Recoding America

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is an investigation into the issues plaguing governmental organizations and what can be done about it.

🎨 Impressions

One thing is that even though this is a book written by a tech person, the views presented in the book were quite interesting and progressive.

Government and IT might not be a match made in heaven, but it ait impossible either.

There are a lot of problems with the government, and too many laws might be the biggest ones. Furthermore, all the laws are a mesh of special cases or edge cases that make the normal processes into a bog of bureaucracy.

I am getting more and more convinced that waterfall and agile are not about teams and how they work but more about organizational culture.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Having a felony on your record can make it very hard to get a job. Most employers won’t even consider you, and fields that require any kind of occupational licensing, from medical assistance to cosmetology, become off-limits. Former felons also can’t join the military. And it’s not just employment. With a felony record, it’s hard to rent an apartment or get a home loan. Veterans with felony convictions are denied certain retirement benefits. Students with drug felonies can’t deduct their tuition from their taxes, the way others can.

• Whites and people of color use marijuana at approximately the same rates, but people of color went to jail for it nearly four times more often, which meant that the new law would create opportunity disproportionately for white people.

• Medicare, the federal government’s medical insurance plan for seniors, has achieved remarkable success since its inception in 1965, when 48 percent of the elderly lacked health coverage. Today just 2 percent do. In approximately the same period, the United States has enjoyed a fifteen-year increase in life expectancy, in part because of the greater access to care that the program provides.

• Three months into my new job, I watched the much-heralded launch of healthcare.gov, which would administer Obama’s signature policy initiative, the Affordable Care Act. The site immediately crashed. With millions to enroll and hundreds of thousands attempting to log on at any given moment, it managed on its first day to serve a total of eight people.

• One reason these common prescriptions sound attractive is that they are partially right. More money can be useful, of course, and is often necessary—but having big budgets from the start can be deadly, since they often require an entire megaproject to be planned up front, reducing the ability of the team to learn as it goes. More modern technology can be handy—but successive layers of policy, regulation, procedure, and process that have accrued over decades encumber our digital services and make even the most modern technologies opaque and hard to use. More outsourcing can help with some aspects of service delivery, and contractors are a valuable piece of the implementation puzzle—but government can work well with these critical players only when it can bring its own basic digital competency to bear as well.

• Digital work, which in our larger society commands so much attention (whether it’s lionized or vilified), in government is reduced to an afterthought. It’s not what important people do, and important people don’t do it.

• Joe Soss, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, found in the 1990s that participating in means-tested programs—benefits that you must prove that you are poor enough to qualify for—significantly reduces the chance you will vote.

• By July 2020, the state’s unemployment insurance had paid out about $50 billion since the lockdowns began, and about 4.4 million Californians were receiving benefits.

• Applicants were calling the EDD in record numbers, but only a tiny fraction of the calls were even being answered (I would later learn it was about one in a thousand) and when calls did get picked up it was by newly hired staffers who had no training or access to EDD systems and could only encourage the callers to continue to wait.

• Spending time with frontline staff, watching them work, and asking questions about how and why they do what they do are critical.

• One reason the IRS has so much trouble modernizing its systems, for instance, is that there are over seventy-three thousand pages in the statutes and regulations the agency must implement. Between 2001 and 2012, the tax code changed 4,680 times, an average of once per day. When former IRS commissioner John Koskinen would get called in front of Congress and its members would gripe about the tax system, he would shake his head and say, “I didn’t write the tax laws, you did.” He had a point.

• The federal DOL sets the goal for timeliness of payments at 87 percent, meaning that state labor agencies get a good grade even if one in every eight workers who apply has to wait over three weeks to receive a first payment.

• Some states still using mainframes, like New Jersey and Rhode Island, paid benefits much faster than others like Florida, which had ostensibly modernized.

• The EDD in California, that’s the recomps, those claims that need to be handled manually. As long as the training manual is eight hundred pages, as long as seventeen-year veterans of the department are still getting up to speed, making the tech better will be of only marginal help. Modernizing technology without rationalizing and simplifying the policy and processes it must support seldom works.

• Lawmakers were furious at state-level bureaucrats for their failures during the pandemic, but it’s the lawmakers who have insisted on petty provisions like docking a claimant’s benefits because the person had a cold one day.

• A SURE SIGN of a waterfall organization is how the people within it treat data. In an agile, empowered organization, data is a useful tool for adjusting course. The people in the organization not only have access to data and the ability to understand it but have the power to decide what to do based on it. If the compass says you’ve drifted off course, no one summons the inspector general or calls for a hearing. You just turn the wheel.

• In a waterfall organization, on the other hand, data functions less like a compass that helps you steer and more like an after-the-fact evaluation, a grade you get that says how well or poorly you did on something that has already happened. That’s why there was such a big fight at the state assembly’s EDD hearings about how many claims were backlogged. Paula wanted the backlog to be 239,000, not the 1.2 million it was eventually assessed at, because while the difference may only have been between a D and an F, that mattered to a leader who cared about the reputation of her department. For people stuck in waterfall frameworks, data is not a tool in their hands. It’s something other people use as a stick to beat them with.

• I met a lawyer from the California state government who was providing legal advice to our team. He had filled out an unemployment application on behalf of his mother, who had lost her job when the pandemic hit in March, and provided her first name, middle initial, and last name just the way she usually signed them. But her Social Security card carried her full middle name, so her application had been flagged for manual processing. It was now September and they hadn’t heard anything back. His mother, who had had high hopes for her claim given her son’s familiarity with the state’s policies and procedures, was not very pleased with him.

• Today, if there’s any relationship between inaccuracy of the applicant data and fraud, it’s an inverse correlation.

• That number could be reduced if the EDD loosened the criteria that were flagging claims for manual processing, but Paula wouldn’t hear of relaxing what she thought of as fraud prevention practices. Those practices were not, in fact, preventing fraud. As proof, Marina’s team took claims that had been flagged for further identity verification during the previous quarter and looked at what the EDD had decided to do with them after its manual review. Out of 183,167 claims, only 804 were judged to be imposters. And even among those 804, many of them were likely to be not actually fraudulent.

• In other words, only about 0.2 percent of applicants who were flagged for identity verification turned out to be committing fraud.

• General Stanley McChrystal put it this way: “I tell people, ‘Don’t follow my orders. Follow the orders I would have given you if I were there and knew what you know.’”

• State and federal civil service rules are a big part of that system, but they are simply the expression of a culture in which fidelity to flawed rules and practices is valued more than solving problems.

• We want to do away with the waterfall, we have to learn how to recognize it. It can be hard to notice because it most often shows up not in what people say but in what they don’t say, like when Paula stayed mum about the impact of the hiring spree because she knew no one wanted to hear it.

• THE GLOBAL POSITIONING System has to be one of the most successful investments the US has ever made, and not just because GPS-enabled map apps on mobile phones have saved the directionally challenged like me from perpetually getting lost. GPS also powers thousands of critical services that we take for granted today, like routing cell phone calls, sending electricity to our homes, and enabling us to get cash from an ATM. Even stock exchange trades now rely on GPS.

• In 1983, however, the crew of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, flying from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska, made an error in their navigational calculations and accidentally strayed into the prohibited airspace of the USSR. Mistaking the airliner for a spy plane, the Soviets shot it down, killing all 269 people aboard, including Larry McDonald, a US congressman from Georgia. Recognizing that GPS could have prevented this tragedy, President Ronald Reagan directed the Department of Defense to make GPS freely available for civilian use. As a common good, it became even more powerful than Reagan could have imagined.

• THE IEEE STANDARD Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology offers two definitions of requirement in the programming context. It can be something “needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective” or something that “must be met or possessed by a system … to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed document.”

• Requirements are the foundation of software development processes in government, and the source of many of its failures.

• 30 Rock when TV executive Jack Donaghy briefly goes to work in government. He arrives at his new office to the sight of water dripping onto his desk and points out to one of his new colleagues that the ceiling is leaking. “No, it’s not,” says the colleague. “We’ve looked into it and it’s not. I’ll show you the study.”

• When Dominic tried it, he couldn’t believe it had come from the VA. He told the team it was “easy to read, straightforward, so much better.” The IEDs and the spikes were gone. But even this victory could have been short-lived. As Mary Ann and Emily suspected, Dominic had not been the only veteran who couldn’t access the previous application form. When the new form went live and worked on the vast majority of computers, the number of incoming health care applications jumped by a factor of ten. While the team celebrated, the blowback began. None of the systems that processed the applications were ready for ten times the volume. People all over the building were suddenly drowning in work, which was particularly bad because the VA was already facing fierce criticism for a myriad of other backlogs. Now there was going to be another one. Bureaucrats across the VA started calling up everyone in power: Revert to the old application form!

• The inability to apply had been largely invisible, both in the press and inside the building, but the backlog of unprocessed applications starting to build up was very visible.

• Eric Schoonover was one of Weaver’s colleagues on the OCX project. He now works for a startup defense contractor, and he has become accustomed to what he called “the weird ESB imperative.” “I’ve spent a lot of my time just relabeling presentations,” he says. “I would create a PowerPoint that described what we were doing, and then somebody would say, ‘You don’t have an ESB on here.’ So I would just relabel one of the boxes ‘ESB’ and then go through the PowerPoint again.” No one ever asked Eric which software components were using the ESB, or even if there was anything installed on the machine at all. Today, Eric’s ESBs are all fictional.

• In the business world, they say that culture eats strategy for breakfast—meaning that the people implementing the strategy, and the skills, attitudes, and assumptions they bring to it, will make more difference than even the most brilliant plan.

• The Trump administration ordered the Border Patrol to start separating detained children from their parents. The cruelty of the new policy provoked a storm of controversy, but while the debate raged, the agents were left to sort out the practical consequences of the sudden change. Reprocessing every child as an “unaccompanied minor” generated a new A number for each one. Previously, the only children to have their own A numbers had been those old enough to have made it across the border on their own, but now agents found themselves sticking Post-it notes with A numbers on infants’ onesies. Worse, the system had no provision for recording a link between two separate A numbers. Some border agents tried to keep notes connecting the A numbers of parents and children, but in the chaos of the rapid transition these were easily lost.

• Small teams work, if they have the right mindset and the right skills. And the reality was that many of the thousands of people from the thirty-four outside vendors did not have the skills.

• One of Todd’s recruits told me about finding a flaw in the code and asking one of the contractors to log in and make a change. The contractor was a member of the technical team, but this recruit had an uneasy feeling about him, so he wrote out exactly the change the contractor was to make in the code. The next day, the error had not gone away, so Todd’s group asked to look at the codebase. There was the change, just as directed—but it was preceded by two forward slashes. Two slashes before a line designated a comment, essentially a note programmers leave for the next programmer who’ll come along. The slashes told the computer not to read that line as code but to ignore it. Why did the contractor do that? “I saw other lines had these slashes so I thought I should put them in too,” he explained. This supposedly technical staff member had never written a line of code.

• Just as government’s core competency has been in contracting with vendors, some vendors’ core competency has been in getting those contracts.

• But as Jake saw, the way you get 212 questions on a form for food assistance is not concentrated power, it’s diffuse power. And diffuse power is not just an artifact of the complexities federalism can bring, with decisions delegated down to local government and then aggregated back up through mechanisms like the county consortia. The fear of having exercised too much power, and being criticized for it, is ever present for many public servants. The result is a compulsion to consult every imaginable stakeholder, except the ones who matter most: the people who will use the service. A tech leader who

• Today, Americans spend 10.5 billion hours a year—about forty-two hours per adult—on paperwork just for the federal government.

• “In the Middle Ages, government was regarded as an essentially judicial function and all its officials, including the king, were viewed as magistrates,” writes Rubin. Earlier in American history, administrative agencies in the federal government, though not medieval, were weighted toward judicial functions as well. Before the New Deal, the number and scope of things the federal government did was much smaller, and Congress could make far more of the rules that were needed.

• The United States Department of Agriculture tried this when it was about to issue a rule regarding the minimum peanut content in peanut butter. Advocates wanted it to be at least 90 percent peanuts, manufacturers wanted to require only 87 percent peanuts, and adjudicating that 3 percent difference under the formal rulemaking process took the Food and Drug Administration twelve years of the 1960s and 1970s. The case went almost all the way to the Supreme Court, and the oral hearing alone took twenty weeks and produced a 7,736-page transcript.12 (The advocates ultimately prevailed.) Since then, when Congress writes laws, it usually avoids the words “on the record” when it comes to rulemaking, leaving agencies the option to choose the informal “notice and comment” process. Unsurprisingly, it’s chosen every time. Peanut butter killed formal rulemaking.

• Judges do not seem to care about speed, whether in the courtroom or in administrative agencies. As one analysis puts it, they want agencies to practice “intensive, multipolar forms of deliberative rulemaking,” and they tend to punish them if they deliberate too little or consult too few stakeholders.

• Today, when digital professionals come into government ready to build services for the American people, they are shocked at how hard it is to build anything at all. It’s not only because the government policies they are attempting to digitize are enormously, needlessly complex. It’s not only because they have to spend so much of their time on procurement, since the actual code writing and interface design must all be outsourced. It’s not only because seemingly arbitrary aspects of their work have been wildly overspecified by distant rule makers with little understanding of the problems at hand. And it’s not only because we put the people who build vital government technology at the bottom of the hierarchy, where they have little voice or power. It’s also because the administrative agencies many of them work for were designed—on purpose—to be unable to make the kinds of decisions that good software development requires.

• To be sure, our government has always been dominated by lawyers. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on this back in the 1830s, when he wrote that “the aristocracy of America is on the bench and at the bar.” More recent commentators like Nicholas Bagley blame the profusion of lawyers for what he describes as government’s “procedure fetish”: “If all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”

• As with Medicare doctors, the more information you ask for, the more you reward administrative capacity, and the harder it is to help those who need it most.

• A researcher in the UK studied one low-income family’s interaction with seventy-three different government entities, including social services, educational supports, and interventions from law enforcement, the costs of which the government had calculated topped one million pounds annually. Though these services and programs theoretically existed to support this family and keep them safe, only 14 percent of the time public servants spent on this family involved any actual interaction with them, the rest of it being spent on tasks like reporting, data entry, and interfacing with other parts of the bureaucracy.

• Of that small fraction spent face-to-face with family members, most of that was spent collecting the data that would then be put into government systems and reports. In other words, even when they were with the family, public servants were still meeting government needs.

• The family members, unsurprisingly, experienced all of this supposed “support” as surveillance and control.

• Dave Guarino, one of the three creators of GetCalFresh, says that technocrats’ desire for a comprehensive screener is a misunderstanding of client needs. The way he recommends screening clients instead is very simple: “Made less than $X last month? You may be eligible.”

• “You know what high-precision accuracy requires?” Dave asks. “A really high-burden, complex form that starts to resemble a full application.”

• People with means can avoid the pain of many government interactions, but when we do, we are missing a chance to build empathy for those who can’t.

• When the GetCalFresh team made these choices, they were practicing a discipline called product management. It is frequently confused (especially in government) with project management, but the two are distinct, and the difference between them is crucial.

• Project management is the art of getting things done. Product management is deciding what to do in the first place—and also, as in the case of the benefit screeners, deciding what not to do.

• Mike Byrne, the guy who built the broadband map for the FCC, estimates that most government tech projects could cost 10 percent of what they do and still provide 85 percent of the functionality. I hereby dub this “Byrne’s Law.”

• Gall’s Law, named for pediatrician and systems design theorist John Gall. “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked,” Gall wrote. “A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.