Why does government so often fall short of its goals — or even fail catastrophically? Jennifer Pahlka, in her important new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, offers what is perhaps the most incisive explanation yet for government failure, particularly in the realm of technology. This is a book that every policymaker should read and take to heart. 

In Pahlka’s view, declining state capacity has resulted from a political culture that prioritizes politics and policymaking over implementation. And government especially falls short of its potential for good when well-intentioned policymakers fail to understand technology, pay attention to citizens who suffer the consequences of poor delivery of government services, or emphasize outcomes over processes. She writes, “When systems or organizations don’t work as you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.”

Jennifer Pahlka comes to her granular understanding of government failures through long experience with the digital delivery of government service at the federal, state, and local levels. In 2009, she founded Code for America to attract technology experts to work on public problems. In 2013, she became the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. She played a significant role in rescuing the healthcare.gov website after its botched rollout and helped to create the U.S. Digital Service. In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her to a task force to salvage the state’s unemployment insurance program when it collapsed under the weight of a tenfold increase in claims during the Covid pandemic. 

In this podcast interview, Pahlka discusses the complexity of government computer systems that become unworkable through decades of layering-on of technologies and policies, policymakers’ failure to understand why they pass laws that can’t be implemented, and the dilemma of civil servants caught between contradictory pressures to deliver outcomes while also adhering to the rigid processes on which their jobs depend. She describes how the government is caught in a hierarchical “waterfall model” of program management while the software industry has moved on to a decentralized model of agile development, and how technological developments are doomed by unworkable technical requirements that aren’t actually mandated by government policy — even though bureaucrats and contractors have come to believe that they are. And although listeners will share Pahlka’s evident frustration at the many examples of government failure that she cites, she also shares numerous examples of courageous leaders who have overcome structural obstacles and outdated thinking to deliver results and show what government can be at its best.