Posts Tagged ‘DOGE’
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic”*…
Jennifer Pahlka— the founder and long-time leader of Code for America, the former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, the author of Recoding America, and the cofounder and board chair of the Recoding America Fund— has dedicated her life to improving governance and government services. Here, she reflects on a core lesson that she has learned…
I got into government reform sixteen years ago, though I didn’t think of it as reform at the time. I thought of it as just trying to make a few specific things work better. Since then I’ve worked at the local, state, and federal levels, on benefit delivery, on national defense, on a handful of things in between. I’ve worked alongside a lot of people whose own paths in this work have run the gamut. Collectively we’ve seen a lot. I think we’ve learned a lot about what we often call the operating model of government.
But the government we have — the operating model it runs on, the rules and structures and assumptions that shape how it hires, procures, and delivers — was built for a world that no longer exists, and the distance between that world and this one is growing. We are approaching the kind of moment when that gap stops being a management problem and becomes a true legitimacy crisis. (Many will say that moment has already come.) It’s time to start asking whether the theory of change most of us have been operating under — incremental improvements off a pretty poor baseline — was ever going to get us to a government capable of meeting fast-changing needs. It hasn’t yet, and if we don’t do something differently, it won’t.
Kelly Born at the Packard Foundation recently shared with me a framework called the Three Horizons, originally developed by Anthony Hodgson and adapted widely in systems-change work. In it, Horizon 1 is the currently dominant system. It’s functional enough to persist but failing in critical ways, especially for people with less power. Horizon 3 is the future system you’re working toward, already visible in patches of practice that embody different values and different ways of working, but far from the norm. Horizon 2 is the turbulent middle where change agents work.
But the key insight is that not all Horizon 2 work is the same. Some H2 innovations genuinely create the conditions for the new system to emerge. Call those transforming H2, or H2+. Others, however inadvertently, extend the lifespan of the failing system by relieving the pressure that might otherwise force structural change. Call those sustaining H2, or H2-. Both feel like reform, but they have very different long-term implications.
H2- work is attractive because it usually produces real value in the short run. H2+ work can take a long time to pay off, and the path is rarely clear. In a stable environment, you can get away with a lot of H2-. In an environment where the underlying system has become truly untenable, the difference between the two starts to matter a great deal. I think that’s where we are now…
[Jen describes a few projects that illustrate patterns that play out over and over in the category of H2-, the work that sustains the status quo…]
… The H2- work I’m describing has been done in good faith by people. I am one of those people. Code for America, which I founded and where I spent more than a decade, is in important respects capacity substitution. USDR, which I also helped start, is as well. The healthcare.gov rescue (which I didn’t actually work on but tried to provide moral support for) was the rescue-and-rebuild cycle. For much of the past fifteen years, the H2- path was arguably the right call. When there was no political space for structural change, demonstrations were a good way to build the evidence base and develop the field.
I think we are in a different moment now. This moment is defined by disruption. I count three kinds.
Contingent disruption — pandemics, climate events, geopolitical shocks, financial crises — is unpredictable in its specifics but very predictable in its category: large, fast-moving, high-stakes demands that fall disproportionately on government. COVID was not an anomaly. The next version won’t look the same.
The most recent disruption to federal government, however, was political. Whatever the cost of its methods, DOGE made the brittleness of the current operating model impossible to ignore and created political openings for structural arguments that previously had no traction. The reform field did not create this moment. But it can shape what comes out of it.
AI brings structural disruption. This is a transformation already underway in the material conditions of work, economy, and administration. AI creates dramatic change in both the needs and conditions government must respond to and the ways in which it can respond at the same time. Yes, I certainly mean a social safety net not nearly fit to handle the levels of unemployment that are likely coming our way, and yes, I mean possible upsets in the balance of power between agencies and the vendors they rely on, but that’s barely scratching the surface.
AI is not only an exogenous shock that government will have to absorb. It is also moving the bar on what counts as acceptable service in the first place. People are already using AI to understand their medical bills, navigate insurance denials, and draft appeals for benefits they were wrongly denied. Soon they will expect to apply for SNAP or file their taxes by uploading a paystub and answering a few plain-language questions, not by filling out even the best-designed web form. The forty-page PDF used to feel intolerable. The well-designed web form will start to feel that way too, and faster than the last transition did.
And service delivery is only the most visible piece. The same expectation shift is going to hit regulation, permitting, enforcement, how quickly an agency can respond to a new problem, how a legislature decides whether a law is working. If a small team with the right tools can map a regulatory regime in a week, the timelines we have now, in which rulemaking takes several years–or even multiple presidential terms–become indefensible. If an advocate can stress-test a policy against thousands of edge cases before it gets enacted, the standard for what counts as due diligence in lawmaking starts to move. The bar is rising on the whole surface of what government does, not just on the forms people fill out.
Not everyone wants this shift to happen. Public sector unions have secured laws in several states forbidding the use of AI in service delivery, won contracts requiring union consent before autonomous vehicles can operate, and pushed legislation mandating staffing levels that the work no longer requires — as my colleagues Robert Gordon and Nick Bagley have documented. The concern for workers caught in this transition is legitimate. But blocking government’s transformation while the world around it moves on is not a strategy for protecting those workers. It exacerbates public frustration with government, weakens the case for investing in it, and leaves the people who most depend on public services with a system increasingly unfit to serve them.
So the gap we have been measuring, between what government delivers and what the public considers a basic level of competence, is widening from both ends at once. The system is straining to clear the old bar at the same moment the bar is rising.
In this environment, the benefits systems that struggled to scale during COVID will be asked to scale again. The regulatory processes that can’t move quickly will be asked to respond to developments they weren’t designed to anticipate. The civil service system that can’t attract the people it needs now will need to attract people with skills that didn’t exist a decade ago.
If I had to pick, it’s AI that drives this disruptive moment. But I don’t have to pick. You could just as easily imagine climate shocks, or the next pandemic, or an escalation of the current war. Truly, some combination of all the above is not that unlikely. Reasonable people may disagree about the size and shape of the disruption AI will bring, but betting against disruption generally seems deeply unwise at the moment.
If you buy that argument, then we must acknowledge that a reform field largely dedicated to H2- work is not what the moment calls for. In a stable environment, H2- work that buys time for a failing system might be much-needed, and might be a missed opportunity for transformation. In an environment where disruptions of all kinds are accelerating, it becomes a compounding liability. Extending the lifespan of a brittle system just means the system eventually fails more spectacularly. More people get hurt. More people look for alternatives to democracy.
That doesn’t mean we need to throw everything out and start over. For the reform ecosystem, it means existing actors need incentives to align their work toward structural transformation, new actors with adjacent expertise need to be welcomed into the fold (especially advocates and lobbyists, given how little influence muscle the field has today), and connections need to be made both upstream and downstream of where we’ve been focused. It means articulating competing H3 visions from a wide range of ideological and practical perspectives and debating them among, including the project that sparked this line of thinking, which Kelly funded and FAI and New America are currently working on. It means designing funding and partnership structures that reward structural ambition while staying grounded in meaningful near-term progress. Funders and grantees share responsibility for creating the conditions under which a diverse set of actors can aim higher by working together, and connecting the dots upstream.
For this to work, it can’t be a zero sum game. Government capacity is wildly neglected in philanthropy despite its high leverage. (Good luck naming an issue philanthropists care about that doesn’t benefit from increased government capacity.) Could the field stop doing some H2- work? Sure. That would free up some existing resources for more H2+ work, which has been too little of the field’s mindshare and resources to date. But that is not the path forward — it wouldn’t get us where we need to be. We need more resources, full stop. We need to make the case to philanthropy for greater investment in the entire field (that’s part of what Recoding America Fund is trying to do) and make the case to government leaders, including electeds, to invest in better plumbing, so that the investment in H2+ work isn’t coming at the expense of the essential life support…
[Jen outlines some of the key principles that animate H2+ efforts, then ponders “doing different things differently”…]
… I realized early last year that while I’d spent the bulk of my career trying to drag government into the Internet Era, that work has to change now. We are entering a new era, and if those of us who fought the last fight don’t adapt to the conditions and expectations of this one, we’ll make exactly the mistake the people who resisted internet-era ways of working made. We’ll become the blockers — the ones holding on to old ways of working because that is what we are used to and that is what we are good at.
None of which means rescue work should stop, or that demonstrations are worthless, or that capacity substitution isn’t helpful and needed. Some H2- work, done deliberately and named honestly, is best understood as experimentation: we’re running it inside the failing system precisely because that’s where we’ll learn what a new operating model has to do. That’s a different kind of work from rescue that produces learning incidentally, but both can be valuable.
But the field needs a shared frame clear-eyed enough to ask, with each investment: does this move the system toward H3, or does it prolong H1? That question should be driving how resources, talent, and attention get allocated now, not because the prior work was mistaken but because the moment is different and the cost of extending the status quo is too high. There will have to be work that sustains the status quo, but what tradeoffs are we willing to make?
But insisting we ask the question does not mean that answering it is easy: there is no objective set of criteria that distinguishes one from the other. What may look like H2+ to some may seem like H2- to others, and part of that depends on your particular vision of that third horizon (more on that in the coming weeks.) Some may see work as contributing to a transformation, and therefore H2+, but towards an undesired H3 state. Grappling with how to answer this question is work we all need to be doing…
… Some things haven’t changed. The community is still full of good, smart people with enormous insight into a very difficult problem. We’ve just run out of time to do it the way we’ve been doing it. A brittle system that gets propped up through manageable shocks will eventually meet a shock it can’t survive, and we are moving into a period where the shocks are neither manageable nor hypothetical. Every H2- intervention that returns the system to “good enough” is now a bet that good enough will hold. It’s a bet I no longer think we can afford to make.
The window for H2+ work has not been open like this before. It will not stay open indefinitely.
Eminently worth reading in full.
What DOGE coulda, shoulda been: “A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform,” from @pahlkadot.bsky.social.
* Peter Drucker
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As we face forward, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that President Richard Nixon formally authorized the commitment of U.S. combat troops, in cooperation with South Vietnamese units, against North Vietnamese troop sanctuaries in Cambodia.
Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who had continually argued for a downsizing of the U.S. effort in Vietnam, were excluded from the decision to use U.S. troops in Cambodia. Gen. Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cabled Gen. Creighton Abrams, senior U.S. commander in Saigon, informing him of the decision that a “higher authority has authorized certain military actions to protect U.S. forces operating in South Vietnam.” Nixon believed that the operation was necessary as a pre-emptive strike to forestall North Vietnamese attacks from Cambodia into South Vietnam as the U.S. forces withdrew and the South Vietnamese assumed more responsibility for the fighting. Nevertheless, three National Security Council staff members and key aides to presidential assistant Henry Kissinger resigned in protest over what amounted to an invasion of Cambodia.
When Nixon publicly announced the Cambodian incursion on April 30, it set off a wave of antiwar demonstrations. A May 4, protest at Kent State University resulted in the killing of four students by Army National Guard troops. Another student rally at Jackson State College in Mississippi resulted in the death of two students and 12 wounded when police opened fire on a women’s dormitory. The incursion angered many in Congress, who felt that Nixon was illegally widening the war; this resulted in a series of congressional resolutions and legislative initiatives that would severely limit the executive power of the president.
– source
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place”*…
The last U. S. election was fueled, in some large measure, by dissatisfaction with government bureaucracies. Indeed, public trust in government has been low– among Democrats and Republicans alike– for decades; there is a wide-spread constituency for reform.
The pending answer at the federal level is an Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy-led effort, DOGE, which their comments suggest will be an accelerationist application of “business principles” and slash-and-burn reduction.
But as Kevin Hawickhorst reminds us, there is another way, one that the U.S. has successfully pursued before– one that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water…
For the federal bureaucracy, the 1940s through the 1960s are a nostalgic time. The era saw one spectacular achievement after another: from winning World War II, to building the interstate highway system, to landing on the moon. At its high point, trust in the federal government reached almost 80% in the 1950’s, as opposed to only 20% today.
Trust in the federal government has plummeted alongside the federal government’s ability to accomplish anything – which is no coincidence. Although government competence has changed for many reasons, there is one forgotten reason: after the second World War, the government was competent because it taught its managers to be competent.
During World War II, the poor management in the federal government was keenly felt. Although federal management had never been especially good, it reached a boiling point when it began noticeably impeding the war effort. The Bureau of the Budget (now OMB) responded by creating a new management unit tasked with training federal managers.
They termed their newly-developed management approach work simplification, which held that implementation and policy went hand-in-hand, and therefore managers had to be trained to streamline procedure in order to achieve policy goals. Moreover, the Bureau of the Budget felt that this viewpoint could be systematically taught to federal managers of average competence, and developed a training program to do so.
During the war, the civilian agencies were incredibly short staffed due to the draft, so any procedural red tape or poor distribution of work created instant bottlenecks. Many of these bottlenecks directly impacted the war effort, as (for example) with slow approvals for important construction projects. The Bureau of the Budget therefore began an initiative to improve management around 1942.
They conducted user research with several agencies and eventually felt they had a management system that could scale, which they termed Work Simplification. They taught managers Work Simplification at training seminars, and also created guides and pamphlets to distribute across the government. I quote from one of their guides1 that sets out the problem, the audience, and their goal:
Thinking of this sort has been going on in the United States Bureau of the Budget for some time. It has culminated in the decision to make a concerted drive to capture the best available means for exposing and disposing of common management problems, set it forth in clear, simple language, and put it in the hands of those who can use it to best advantage. And who are they? They are the operating managers of government: middle management people and first line supervisors. […]
From the standpoint of the Bureau of the Budget, Work Simplification is a method of attacking the procedural problems of large organizations by equipping first line supervisors with the skill to analyze and improve procedures. It provides a way of tapping the great reservoir of unused practical knowledge represented by this group.
… Their management agenda developed a training program for the managers closest to the ground, rather than (as is common today) focusing on top leadership…
… Although Work Simplification was developed during World War II, it was still the common approach for training federal managers into the 1960s. These were the stodgy managers of the Eisenhower era who oversaw the building of the interstate highway system, or the administration of the GI bill.
This is not how the federal government approaches management today. It would be, obviously, unreasonable to claim that earlier success was entirely due to training managers differently. But it clearly contributed – their methods explicitly aimed to solve issues that today’s processes aggravate.
In particular, the Bureau of the Budget’s work almost remarkably anticipated current conversations on government efficiency. Reformers note that the bureaucracy piles up layers of procedure without ever rethinking them – process charting taught managers to reduce procedural burden. Reformers note that government IT piles up layers of software from different eras, with nobody understanding how it fits together – process charting taught managers the start-to-finish viewpoint. Reformers note that bureaucrats rarely consider what it’s like to actually apply for benefits – once again, a failure that process charting aimed to correct.
Process charting is clearly not a perfect solution to any of these issues. But it is proof that the government can train bureaucrats to tackle these issues head-on!
The overall lessons of Work Simplification are even more important. Work Simplification’s success did not last forever, but it did last for several decades. And it achieved its success because the Bureau of the Budget created free training for low-level managers, while nobody else particularly cared.
So would-be bureaucratic streamliners today – proponents of product management thinking, agile IT development, or what have you – might imitate Eisenhower’s bureaucrats. Above all, they should prove that their proposals are a rational method that can be systematically taught to low-level managers, in order to put their “great reservoir of unused practical knowledge” to use…
How the federal government taught its managers to cut red tape: “Eisenhower’s Bureaucrats,” from @KHawickhorst.
Via Jennifer Pahlka, whose own Recoding America (and her continuing work) are powerful contributions to this critically-important dialogue.
By way of context, a piece from Venkatesh Rao explicitly about “self-help” but very useful in this broader/more systemic context: “How to Fall Off of the Wagon.” (Per the diagram below, from that post, the approach suggested above is “clockwise”; the Musk/Ramaswamy m.o., “counterclockwise”… which will make clarifying sense after you’ve read the short essay. While I can’t attribute the significance that I draw from it [for the issue of reengineering the government bureaucracies that are not serving Americans as they should] to Rao, I’d note that the clockwise direction is green; the counterclockwise, red.)
* G. K. Chesterton, The Thing
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As we fix it instead of throwing it away, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his sixth State of the Union Address to the joint houses of Congress. Eisenhower focused on three themes: a vigilant regard for human liberty, a wise concern for human welfare, and a ceaseless effort for human progress. His speech addressed the threats posed by the Soviet Union (and communism more generally around the world); urged efficient, effective government (as the government’s duty to citizens); and raised the issue of civil rights, calling for the enactment of what later became the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson called Eisenhower’s speech “a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of the problems which confront our people.”
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