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.