Jennifer Pahlka
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
I'm Jennifer Palka. I wrote a book called Recoding America, Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
I work with governments, state, federal, and local, to increase their capacity to achieve their policy goals. I founded a nonprofit that helps state and local governments do all that stuff.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
I served on the Defense Innovation Board trying to help the Defense Department be better. I do stuff like that. I write a lot. I write a sub stack called Eating Policy.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
My superpower is translating between different languages, but not actual languages.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Yes, intra-English translation. The theme of my life is sitting at the boundary between things and being able to tell people on each side of the boundary what the other is talking about and helping them see it from the other person's perspective or community's perspective.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
When I started Code for America, we had people who came in primarily from the tech industry. 2011 was our first year, so it was very much like the startup world. And then you had people in city government. And they have very different assumptions about what work looks like, how you serve the public. The tech industry folks started to understand why government works the way it does.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And the government people getting, oh, these folks are bringing a different approach.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
There's a whole bunch of reasons that it can get more sludgy and more complicated in government. We have Congress and the executive branch. We have federalism. So any sludge problem can implicate state, local, federal, tribal, and a private sector. I completely agree with all the people who come up and tell me, but my big company I work for is just as bad as government.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Well, it is frustrating and it is slow, but it is different because you don't have Congress as your boss. But I think actually what matters more is not our big corporations or government more sludgy, but that government is a monopoly. And so it just matters more.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Yes. And when government systems fail, they're the only system. When a company can't get its product on the shelves, there's a different company there to fill in. Child welfare, unemployment insurance, Medicare, the tax system, it's the only one.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
So I was there trying to stand up the USDS when healthcare.gov had its failures and my boss got pulled into helping get the site back up and running.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
The HHS inspector general wrote this report that details so many things that were wrong that you're like, that's just everything. And I don't think that the IG was wrong in any of the things that they listed. But the thing they didn't list that I think needs to be said is. is that we have this concept in consumer tech called a product manager.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And it is always confused in government because it sounds like project manager. There are thousands of project managers in every department, agency, whatever. And until recently in government, there were zero product managers. So what's the difference? Project management is the art of getting things done.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And there's so much to do in government that we have amazing project managers and lots of them. But product management is the art of deciding what to do. Healthcare.gov just tried to do all the things. It didn't have somebody who was empowered to say, I don't think we can launch a system this complex that handles this many edge cases and have it work for everyone on day one.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
In Silicon Valley, you would never do that. It doesn't have to be Silicon Valley. Anywhere in the country that's launching technology that needs to work for people, that needs to be usable, scalable, and reliable, you just don't do that. You start with a small set of users who sort of help you work out the bugs, and then you add more, and then you add more.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
The people who did propose that at the time were told that it was illegal. that for equity concerns, you have to serve everyone equally. Well, we served no one for a while.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And I think we need to have that idea of what is it that we're actually deciding to do and then empower someone to make those choices instead of say, here are literally thousands of requirements and have them all work the first day that the site launches. I mean, it's, in retrospect, insane. And I wish...
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
that the IG had that language, but instead they look at the different ways that the project management went wrong instead of questioning the whole assumption in the first place.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
You had 10x, 15x spikes in the volume of applications for unemployment insurance. Every state developed a pretty big backlog, which is a real crisis because if you are four months into having no job and your unemployment check isn't there, you are running out of money to eat. It looks like just a problem of a computer system, but unemployment insurance dates back to the 1935 Social Security Act.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
What happens is that we add requirements and process and procedure and law and regulation every year to that program. It comes from the federal government. It comes from the state. It comes from the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch. It's all additive and it's never subtractive.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
One commissioner of labor in New Jersey, Commissioner Osirio Angelo, when he was called up in front of the legislature to explain why they had a backlog, he brought the 7,119 pages of regulation that he's supposed to comply with, put them on the table and said it's a little hard.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
It's very hard because the incentives for legislators in particular is to add. We think we want elected leaders who are going to write bills. We think that's their job. I think their job is actually different. I think their job is to create the conditions under which government agencies can succeed.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Changing incentives is very difficult and involves the public having a different view of what they want out of their electeds. But we now have large language models that can help us sort through those 7,119 pages. Five years ago, if you said to a legislative assistant, your success is going to be doing something with that pile here, they literally couldn't.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
It's too complex to actually understand and then to rationalize and simplify.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Yes. In a best case scenario, magic wand thought experiment, it would actually give you not only what the regulation should look like, but it would write the legislation that repeals the stuff that needs to be repealed.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
You need not just political will, but you need to counter the interests of the status quo. There will always be someone who says, wait, if you simplify it, this person might be out of a job or this vendor might be out of a job. Or we think that one of the things you're proposing to take out is a safeguard that's important for this constituency or this consideration.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And I'm not saying that those interests, particularly for safeguards, are wrong. We do need safeguards. The problem is that oftentimes we have so many safeguards that government just can't move forward.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
There are safeguards meant to prevent fraud. When I started working on it in 2020, none of those safeguards prevented fraud at all. In fact, they were enabling fraud. There's a lot of safeguards around things like technology development, where you have to do things in a very prescriptive way. You are supposed to have your plan set up.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
entirely in huge detail up front before you ever start coding anything. There are requirements for security. Security is a good thing. We need security. But the way we prescribe security is over-detailed and keeps security professionals from using any judgment. It's a whole set of compliance regimes around
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
These interlocking issues like technology, like labor, like how you communicate with the public that all come together to create gridlock.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
I think that in many government processes, they have gone so far towards just following rules. And for reasons that we should talk about, right? There's real incentives for that that the public helps create. But we've now tried to design processes in which you cannot criticize the judgment of anybody in them because literally no judgment was used.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And the outcomes of those systems are almost across the board poor.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Companies are going to complain about that probably a little disproportionately to how much it really is government's fault. But it's certainly true that that happens, that sometimes government imposes regulations that it doesn't quite understand the implications of.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And one thing I kind of want to insert in the dialogue is that it's really in how you design the implementation of those regulations that matters.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Well, both, right? There's a thing in consumer technology of just testing with users. And we don't do that. This is the thing I wish policymakers would do more of. And I've seen them do it recently. People are starting to pick this up where they say, OK, this is what we think the regulation needs to say.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Now let's go show it to people and see what they heard, first of all, because very often they'll be like, but we didn't write that. And then what is it going to look like when it's actually hitting the user, so to speak, when it gets out in the real world? And then they can go, oh, oh, oh, oh, I see. Because we said this, you have to do that. Oh, we can do that in a different way.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
That's part of what I mean by closing this policy implementation loop is that If you can get out there and test it first, you will end up finding ways to make that same regulation less burdensome. The dialogue right now assumes a sort of one-to-one relationship, like this amount of regulation will be this amount of burden, when in fact,
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Designing things thoughtfully and testing them thoroughly in the real world can mean a lot less burden on both the companies and the end user for the same kind of benefit of guardrail.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Let me pull apart two parts of that. One is there hasn't felt like there's many solutions. This has been a sort of intractable problem. But I think we're in a particular moment where the models are so broken and people are so frustrated that we have an opportunity. Plus, we have new tools at our disposal.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Plus, there's significant changes in government, like the Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright, which is going to force change. Now, that change could be awful, but it is going to force a change, for instance, in how the executive and legislative branches work together. And nobody knows what that looks like. And so we have an opportunity to shape it towards a better model.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
And governments everywhere are going to have fiscal crises now. There's just all of these things coming together that I think hopefully are going to kick us out of that malaise of just adding policy and procedure and being frustrated with bad outcomes.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
The way we frame the problem is the how of government. Everyone's focused on the what. The what is the bill you pass that says we're going to do industrial policy or we're going to give people incentives for solar panels or we're going to do financial aid for students in this certain way. The how is all of the plumbing of it that's gotten jammed up with sludge.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
So if you want government that can actually achieve its policy goals, You have to have four things. You have to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. You have to reduce the procedural bloat or accretion that we talked about. You have to invest in digital and data infrastructure. And you have to close the loop between policy and implementation. Thank you. Thank you.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Freakonomics Radio
628. Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?
We've now tried to design processes in which you cannot criticize the judgment of anybody in them because literally no judgment was used.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
One of the reasons is that the way to change things sustainably is to help agencies change themselves. And so while the United States Digital Service has and I think will at least for some time continue to take folks with fantastic digital expertise and put them in agencies and help them do things differently, you really, at the end of the day, can't do it for them anymore. forever, right?
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And in fact, what you're doing when you go into those agencies is finding people who already were really hungry for different ways of doing things. And so they have been quite quiet about their many successes
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
in part because the successes needed to be the agency's successes, in the sense that when an agency works with USDS on something like, say, online passport renewal, which rolled out several months ago and has been quite successful, it's successful because of the combination of both the new approaches that the USDS brings in and the willingness and ability to
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
and energy by, in that case, the Bureau of Consular Affairs to say, yes, we're going to adopt these new ways of working.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And in fact, in the best case scenario, they don't just adopt them for the project they're partnered on, but they take that into other projects and say, we're going to use new tools, new approaches, and we're going to start doing things fundamentally differently across the board.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
It's hard for me to know exactly what it will be because I only know what they've said about it. They did rename the U.S. Digital Service, the U.S. Doge Service. The people who work at USDS who are mostly, you know, assigned out to agencies doing great projects, some of them are still doing that. I mean, it's only been a week, but they're still doing that.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And I don't see any reason why Doge would say, hey, you who are working on... modernization at the Social Security Administration, you don't do that anymore. Like, that's still very, very important work. They've also stated that there will be a team of four that goes into each agency that's a DOGE team.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
That sounds like it's separate, I think, from whatever agencies have USDS staff attached to them at the moment. And those teams from DOGE will have a team lead, a lawyer, an HR person, and an engineer And it sounds like what they're meant to do is sort of a full-scale review of how that agency might be more efficient. They've said they intend to look at staffing cuts.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
They've also said they intend to look at reducing – the regulatory load, essentially. Like, there are a lot of regulations that agencies both put out, but also regulations that sort of constrain what the agencies can do in their own operations.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And I think it'd be great, actually, if the Doge teams looked at that and said, these are some ways that we might change these regulations to make the agency able to move faster and serve the American public better.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
somewhere there's already a doge clock counting down savings that I have heard of. Two trillion, they've even acknowledged, is not remotely possible without Congress really taking the axe to programs that the American public really cares about. So I don't think that's going to happen. What I heard when I saw that and then
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
saw that they rolled it back is that they're going to learn a lot and they're going to have to learn it quickly. And anybody who comes in from outside government thinks that they know how to change things. In fact, I was one of those people. And I spent now 15 years learning how much harder it is than it looks. And I think I've also hopefully spent 15 years figuring out things that do work.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And I hope they can figure those things out because they have more power than our existing USDS. And they have very, very strong backing from the executives. So I hope they learn very quickly.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Well, there's some signals he's giving that I think I've sort of sent a general thumbs up on, which is things like it's probably a pretty good use of advanced technologies like large language models. to go in and say, let's try to understand the law as it exists, the regulations as this agency is subject to, and figure out what's really serving us and what's not.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Because we are subject to really decades, even centuries, of regulatory cruft. Now, I'm not talking here about taking the shackles off of private industry, which I think is also an interest of his, and I know he's spoken quite a bit about because he's subject to those. I'm talking about the shackles on the administrative state that make it hard for it to move.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
He's going to bring some new tools to the table to be able to understand that stuff better. I think he could shake things up in a way that could be good. It could be good in the hands of this current administration. It could also be really good in the hands of others who have competing goals.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Where I think he and his colleagues are going to have trouble is it's really easy to walk in and say these people, because what they're doing, frankly, often does seem kind of crazy, right? Like, if you don't know how bureaucracy works, you really just don't see how many barriers exist, how many hoops people have to jump through.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And it's easy to say these people must be stupid or bad because they're jumping through these hoops. They didn't put those hoops there. Congress did, or the agency did, or the executive branch did. And I think there's almost always an arc from judging civil servants to having a lot of empathy for them. And I hope he follows that path.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Trump has come out the gate very aggressively in his first week in office, but in ways that I believe are only the tip of the iceberg. I think that he and the people around him, most notably people from Silicon Valley, have very grandiose ambitions to reshape the federal government. And we are seeing the beginning of those plans being put into action, but not yet anywhere near the end.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
That's one of the things I try to point out when people say, you know, this is the same thing with big companies. All bureaucracies are the same. And the skills that you might have changing a company can be used on government. Yes, some of those skills are relevant, but we only have one government. We only have one Social Security Administration. We only have one IRS.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And in the marketplace, if a company fails, another company takes its space. And that doesn't happen in government. And people get hurt.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Elon Musk has been installed at Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is in practice a rebranding of the United States Digital Service. It got a mission statement, which is about modernizing government technology, but it's been pretty quiet so far from them. We don't know exactly what they're up to yet. But...
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Musk's efforts are being undertaken in concert with various other appointees at other agencies who have been much more aggressive getting started very quickly. So the most dramatic stuff so far has come from the United States Office of Personnel Management, OPM. This is kind of like a sleepy, process-minded agency that oversees the federal civil service government.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
benefits, HR, practices for hiring, and not generally an action center for big, controversial policy fights within the American government until now. So let me go through a Instruction that almost all remote work has to end and federal employees must return to government offices five days a week.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
They called for the names and information of any employees who have been employed for less than a year because that's called probationary status and they are easier to fire. They took various moves instructing agencies to reclassify certain positions that had career civil service protections as not having those protections anymore, making it easier for Trump to fire many civil service workers.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And they also, as part of Trump's executive order rolling back DEI programs across the federal government, OPM said that all federal employees working on DEI must be placed on paid administrative leave immediately.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
They even sent out a note to federal workers saying that if you are aware of any DEI programs that since the election have been renamed something else in an effort to kind of disguise or hide them, tell us now.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
So we're really seeing something we haven't seen before, which is OPM being used as kind of an instrument of control, of intimidation, an effort to instill fear into federal workers, perhaps to convince some to quit, perhaps intimidate. scare some straight in Trump's view to make them less inclined to defy him in any way.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
And it's also worth mentioning that the newly installed chief of staff at OPM is Amanda Scales, who was just recently working at XAI, which is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company. So that's why a lot of people think what's happening at OPM is part of this larger Elon and the tech right effort.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
I think we are seeing the beginning of what will be a pretty wide-ranging project to really take aim at the federal government to dismantle the way it works and perhaps to build it back differently. And I think there are a few different motivations from different people involved in the MAGA coalition behind this project. First, you have Trump himself.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Trump views the permanent civil service as kind of a deep state that is reflexively anti-Trump, hostile to him, inclined to investigate him, inclined to say stuff he's doing is illegal or immoral or can't work. He wants to have greater control over the executive branch.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
He wants employees not to leak against him, not to resist what he's trying to do, and not to raise pesky concerns about potential corruption or the legality of his policies. So... That's Trump. Second, I'd say, is the longtime conservative coalition that's been defined by hostility to government and wanting to scale back government. Less regulation, less bureaucracy.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Government is hostile to big business and so on. Then, third, I would look at several of the very wealthy Silicon Valley figures who have endorsed Trump in 2024 and who are deeply involved in Musk's Doge project. You know, if you are someone who...
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
funds startups from Silicon Valley or has run them, you are used to looking at the way things work, the existing system, and it looks to you like it's very inefficient, bloated, ripe for disruption. There are sort of understandable reasons to believe this. There are many dysfunctional things about the way the federal government works. A lot of people have very legitimate frustrations with it.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Of course, the approach of many in Silicon Valley is to kind of move fast and and break things, shake things up, and establish something new. So I think part of that is what's going on too. But then there's also a fourth motivation from some other figures on the tech right that I think is really important here.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
For this, I think we should look at the words of Mark Andreessen, who is a big venture capitalist guy, very close to Elon Musk, has been involved in Doge's planning and hiring of people for it. And so... Here's what Marc Andreessen posted on X this Sunday. The long 20th century was 1915 to 2024. The 21st century starts in 2025. He's like viewing this in grandiose historical terms.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
He wrote that about laying off federal employees? I think the ambitions are broader than that. He goes on that the unifying theme of that long 20th century was managerialism, systems at scale run by expert managers credentialed by elite institutions. A method now increasingly exposed as ineffective, corrupt, moribund, stagnant, rotten, demoralizing and demoralized. Time for change.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Andreessen recently appeared on a New York Times podcast, and he said they have plans for how to pull on three different threads, the federal government spending, the money, but also the headcount and the staffing side.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
They are at least thinking about stuff on the scale of FDR level change. And I don't think we yet know exactly what they're going to do. We don't have anywhere near the full scope of it, but they're shooting for the moon. They're not coming at this like they're going to make minor incremental changes.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Oh, there's going to be tons of challenges in court. Some are gearing up already, it's clear. Trump tried to fire the inspectors general, positions within agencies that are in charge of investigating malfeasance or misconduct. But there's a law that says that he can't do that in that particular way. But I think what we're going to find out is...
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
How much can Trump and his people, how much can they do and make it very difficult for anyone else to undo later, even if they get a slap on the wrist from the courts later on? I think we're seeing that they are going to push the limits of their executive authority as far as they can go. They've already done several things that seem clearly illegal and illegal.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
likely doomed for court rebuke, but they don't seem to care about that very much. And they think right now what's important is pushing ahead as hard as they can while they have the chance.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
This is Today Explained. I'm Jennifer Polka. I'm a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the author of Recoding America.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
Well, the subtitle is Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. And it looks like a tech book, but it's really about how government just needs to kind of move into the modern era more generally.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
I think it's more I wish Democrats had been as bold. Hmm. As they are being, I do think that there is enormous work to be done. I am going to remain optimistic as long as I can that the Trump administration will do that work in a way that has long-term positive impacts.
Today, Explained
Trump’s government purge
I came to federal government in 2013 to be part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. I was actually recruited to run a fellows program, but what I told them I wanted to do, and in fact they were already thinking about doing, was really upending the whole approach to technology and service delivery.