Latest news with #JenniferPahlka
Hindustan Times
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Why JAM needs re-coding for robust social protection
In her book Recoding America, Jennifer Pahlka recounts her experience co-leading the Employment Development Department (EDD) task force in California during Covid-19. Covid relief was delayed by weeks due to a backlog stemming from outdated technology and rigid rules. For example, minor name mismatches could trigger a manual review, significantly delaying relief payments. We are often surprised when we first read about such systemic failures in a technologically advanced nation. But this is a global problem, a combination of technological choices, government contracting modalities, and rigid administrative processes. At a very different point in our technological journey within government, we face similar challenges in India, as a recent piece about India's first Aadhaar recipient highlights; Ranjana Sonwane received her monthly entitlements only in April, after a wait of nine months, because of an error linking her bank account to her Aadhaar. We are fortunately at an earlier starting point regarding technology in the Indian State; many of these systems for enhancing frontline welfare delivery are yet to realise their full effectiveness. At the same time, full-stack solutions are already emerging and have even matured across many states in India. The struggles of even a single citizen should motivate us to envision a more robust social protection system, especially given the maturity of supporting digital public infrastructure, such as the linkages between Jan Dhan bank accounts through Aadhaar and UPI protocols on mobile devices (JAM trinity). It is helpful to start with the fundamentals. Why do eligible citizens sometimes get excluded from receiving their rightful entitlements? As Pahlka shows us, technology is only part of the problem. Instead, a core challenge lies in how technology is designed and deployed to identify eligibility. If we begin with the assumptions that most citizens are likely to cheat to receive entitlements they do not deserve, we end up building extremely rigid processes and benchmarks that raise the administrative burden on citizens in terms of documentation, proof, and visits to government offices, that eventually only impacts the poor, educationally and technologically unprepared citizen. As a policy implementation organisation, through our work at Indus Action, we have found that it takes nearly 10 high-touch transactions, including more than three visits to government offices, to secure access to entitlements like scholarships, pensions and maternity benefits. Solving this problem requires combining new technological solutions and reframing the core problem. Let's reframe first, and adapt our strategy to one where we are comfortable living with a small degree of inclusion errors. Some undeserving citizens might get access to entitlements, but lowering the bar for inclusion will help lakhs of marginalised citizens. Technology allows us to check these inclusion errors if we think innovatively. From over a decade of work with governments across India, we have learnt that there are three key challenges in welfare delivery that new systems and technology can solve. The first is discovery: How can governments discover the eligible citizen instead of the other way around? Second, documentation: How can the government design rules and leverage existing data to validate eligibility for low exclusion/inclusion errors? And third, delivery: How can governments fast-track applications upon eligibility check and redress grievances to ensure on-time and quality delivery of entitlements? Luckily, we have enough bright spots from within India for these three significant challenges. Regarding discovery, states now have better quality information to discover vulnerable citizens. States can estimate spatial and household-level vulnerability through family ID linkage across department databases and auto-validate eligible citizens into relevant schemes. For example, states such as Punjab, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Jammu and Kashmir are providing validation tokens to workers who have finished 50 plus days of MGNREGA building and other construction jobs, making them automatically eligible for construction workers' entitlements administered by the labour department. On the burden of documentation, apart from leveraging validations of other departments (for example, birth/death registries; school-going age/grade), the rules governing eligibility can be reviewed to move towards exclusion-based targeting or targeting vulnerable households instead of individuals. For instance, all informal workers can be broadly divided into three archetypes: Farmers, construction workers and other e-Shram registered informal workers like domestic workers and gig workers. Once the family ID is linked to the key occupational information (like KAALIA ID for farmers in Odisha or shramik ID with labour departments), eligibility matching can provide a report of schemes that could be compounded to the family during crucial life-cycle moments. Finally, on the burden of delivery, we need look no further than passport seva and other government to citizen (G2C) services that have been transformed with commitments to operational excellence metrics like TATs (turnaround times) and SLAs (service level agreements). The RTPS framework and Bihar model provide the ambition for delivering grievance redress services for major G2C entitlements in all states. With the latest developments in Gen AI, it is possible to reach India's digitally unprepared citizens through voice in their Indic language, eliminating text barriers. Whether we hear about one citizen not receiving access, or view this as a systemic failure, we have a critical opportunity for learning to iterate better delivery systems and move towards universal access. We have experienced Covid-19 and find ourselves today increasingly unsettled by climate-related shocks. The next time a public health or climate emergency occurs anywhere across India, we can, through our DPI infrastructure for states, immediately release social protection grants to an auto-validated and eligible set of vulnerable citizens. This future is almost here if we act on every error to iterate on our delivery systems. Tarun Cherukuri and Rahul Karnamadakala Sharma are with Indus Action, a policy implementation organization. The views expressed are personal.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Trump never promised mass federal layoffs, and they won't fulfill his agenda, either
Leading up to the November election, the one issue voters cared about most was the cost of living. For Republican voters, immigration was a close second. Concerns about government inefficiency did not even make the list. Months into the new administration, however, one of its top priorities is improving government efficiency, and its basic approach is to reduce the size of government through mass layoffs. The assumption seems to be that the government can operate just as efficiently with fewer employees. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if our government is inefficient not because it has too many employees, but has too many employees because it is so inefficient? All of us interact with the government at different levels, and all of us know the feeling of being caught in a maze of dead ends. Years ago, my company tried to purchase one-tenth of an acre of land from the New York State Thruway Authority to put up a sign. The parcel was completely landlocked, and the authority no longer needed it. When we asked the authority how long it would take to buy the land, they said five years, which we found hard to imagine. It took over six. From start to finish, we found the process unbelievably frustrating. But we didn't come away wishing the authority had fewer employees. We came away angry that the state legislature, which established the authority and sets rules for its operation, takes no interest in how it actually works. For the federal government, Congress sets the rules. Congress may include specific rules for the executive branch to follow in carrying out its legislation, or it may delegate large areas of rule-making to the agencies themselves. Either way, the number and complexity of agency rules are key factors in determining how many people government agencies employ and whether they can efficiently deliver results. Moreover, new regulations are often layered on top of old ones without any thought of how they will work together. Another factor in making government work is the strength or weakness of its information systems. In 'Recoding America,' Jennifer Pahlka examines why high-minded policies so often fail to deliver on their goals. Sometimes, bad results are front-page news, such as the crash of when people tried to enroll in health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. More often, however, government systems deliver results in ways that are slow, confusing and frustrating, both for employees providing services and for people trying to use them. Part of the problem, again, is 'layers of policy, regulation, procedure and process that have accrued over decades,' making any technology hard to use. But Pahlka found overlaps in technology as well, with some systems dating back to the 1980s. Comparing new technologies to layers of paint, she writes that each new addition 'depends on everything that came before it, so each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies.' Over time, the layers become so complex and brittle that the paint finally cracks. For people offering tech support to the federal government, overhauling this patchwork of systems would be a good place to start. After decades of deferred maintenance, however, fixing it will not save money in the short term. Improvements will be costly, time-consuming, and will require hanging on to the few employees who still know how everything works, rather than offering blanket early retirement incentives and imposing mass layoffs. A serious effort to make government work better would begin with these two steps: peeling back layers of complex regulations and updating the technologies needed to deliver better results. Cutting jobs without taking these steps first won't create efficiencies. Instead, it will leave fewer people in place to do the same amount of work. Furthermore, sudden cuts to ongoing programs and capital projects create their own type of waste by disrupting supply chains, investment decisions and hiring commitments. Devoting so much energy to layoffs and funding cuts also takes attention away from the issues that helped decide the 2024 election in the first place. On immigration, the administration can take credit for the large drop in illegal crossings at the southern border. But on other issues, including employment-based immigration and the fate of more than 11 million people already living illegally in the U.S., public opinion is far more divided, and these problems cannot be fixed by executive orders alone because responsibility for immigration laws rests with Congress, not the executive branch. Relying solely on executive orders will leave the administration liable to claims that it is both overreaching its authority and, in a grim sort of protection scheme, shielding Republican members of Congress from voting on difficult issues. The prospects for curbing inflation are no better. Tariffs, tax cuts, reduced immigrant labor and pressures on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low all work against the promise to keep inflation in check. Recognizing the trade-offs, a frustrated President Trump said in March that he 'couldn't care less' about higher car prices. Voters who were concerned about inflation last November may not agree. Howard Konar is co-owner of a family real estate development company in Rochester, New York and author of 'Common Ground, An Alternative to Partisan Politics.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
06-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Trump never promised mass federal layoffs, and they won't fulfill his agenda, either
Leading up to the November election, the one issue voters cared about most was the cost of living. For Republican voters, immigration was a close second. Concerns about government inefficiency did not even make the list. Months into the new administration, however, one of its top priorities is improving government efficiency, and its basic approach is to reduce the size of government through mass layoffs. The assumption seems to be that the government can operate just as efficiently with fewer employees. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if our government is inefficient not because it has too many employees, but has too many employees because it is so inefficient? All of us interact with the government at different levels, and all of us know the feeling of being caught in a maze of dead ends. Years ago, my company tried to purchase one-tenth of an acre of land from the New York State Thruway Authority to put up a sign. The parcel was completely landlocked, and the authority no longer needed it. When we asked the authority how long it would take to buy the land, they said five years, which we found hard to imagine. It took over six. From start to finish, we found the process unbelievably frustrating. But we didn't come away wishing the authority had fewer employees. We came away angry that the state legislature, which established the authority and sets rules for its operation, takes no interest in how it actually works. For the federal government, Congress sets the rules. Congress may include specific rules for the executive branch to follow in carrying out its legislation, or it may delegate large areas of rule-making to the agencies themselves. Either way, the number and complexity of agency rules are key factors in determining how many people government agencies employ and whether they can efficiently deliver results. Moreover, new regulations are often layered on top of old ones without any thought of how they will work together. Another factor in making government work is the strength or weakness of its information systems. In 'Recoding America,' Jennifer Pahlka examines why high-minded policies so often fail to deliver on their goals. Sometimes, bad results are front-page news, such as the crash of when people tried to enroll in health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. More often, however, government systems deliver results in ways that are slow, confusing and frustrating, both for employees providing services and for people trying to use them. Part of the problem, again, is 'layers of policy, regulation, procedure and process that have accrued over decades,' making any technology hard to use. But Pahlka found overlaps in technology as well, with some systems dating back to the 1980s. Comparing new technologies to layers of paint, she writes that each new addition 'depends on everything that came before it, so each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies.' Over time, the layers become so complex and brittle that the paint finally cracks. For people offering tech support to the federal government, overhauling this patchwork of systems would be a good place to start. After decades of deferred maintenance, however, fixing it will not save money in the short term. Improvements will be costly, time-consuming, and will require hanging on to the few employees who still know how everything works, rather than offering blanket early retirement incentives and imposing mass layoffs. A serious effort to make government work better would begin with these two steps: peeling back layers of complex regulations and updating the technologies needed to deliver better results. Cutting jobs without taking these steps first won't create efficiencies. Instead, it will leave fewer people in place to do the same amount of work. Furthermore, sudden cuts to ongoing programs and capital projects create their own type of waste by disrupting supply chains, investment decisions and hiring commitments. Devoting so much energy to layoffs and funding cuts also takes attention away from the issues that helped decide the 2024 election in the first place. On immigration, the administration can take credit for the large drop in illegal crossings at the southern border. But on other issues, including employment-based immigration and the fate of more than 11 million people already living illegally in the U.S., public opinion is far more divided, and these problems cannot be fixed by executive orders alone because responsibility for immigration laws rests with Congress, not the executive branch. Relying solely on executive orders will leave the administration liable to claims that it is both overreaching its authority and, in a grim sort of protection scheme, shielding Republican members of Congress from voting on difficult issues. The prospects for curbing inflation are no better. Tariffs, tax cuts, reduced immigrant labor and pressures on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low all work against the promise to keep inflation in check. Recognizing the trade-offs, a frustrated President Trump said in March that he 'couldn't care less' about higher car prices. Voters who were concerned about inflation last November may not agree. Howard Konar is co-owner of a family real estate development company in Rochester, New York and author of 'Common Ground, An Alternative to Partisan Politics.'
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
She co-founded the office that became DOGE. Now, she sees ‘irresponsible transformation.'
Jennifer Pahlka is perhaps best known as the founder of Code for America, a widely respected nonprofit that helped formalize the principles of civic tech, a movement leveraging design and technology expertise to improve public access to government services and data. Notably, the organization reimagined the online application for California's food assistance program, which once had one of the country's lowest participation rates, transforming it from a 45-minute endeavor requiring a computer to a mobile-friendly process that can be completed in under 10 minutes. Pahlka's 2023 book, 'Recoding America,' outlines her views on why the government so often fails to achieve its policy goals in the digital age. In it, she argues that "archaeological" layers of policies, regulations, and processes center the bureaucracy, not the public. As a deputy chief technology officer under President Barack Obama, Pahlka helped launch the United States Digital Service, a unit within the White House that paired top technology talent with federal agencies to make government services more efficient and user-friendly. It was the predecessor to Elon Musk's 'Department of Government Efficiency,' or DOGE. On Feb. 25, 21 employees resigned from the renamed service, saying they would not 'carry out or legitimize DOGE's actions.' Pahlka believes bolstering the government's tech chops and relying less on contractors could save taxpayer dollars. However, as the administration looks to slash spending, she worries that DOGE's 'very indiscriminate' approach to date could wind up harming people who rely on public benefits such as Medicaid. KFF Health News spoke to Pahlka, now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, about what she sees as 'irresponsible transformation' and how best to fast-track government reform. This interview, conducted in mid-February, has been edited for length and clarity. A: It's really easy to look from the outside of government and say, 'That's crazy it works that way. I'm going to go in and fix it.' And when you get in, it's that way for a reason, and you gain so much more empathy and sympathy for people in public service. You realize that people who you thought were obstructionists actually are just trying to do their jobs. Civil servants deserve respect. We're just not transforming government fast enough. A: One, you have to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. You also have to be able to reduce procedural bloat. When the unemployment insurance crisis hit, every state's labor commissioner got called in front of the legislature and yelled at for the backlog. Rob Asaro-Angelo in New Jersey brought boxes and boxes of paper — 7,119 pages of active regs. And when they kept yelling, he kept pointing them to them and saying, 'You can't be scalable with 7,119 pages of regulations.' The third pillar is investment in digital and data infrastructure. And the fourth is closing the loop between policy and implementation. In California, you get thousands of bills introduced every year in the legislature. We don't need that many. We need legislators to follow up on bills that have already been passed, see if they're working, tweak them if they're not. They need to go into agencies and say, 'If this is hard for you to do, what mandates and constraints can we remove so you can make this a priority?' A: When we started working on California's SNAP application, it was 212 questions. It started from, 'What are all the policies that we need to comply with?' Instead of, 'How would this be easy for someone to use?' I think it can always be helpful to have fresh eyes on something. If those eyes have experience in consumer technology, they're going to see through that lens of, 'How do we deliver something that is easy for people to use?' A: Let me say what I hope for: I hope that the states now get that when we don't transform fast enough in a responsible way, you are inviting irresponsible transformation. I hope this gives governors and mayors all over the country a kick in the butt to say, 'Whatever we have done so far, it has been insufficient. We really need to work on the capacity of our state to deliver in a modern era.' A: Maybe there is good stuff that DOGE is doing now that I don't know about or good stuff that they will do in the future. I don't have a crystal ball. But I do see that there is a huge difference between illegally stopping payments without Congress' permission and making an IT system work better. A: I think the thesis that better technology could reduce waste, fraud, and abuse is sound, but you want to see both better use of technology to ensure that taxpayer dollars aren't wasted, and that people who need their benefits are going to get them. You need a North Star that includes both of those things. A: They have not expressed great care for what damage can happen to people who rely on benefits. I'm just seeing large, very indiscriminate cuts. They have signaled that government needs its own internal tech capacity and that it's shocking how reliant on contractors our government is. I would agree with that. We have a very dysfunctional government technology contracting ecosystem. There's this set of big firms that we've outsourced our technology to that get to charge taxpayers a shocking amount of money to implement changes. A: We've overrelied on the idea that we should bring people in from the outside and underinvested in helping career civil servants to do transformation work themselves. When I wrote my book, the biggest hero was Yadira Sánchez, who I think now has been at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for 25 years. She's a leader who really pushes for the kinds of decisions that are going to make a service for doctors that's going to be usable. She gets pushback and comes back and says, 'If you make that decision, we are going to alienate doctors. They're going to stop taking Medicare patients. And we've got to do it this different way.' We need more of her, and we need to empower lots of people like that. This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. KFF Health News is the publisher of California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. This story was originally featured on
Politico
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Politico
5 questions for Jennifer Pahlka
Presented by 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.' post OF THE DAY The Future in 5 links Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@ and Christine Mui (cmui@
