5 questions for Jennifer Pahlka
Hello, and welcome to this week's installment of the Future in Five Questions. This week DFD interviewed Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and an Obama-era deputy chief technology officer who helped co-found the U.S. Digital Service — now known as the U.S. DOGE Service. Pahlka, the author of Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, discussed why (and how) government needs to become more responsive to feedback, why she thinks Marc Dunkelman's ballyhooed new book 'Why Nothing Works' points a way forward through 'vetocracy,' and what it would really take to integrate artificial intelligence in the government. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows:
What's one underrated big idea?
Feedback loops. They're so simple, and yet we have such trouble employing them in government. Our elected leaders are meant to get feedback, often in the form of election results, from the public, but that's a very long loop and it's very indirect. In between, we need feedback about whether policies or programs are working as intended, but the linear processes we employ don't allow for the kind of mid-stream feedback that's needed to adjust appropriately. So lawmakers might pass a law, and it gets handed down to agencies to implement, and as it descends through this complex hierarchy, a sort of game of telephone occurs, and things morph. So often, our laws and policies just don't have the intended effect.
Both policy making and policy implementation need to be renovated, and connected to each other to allow for far more frequent looping back to check that we're doing what we originally wanted. That means a lot of different feedback loops. Agencies trying things out with the people they serve, like beta versions of websites, or early tests of rules and guidance, and then adjusting based on whether the public understood and used it. They will learn from those tests, and agency implementers will also have to loop back to regulators and lawmakers for adjustments. In this model, lawmakers can exercise a very different kind of oversight — not just outrage when things don't work, but helping implementation stay on track while it's happening.
What's a technology that you think is overhyped?
I've really never understood crypto. Maybe I'll get it someday.
What book most shaped your conception of the future?
I finally read 'The Power Broker' by Robert Caro just a year or two ago, and it really helped me understand how we got so stuck in our ability to do things and build things. Robert Moses got a lot built, but he did it at too great a cost, and ruined things for future builders for a long time.
It's a book about the past, but it helps you see the cycle we're in, which points at the future. Marc Dunkelman's new book 'Why Nothing Works' picks up from there really well. We've got to dismantle the vetocracy we've created so we can do stuff again. There's so much that needs doing. We can learn the right lessons from the past and stop overcorrecting.
What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn't?
Government needs far more basic technology competence. We have to have this competence inside government. We can't just outsource everything, including our own understanding of what's possible and what we need. Of course, we'll still use contractors, but we'd use them a lot better if we had the right internal capacity. It's interesting to me that many voices for this path now come from the right, in part because they see how government is going to need to adapt to and adopt AI. You can't just let vendors tell you how to apply AI. You have to understand your own operations to know where it can help.
One of the things that competence could do is put us in a position to use AI to move faster by tackling regulatory and procedural bloat. It's exhausting trying to understand what's actually required by law and what's someone's arbitrary idea of how to comply with that law that could be made far less burdensome. Getting back to the need to build and get stuff done, AI could really help us cut through these vague notions of red tape.
What has surprised you the most this year?
The L.A. fires really took me by surprise. They took a lot of people by surprise! I live part of the year in a high fire-risk area, but it's rural, very remote and very overgrown after centuries of fire suppression. I've pretty much been expecting our area would burn for some time. I had no idea we would see that kind of devastation in an urban area. It's been so shocking. Two branches of our family, and a dear friend, all lost everything. I only hope that L.A. can rebuild more sustainably this time. Events like these really make you consider the depth and breadth of what we need to rethink.
doge at cfpb
DOGE is now spreading its gospel of efficiency at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
POLITICO's Holly Otterbein and Katy O'Donnell reported for Pro subscribers today that Elon Musk's team is now embedded at the bureau, which Republicans have not been shy about wanting to eliminate.
The CFPB's employees union, National Treasury Employees' Union 335, said in a statement, 'CFPB Union members welcome our newest colleagues and look forward to the smell of Axe Body Spray in our elevators. While Acting Director Bessent allows Musk's operatives to bypass cybersecurity policies and wreak havoc with their amateur code skills inside CFPB's once-secure systems, CFPB Union members fight to protect our jobs so we can continue protecting Americans from scammers with conflicts of interest like Musk.'
Neither the CFPB nor DOGE immediately responded to POLITICO's request for comment. In a November post on X, Musk wrote: 'Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.'
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Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@politico.com); Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@politico.com); Steve Heuser (sheuser@politico.com); Nate Robson (nrobson@politico.com); Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@politico.com); and Christine Mui (cmui@politico.com).
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The rise and fall of John Brennan
In 1980, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin saw an ad for the Central Intelligence Agency on a bus. John Brennan decided to apply, thinking that such a job would satisfy his 'wanderlust.' This month, the 'wanderlust' of John Brennan came to an end, as the former CIA director stands accused of false testimony regarding the Russian collusion investigation. Ironically, Brennan was first selected for his honesty — at least in part. During his entry polygraph, Brennan admitted that he had voted for the communist party candidate for president in 1976. He was impressed that the agency took him anyway. That honest young man seems like a faint and tragic echo of the man today. When Obama picked Brennan to be the CIA director, he had become the ultimate Democratic insider and loyalist. And it would be choosing loyalty over honesty that would prove Brennan's undoing. Newly declassified information contradicts Brennan's testimony before Congress on the origins of the now-debunked Russian collusion conspiracy theory. There is a particular focus on the intelligence community assessment commissioned by President Barack Obama in December 2016, which suggested that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump. Obama ordered the assessment after a prior assessment found no evidence of collusion or influence on the election in Trump's favor. But Obama's White House effectively quashed that finding from seasoned CIA analysts. To create a new version, Brennan handpicked new analysts, who effectively flipped the earlier finding on its head without any credible basis in the record. The new assessment relied, to a significant degree, on the Steele dossier, a widely discredited report paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign that contained unfounded allegations about Trump. In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that the Steele dossier 'wasn't part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.' In short, Brennan dismissed any reliance on the dossier. Yet in the material now declassified, Brennan is shown not just discussing the dossier but insisting upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested. Indeed, he expressly overruled the CIA's two most senior Russia experts, who said it 'did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.' Analysts were appalled by the use of the Steele dossier and complained that it 'ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.' One CIA analyst told investigators that '[Brennan] refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier's main flaws, [Brennan] responded, 'Yes, but doesn't it ring true?''Brennan expressly ordered its inclusion in the assessment. It would appear not just in an annex but in the main body of the assessment. The timeline here is important. In July 2016, Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton's 'plan' to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia as 'a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.' The original Russia investigation — funded by Clinton's campaign — was launched days after this briefing. The resulting Steele Dossier's funding was hidden as a legal expense by the Clinton campaign's general counsel, Marc Elias. So Brennan and the Obama Administration knew in advance about the planned political hit job. Yet, only months later, Brennan would intervene to force the dossier's inclusion in version 2.0 of the intelligence assessment. Unnamed officials then leaked false information to the media about non-existent intelligence implicating Trump. Keep in mind that Obama's ordering of the new assessment was occurring at the very end of his term. There was a rush to complete the report before Trump took office after defeating Hillary Clinton. The effort seeded the Russian collusion hoax that would consume much of Trump's first term. In other words, it worked. However, it required the involvement of John Brennan, as well as then-FBI Director James Comey. As time went on, Brennan continued to deny prior knowledge of the dossier. He would later become a paid contributor for MSNBC and, in 2018, insisted that he first heard 'just snippets about' the dossier in the 'late summer of 2016.' As an MSNBC regular, Brennan accused Trump of 'treason,' to the delight of the network hosts and viewers. 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Of course, the public would ultimately reject these hit jobs, not only reelecting Trump but also giving Republicans full control of Congress. Brennan may be protected from perjury charges by the five-year statute of limitations. However, he is likely to be called again before Congress and asked the same questions. Even if he is not criminally charged, his past statements will remain an indictment of his role in history. What is now clear is that high-level officials dismissed intelligence and evidence in order to create and spread the Russian collusion conspiracy as widely as they could. Their politicization of intelligence was raw and wrong. It succeeded only because it was an 'all-hands-on-deck' effort, from the Obama White House to the CIA, the FBI, and the media. The rise and fall of John Brennan is an all-too-familiar Beltway tragedy. People do not lose their idealism in this city in grand moments of corruption. It starts with small lies that steadily reduce your resistance until the biggest lies become happenstance. It can create a type of self-deception as one treats lies as a moral option for the sake of the greater good. In 'A Man for All Seasons,' Sir Thomas More is asked by his loving daughter Meg to sign a false affidavit to save his own life. More tells her, 'When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again.' In Washington, power tends to loosen fingers over time, and the truth drips out to the point that little recognizable remains. That is the true tragedy. For Brennan, what began as a young man's wanderlust ended in a quagmire of contradictions and deceit. .'
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WATCH: Gabbard's Obama bombshell has GOP demanding accountability while Dems question timing as 'distraction'
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