In this episode Stephen Goldsmith interviews Jennifer Pahlka, former Deputy Chief Technology Officer and founder of Code for America, about her new book, "Recoding America."
In this episode host Professor Stephen Goldsmith interviews Jennifer Pahlka, former Deputy Chief Technology Officer for President Obama and founder of Code for America. They discuss Jennifer's new book, "Recoding America," which focuses on how to approach big and small projects in the digital age, the challenges of government technology, and the need for a reevaluation of how we think about and invest in government. Pahlka shares insights on successful projects, the importance of collaboration between tech and policy experts, and the need to rethink bureaucratic processes to achieve better public outcomes.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
About Data-Smart City Solutions
Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
This is Betsy Gardner, editor of Data-Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. And you're listening to Data-Smart City Pod, where we bring on the top innovators and experts to discuss the future of cities and how to become data smart.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Welcome back. This is Stephen Goldsmith, professor of Practice of Urban Policy at the Bloomberg Center at Harvard University. Today we have an exciting guest, Jennifer Pahlka, who has written a new book called, Recoding America. Jennifer, most everyone who listens to our podcast will know was Deputy Chief Technology Officer for President Obama. She founded Code for America and has this great book on how to think about big projects, small projects in the digital age. Thanks for your time.
Jen Pahlka:
Thank you so much for having me.
Stephen Goldsmith:
And we're excited that you're speaking today to Harvard University students and faculty. So let's go back a little bit. I first became aware of you at the time of Code for America. Go back a step before Code for America. How did you get started in this area in the first place?
Jen Pahlka:
I worked in tech media. I don't know if anybody remembers Web 2.0 before there was Gov 2.0. That was a big thing and as that became sort of more and more commercialized, those of us working on that event and that brand, started asking ourselves, what is the highest best use of these ideas? And I think making more companies look modern or something less appealing than how would this work in government? So this was 2007, 2008, moving into '09, and everyone had said Barack Obama was elected by the internet. He was the first person to use Blue State Digital. His barackobama.com really was revolutionary, but the question that I and others were asking is, so this Web 2.0 stuff can help get him elected, but can it help him govern better?
And that was how I got interested in it. So we started doing this Gov 2.0 events and writing about it, and it was the beginning of my journey of understanding how government works now, very early beginning. I learned a lot since then, maybe more than I care to know, but that was the inspiration really for starting Code for America.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So you were working for President Obama right before you started Code for America?
Jen Pahlka:
No. I was working for O'Reilly Media and Tech Web. We were producing first the Web 2.0 events and then the Gov 2.0 events. However, I will say, Gov 2.0 was very much in conjunction with the first CTO and CIO under Obama, Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra. So they were sort of helping to shape that whole message, which was, how would you apply the principles and values of the web to the business of governing? And it was very new back then. We've learned a lot since then.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Yeah. Well, you were a pioneer, as was the president. Code for America has done so much good and has covered so much area in cities in particular. What was your original goal for Code for America?
Jen Pahlka:
I had this naïve idea that these principles and practices that I saw in action in these, what were then little companies, Facebook and Google were young then, that the way that they were building technology that was really easy to use, that scaled very quickly, could be applied to making things like child welfare or food stamps or transportation easier because you could just see, especially back at the time, the difference between using, I remember the time Flickr was my favorite thing. The difference between using that and using anything that the government had put online was just like night and day. And also quickly found out that we were spending a ton of money to put those things online in government, that we really didn't need. We're not really doing it the right way. So it was a pretty naïve idea in the beginning.
Very quickly, immediately with the first class of fellows, we learned that it wasn't just about tech helping government, it was about giving a way for people in the tech industry to understand government better, become better citizens, have potentially a pathway into public service. And we immediately learned that what I end up talking about in the book, which is that you have to be in constant dialogue with policy. The tech people and the policy people get the best outcomes when they are sitting next to each other and having a dialogue. And we saw that right here in Boston in our very first year. And that's not something I founded the organization to do because I just didn't know anything about it. But it was one of the first things we learned and built on.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I want to come back to that because it's such an important point, but before I do, give us something you're particularly proud of that one group of fellows did in some city that you find rewarding or particularly inspirational.
Jen Pahlka:
I'm still just a big fan of the project first year here in Boston where the city had changed the rules about how kids were assigned to public schools. And it took our team a couple months to stand up something that allowed the parents to put in their address, the age of their kids, whether there was a kid in another public school and give them back a map, basically showing which schools that they could at least check out.
The thing that I realized about it was the folks in Boston, Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood, who I think pretty famous in this world, they're the ones that told us if that had gone through regular channels, it would've taken two years and cost $2 million. I didn't even know that at the time. But I think more profound than the money and the time was what the head of Boston Public Schools said to our lead on that project, "You've changed our relationship with parents for the better. They believe that we can do this. They believe that now that it can be easy and simple to use," so that was pretty great.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Yeah, sounds good. Tech can produce trust if done right.
Jen Pahlka:
Yeah. And then we moved into doing projects. I think what we're known for now started in 2013, so a couple years in, where they let us work on food stamps, which is more highly regulated, lot higher risk, lots of personally identifying information, vulnerable population. And that really took the organization in this direction that it is today, working on the social safety net and in the criminal justice world.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Yeah. Well, you've done so much. I have about five hours of questions for you. We have about 15, 12 minutes left. One of your earlier answers, you touched on the need for the program people and the IT people to be working together. And it's at least widely reported that all the problems with the original health.gov website were because those two pieces were separated. So if you were a city or a state, now that your view is federal, but how would you think about putting together these big projects? You say take them apart in your book and do things practically, but how would you put together the ideal structure for addressing a big project?
Jen Pahlka:
Well, I'll give you an example with healthcare.gov, they tried to do absolutely everything from day one. They were supposed to be able to serve every single user, even though there were categories of users, it follows a long tail. It wasn't supposed to cover people who were not legal citizens, and yet there were 19, I believe, categories of green cards and immigrants that could qualify. So you're talking about people at the end of that with just a couple people in that category. If you were a tech company, you would say, "We'll get to those users later. Let's launch something that doesn't have to be a 'minimum viable product,' but that is less complex and serves maybe 75% of our users. And let the other folks go through the in-person service centers and the call centers, they can get more custom help." But because the team doing the delivery has no say in it, they're just told, "You will do this, you will do all of those things."
There's no dialogue. It's just, "These are what the people are telling us to do. We will do it all, even when we know it's not going to work," which I think is so common. They know it's not going to work, but they don't have a voice in saying, "Here's a way we could do this, that actually would work." So you can contrast that. For instance, with COVIDtests.gov, X number of years later. Biden gets into office and he wants to send COVID tests to every home. Well, of course that's not as complicated as healthcare.gov, which the insurance system is not easy. And yet they still do a beautiful job of this. The people kept saying it's 10 seconds, 11 seconds to order your tests, they come right away, a couple little glitches but really performed well.
And all over social media, people are going, "This is great. This is what government should look like. I'm delighted," really building trust. Well, that could have been a lot more complicated than it was. They could have asked for insurance information in COVIDtests.gov. They could have asked for vaccination status. They could have done a whole lot of things that would've made it a lot more than 11 seconds to use. And they didn't because Biden's team asked the delivery team to show up for the meeting before they ever made an announcement, before they made a plan. They made a plan with that team in the room. And what they allow the team to do then is what we call product management. Personally, I don't care what you call it. The difference between product management and project management is that project management is the art of getting things done. And when you have to do everything, you need a lot of project management, which is why we revere our excellent project managers in government.
But product management is the art of deciding what to do in the first place. Making those choices, yes, we could ask household size, but that's going to make it harder to administer, and we've decided on this program, speed, accessibility, ease of use, are the top priorities and we're going to make decisions towards that. They product managed COVIDtests.gov very well. They did not product manage healthcare.gov very well. Not that the people on it weren't trying very hard, and I think many of them very good, it's just that they didn't have a voice in saying, here's what we can launch that would actually work on launch date. That means that everybody who can use the website will, and everybody who can't, will go to the call centers. Instead, everybody had to go to the call centers because the website didn't work.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Really informative answer. In Recoding America, you blame a little bit, bureaucracy is bogging down the system. Why do you blame bureaucracy and what do you mean by bureaucracy?
Jen Pahlka:
I think bureaucracy is sort of maybe the solution and the problem. I think what I'm really talking about is, and when I use the word bureaucracy or bureaucrat, I say it with enormous respect. What I'm talking about that I think your audience will understand, but I think we do a bad job of communicating to the general public, is that public servants are in an accountability trap. They are supposed to make sure that they haven't done anything that was outside of the process that has been established, and yet they're all supposed to get the outcomes. And those things often don't match up. People who succeed are often succeeding in spite of the process that they inherited. They're empowering themselves to change it. They're challenging it. They're saying, "There's a lighter weight way to do that, there's a different way to do this."
And I have some examples at the end of the book of the team at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, who went through that healthcare.gov experience and said, "Never again. We're actually going to have a voice in this. You're going to tell us to do these things that sure, may sound technically, legally accurate, but results in systems that just don't make sense to people and therefore they don't work." And they found that voice and because of it, the project after the implementation of the ACA, which was the implementation of MACRA, the program was called QPP for Quality Payment Program. That project launched on time, under budget, and the users in this case, doctors, which is not for the general public, loved it. They would call the call center saying, "I must be on the wrong site. This is too easy to use." That came from making very, very different decisions.
Stephen Goldsmith:
A few more questions for you and then we'll let you get onto your presentation. I have a good friend, a guy named John Dilulio at Penn, who's written a book about bring back the bureaucrats, where he argues that we need more bureaucrats and less outsourcing. We need more professional bureaucrats.
Jen Pahlka:
I agree.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I know you do, and he's a friend, but I'm not sure I agree. So let's talk about this for a while. I inherited when I was deputy mayor for Mike Bloomberg, a troubled project called City Time. It was way over budget and it was outsourced, but it looked to me like one of the problems was that the city didn't have really high-quality program. Maybe it's product the way you used it, but didn't have really high... It wasn't managing, and there were levels of outsourcing, reporting the sub. So if you took a big system and in your book also argues for kind of taking bite-sized pieces, but if you were a mayor or a governor, you're putting together a big system implementation, how would that fit in your don't-outsource theory?
Jen Pahlka:
Well, let me first say that there are circumstances under which I would agree with you that more internal bureaucrats is not the answer. So remind me to speak to that. I think I wasn't there for city time, though I do remember reading about it.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I'm sure you do, unfortunately.
Jen Pahlka:
But what I see commonly is that we have allocated the capital expense to the project and it's a lot of money, but we don't have the proper operating expense. We don't have the right people to manage it. We go way lean on that and way fat on the outsourcing. And I think in a traditional mode, we've been saying for a long time, people have been observing this about the DOD, for instance, when they cut all the procurement people, you do need the right procurement people there, and when you go too lean on procurement, that can be a problem. I think what I'm trying to add is, there's this thing called product vision, product management, product ownership, which is, I am the agency department, whatever. I know what we're trying to achieve. I know how our systems work, and I have clear goals for this.
So often the goal is modernization. Modernization is not a goal. As a side note, one of the proof points for this is that during the pandemic, we had such a problem delivering unemployment insurance. Half of the states had modernized their systems before the pandemic. On average, those states did no better than those that hadn't modernized, because they didn't have clear goals. A great clear goal would've been, I know that this system may have to pay benefits at 10 x the rate that it does today, if there were a massive event, so maybe they didn't predict COVID. Still, none of these modernizations said, "I need to be adaptable to this. I want you to be scalable to that. These are the metrics I'm trying to go for. We would have to be able to..." And looked at the system as a whole, not just the technology, but how the people in it operate.
So when we say instead of, "I have a clear vision, I know what I'm trying to do and I have my goals." We say, "Everybody get together. Anybody in any department gets to throw their requirements in." Often these requirements are in the thousands, and then it's just the vendor's job to deliver on all of those requirements. We are abdicating responsibility to vendors in ways that result in many failed projects. You really have to get a handle on what team you have managing those vendors. I'm very much in favor of bringing certain functions in-house, so that we can outsource well. And I think that may mean that we have slightly smaller outsource projects, maybe more of them, but better ones and ones that have really clear goals and fewer failed ones.
Now where you say, we shouldn't always hire new people, and I'd love to hear why, I'll give you my reason. For example, in the book, I talk about records clearance. So people have old felonies on their records, they need to be cleared. I think so often we look at that and we say, "There's this huge paperwork process and we need to hire more people to process the paperwork." In the case of those criminal records in California that I worked on, we needed, I think we found in the end, that there were over 9,000 just in San Francisco. We didn't need to process the paper at all. Those records are simply in a field in a database, and when we finally got to the solution, it was just run an algorithm on the database to identify all of the records that can be cleared and clear them. And when we say, okay, there's all this work to be done, let's hire the people to hire them to do the work, we are sometimes missing the big opportunity.
Because the truth is, if all you cared about was the outcome, if you really wanted all 9,000 people to have their records cleared in San Francisco, even hiring a ton of people, you still wouldn't have gotten the job done. It's just too slow and there's too many parts of the bureaucracy, that have to touch it. You would've had to staff up in every single point at which that petition travels through the system to do it. So I would rather invest in the people who are going to figure out how to get rid of the whole process, instead of just hiring staffing up to meet the demand of a process that is really outdated.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, I think we totally agree on that. Automating an obsolete system is contrasted that business process, re-engineering it before you do something would be really important. Well, you're just filled with ideas that I'd love to ask you about, but I promise you I wouldn't take any more of your time. Let's go back to why our readers should buy your book. What are two things that they should get out of this?
Jen Pahlka:
Well, what I'm really hoping to do beyond talking about government technology, is to reframe how we think about government, both in our professional lives, but also with citizens. So right now, I think, it's the idea if you're an elected official, that you're a gardener and you're planting seeds in the soil. If you get a bill passed, that's a seed that gets into the soil and you hope that whatever grows out of it, provides shade or fruit or flowers for the public, and that's how you get your glory and get reelected. But too often now, we are planting those seeds and either nothing is growing or something different is growing. It's because gardeners don't just plant seeds. They also tend the soil, and we haven't been tending the soil. We've been just trying to extract outcomes out of government, at all levels, for a really long time.
The civil service is that soil in a certain sense. We need to be investing in it. If we want to get, say, better digital outcomes, we need to figure out the capacity to deliver that, not just throw on more mandates. We keep adding to mandates. We keep adding to policy and regulation to the point where the camel's back broke years ago with all of the layers of requirements and mandates. You got to start taking them away and making sure that we have the right foundation. And I hope that in fact, we start a movement where the general public is expecting that and asking that of their leaders.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well said. Well, we're with Jennifer Pahlka about her new book, Recoding America. Jennifer's one of the country's leaders in applied technology to produce good public outcomes. Thank you so much for your time today.
Jen Pahlka:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us@datassmartcities.org. Find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Steven Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.