown speaker**

[1:10:13](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4213) Hannah, are there other questions that you want to bring up? Because otherwise, I'll, Jen, I'm going to ask you for a closing remark. So just have yourself ready for that. But is there another question? And I always like to give a few minutes back to people, Hannah, so. Yes, if it's okay, we've had fantastic questions throughout this and thank you all for using the chat and engaging with each other and sharing documents and resources. I'm going to take this moment to just put a link to our feedback survey. It's very brief, if you could just take one minute after this to fill it out. But if it's okay with you, Steve and Jennifer, if I could put a few questions that we have from earlier. And the first, which is garnering a lot of interesting back and forth in the chat was from Solis. Without legislative requirements for equity, what incentive is there for executive leadership within state government to go back and add equity, such as translation services, accessibility, cultural competency, etc. If standing up a service is prioritized over making a tool usable for historically underserved populations, how do you ensure that government goes back to people being left behind?

[1:11:32](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4292) It's a big question, Jen, but would just love to get your take on that.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:11:36](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4296) I think I understand it. There's just, there's a lot there, I guess. I feel like we should have a whole discussion group on this. I think in some cases, we're confusing equality and equity. So the idea that we, that the sort of oversimplification that I've heard from lawyers in government that say, you can't do an MVP because it doesn't serve everybody because that's not equitable, which of course, I believe results in these systems that serve no one well, and sometimes serve no one at all. You know, I absolutely don't think that we should only serve certain parts of the population and certainly those that are already well served. But I think the principle of equity is what is the right thing to meet that person's needs or that population's needs? So if you have a website, for instance, it's only in English, which you shouldn't, but if you have to have that to start, because you're going to test on, you're going to use it to test at the start of a service so that you can iterate it on a little bit with your users, and then you're going to translate it into the languages of the other users. You need to then have other channels that do meet those users' needs. And so I think it just comes back to who are our users? What are their needs? How are we meeting them? You know, in the case of, I mean, I just mentioned healthcare.gov, but actually let's do EDD, right? Like when I was working on that, unfortunately called Strike Team, which I just in the public call a task force, because strike team is such a terrible word. You know, we were getting, we never even got to this part, but we were getting tons of complaints just about how confusing the, you know,

[1:13:36](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4416) the application is, much less everything that comes after that in English. So equity, you know, so equity, you know, equity is not taking a site that people in English can't use and translating it into Spanish. Like equity is meeting the needs of the Spanish and Vietnamese and every other language that's, you know, that's prominent in California into their languages, and then having a longer term plan for creating a website that works for all of them. But in the short term, I believe the right answer was giving them great phone service with great translators who could actually help them in a way that helped them not just literally read the thing, but understand what the EDD was asking of them because they had that

**Unknown speaker**

[1:14:29](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4469) expertise. I hope that's helpful. And Celis has raised their hand. You know, before we go there, I want to, I had another take on that question, Jen, and that is not all requirements are bad. And some requirements are actually super important to get the, to break a status quo, to get at what your goals are. And so an equity goal, It can be a really important goal to state, even with some specifications. But I'll go back to Yadira. If it says, you know, thou shalt do something in four languages, it, you know, you know, four quarters, she figured out the API. If something says, thou shalt do this in eight languages, then the message there is make it available. But I want to make a distinction between, and you do this, between specification and requirements, which are really important for us to fulfill, and specifications and requirements, which are junk.

[1:15:41](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4541) And so, you know, so I'd like to put that out there. Hannah, is it okay to take a question?

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:15:50](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4550) Can I say, I also think it's both for principles and values, right? Like, can we have a shared principle and principles and values around equity, instead of trying to lock down exactly what that's going to mean when you don't know. But anyway, I'm interrupting you.

**Audience**

[1:16:05](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4565) Can I clarify my question? Is that okay? I'm so sorry to interrupt. So my question is not like that process. That process is good. I understand it. But I feel like my actual question has been missed through here. So if we do that, if we set up a tool, and then we do equity as a thing, a value we have after the fact, in my experience with government, going back and adding the equity parts has been unsuccessful, if there's not a legislative requirement around it. And I understand not having legislation be prescriptive to the point where it paralyzes an agency. Sorry, that was ableist. Anyway, where it keeps an agency from doing its mission. But how do we make sure that we are going back for priority populations, so we don't see these communities that have been historically underserved continue to be underserved, because our iterative process doesn't include them. And there's no incentive for executive leaders and state agencies to make that a priority moving forward without legislative oversight. So is there another incentive that we can give them another way we can engage with executive leadership to make sure that if we do it this way, we will guarantee that we'll go back

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:17:15](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4635) for people who are left behind by the initial product? Yeah, no, that's a great question. When they did COVID test.gov, they did that like it launched. And it was only three languages. But you know, they launched in three languages. Actually, they launched in English, but the Spanish and Chinese was up the next day. And clearly, that was a conversation that happened. Well, I know from interviewing them, the reason that site was successful is because the service designers were included way earlier than usual, they were actually spoken to before Biden announced it, which like is almost unheard of. And they were able to insert that quote, I mean, it wasn't served up as a requirement. But they were they were able to say, let's talk about what matters here. Is it going to be a lot of features? Or is it going to be accessibility, and scale? And you know, and accessibility to whom, like, you know, how much of the population are we going to be able to get? And you know, who really needs to get this. And so I do think that it does come down to having different people at the table far earlier.

[1:18:35](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4715) And that is why I think we need to essentially widen our circle of influence. I'm not trying to point at anybody for not doing it. I just like collectively, how do we communicate these things? Less on the, you know, like, you must do this exact things. And we're sort of, you know, I think committing the same sins as the legislators, but if you want the outcome, your policy or law intends not just to be able to say you did it, but that the actual outcome comes out, you are going to need to have implementation people at the table. And I think it's mostly going to come because someone like you gets asked to be there early on and you say it then and it doesn't

**Unknown speaker**

[1:19:26](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4766) have to be a requirement. It's just part of the plan. I'm going to begin to wrap us up, Hannah. And so I would, I'm going to ask everybody in the audience to think about this conversation. And it's been super rich, but either now or at the end for you, take a minute to write down one or two ideas that you got out of this that you want to think about, or you want to pursue. Because so many times we are in these kinds of conversations and they happen. And I'm trying to inject in here a small, take something that will last with you. And so, and I'm going to do it myself. So with that, Jen, what's your close for us? What's your message for us besides don't give up?

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:20:33](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4833) Well, the other part in the beginning is that David Graeber quote, which I think I can get right without looking at it, which is this, the hidden secret of the world is that it is, we make it and we could just as easily make it differently. And I know that makes change sound so easy and change is not hard. But there's another quote at the end of the book that I haven't focused on a lot, but it's power is the ability to afford not to learn. And I think there's a lot in this book that's about power. And I guess if I have a message for folks, it's that we probably need to think about how to build some power. And it's just, I know that sounds so awkward and weird, but like, if we're, you know, I think we've spent, we've all spent time in government, you know, where you have like a big ambition and then it just gets destroyed. And it's like end of the day, you're kind of like, well, we got this one little thing done. So I'm proud of that. And we should be proud of that. And we should remember that progress is incremental and we should support each other in the winds and under the weather. And we should support each other in the winds and understand that we're going to lose a lot and all of that.

[1:21:56](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4916) And let's also try to not let that dynamic keep us from asking for more. And I think what we need to ask for is more understanding of how fundamentally things need to change. And we have to have the, it has to be on us to figure out how to communicate this in ways that aren't like within our own little circles using the language that alienates others. But we do need to get out of our bubbles and we do need to have a little bit more awareness that the environment around us needs to change and it's not going to change without us. So as much as we all have too much to do, let's also set aside a little bit of our brains for how to influence the environment and do it together. And the last thing I'll just say is thank you to all of you for all that you do. It means so much to me. Whenever I see your faces, I don't know exactly what each of you work on, but I know that each one of you is touching people's lives in ways that are so much more profound than the public knows.

**Unknown speaker**

[1:23:16](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=4996) So I just want to say thank you. And I want to echo that. And Jen, a huge thank you for the effort to write the book and for the effort to be here and talk to us about it. So I'm grateful. I know that everybody here has been grateful. Hannah, back to you.

**Jennifer Pahlka**

[1:23:36](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=5016) And I just want to thank you, Steve, for your excellent preparation for this and for all the collaboration. I really appreciate it. And Hannah, thank you so much for making this happen.

**Unknown speaker**

[1:23:47](https://youtu.be/sbAiEvUaFpc?t=5027) Thank you to both of you. This has been so wonderful and enriching. And Jennifer, that was just a wonderful note to end on. So thank you to all of you for coming. We hope to see you at future workshops and have a wonderful afternoon. Thanks again, Steve. Thanks again, Jennifer. Take care, everyone. Bye.

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Original page: https://innovate-us.org/recoding-america-why-government-is-failing-in-the-digital-age-and-how-we-can-do-better · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org