Become a sustaining member
of the Commonwealth Club for just $10 a month. I hope you all buckled up
and this is going to be a wild ride because there's so much to cover,
especially in Jen's book. Because Jen Parker
is one of the greatest change agents I've ever met to making sure
that government actually works for you. And so absolutely it is well-said. That being said,
by the greatest change agent. So. Well, let me get. Playing. Of all the amazing things you've done. A, you founded Code for America,
a nonprofit that makes sure government is for the people,
by the people in the digital age. You not only did that, you co-founded the US digital response
in the wake of COVID to help governments
respond more quickly to critical needs. You were Chief
Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the United States
establishing the US Digital Service. And what people don't realize about that,
you did that at great expense to your family to serve
your daughter was in high school at that time and you were traveling back
and forth to D.C. You were also on the Defense Innovation
Board for both President Obama and President Trump to help
to transform the Department of Defense. And you chaired Gavin Newsom's
strike team on unemployment insurance during the pandemic,
much of which we're about to get into. And you've won
so many incredible accolades about this. And as was previously mentioned,
you know, being also named
as one of the most important policy books for anybody to actually
to really understand how government works. And so thank you for being here
at the Commonwealth Club and congratulations on the book. Let me start with with one of the favorite quotes
I hear you say, and it just always sticks for me
and something I find myself repeating,
which is government is who shows up. What does that mean
and why is it so important? I think it's really easy
to be frustrated with government. Many of us are pretty frequently. It's also easy to forget all the great things that government does
that becomes invisible. But it's a lot more meaningful
to get in there and figure out how to make it work
than it is to complain about it. And I think people who go to work in
government haven't and haven't worked there before are often
shocked at the ways in which they get to make the decisions. That is a sort of corollary saying,
you know, decisions are made by those who show up
and you really do have a chance to shape government
if you're if you're willing to to dig in. Well, how did so how did you become one of the people
who showed up or and continues to show up? Where did that come from? You know, my first job out of college,
I worked for a child welfare agency and ended up working in media. We were doing the Web 2.0 conferences back
when. That was a big thing with my now
husband, Tim O'Reilly, and it was sort of recognizing
the power of that sort of second wave of the Internet,
participatory, lightweight, the things that moved for it
quickly and really worked well for people that we realized that the best application of those principles
and values would be in government. I mean, that's really the thing
that's supposed to work for all of us. And so when Obama was Obama's success in being elected
was sort of credited to the Internet. Several of us
sort of started to say, okay, well, if it could help him get elected,
can it help him govern better? And that was really the beginning
of my journey to, you know, realizing that we could
we could bring people in, get them involved, people who had not thought
about government work before. And that was the beginning of Code
for America. And as you were going along
and starting Code for America and starting to
talk about with government, you know, for many people out there, it's the first U.S. government is maybe we go to the DMV,
maybe we we try to we try to pay our taxes. We get frustrated with these forms
oftentimes or other services. We wait in a line. What was that? Talk to us a little bit about
what was that moment you realized, like we can actually do something different as you're interacting
with these government agencies? I think the the first moment
I really realized this was was going to work
was the first year of Code for America. We had a team of fellows program
doesn't really rely on fellows anymore, but when we started it was a year service
year program essentially, and we had a team
working with the city of Boston and they had a problem
where they'd changed how kids were allowed to choose,
or the parents were choosing the schools for the kids. So they were trying
to make it more walkable. And the city had a really big problem
sort of communicating this because the way they normally communicated
it was a 28 page printed brochure
in sort of eight point font. You know, this all about these different
schools, but it didn't help, you know, if the school was in your walk zone,
it was really a mapping problem. And so these these wonderful technologists
and designers that were working with the city
that year got together and they made, you know, a pretty simple website
that allowed you to put in your address and the age of your kid
and whether there were kid any siblings in another public school. And it would tell you
which schools your kids could go to. And they you know,
they did it in about eight weeks. And when they were when they were able
to show it to their partners in Boston, you know, they were just blown away. And they said if if you had done this
through normal channels, it would have taken at least two years
and cost at least $2 million. But now we have it for parents now. So that much faster, at almost
no cost, really. And it works. They like using it. It look like a consumer application
instead of a government application. And the head of the Boston Public Schools
said, you know, you just changed our relationship
with parents. It's and I think that was when I started
to realize this isn't just about cheaper. This isn't just about, you know,
make it look like Twitter or something. You know, I had very naive ideas,
I think, back then about what
I thought would make a difference. It is about people's
relationship to government and whether they believe government
is really there for them or not. And imagine not having that for two years
you know two years been rolling kids through. Note without without
a map to help them out that that's when it really started
to become meaningful for me. So you know, that was almost 15 years ago. Oh, was it? Well, and the reason I bring this up
and I wanted to start talking about your entry point
is you know, over that arc. You've. Seen so many things and you've done
so many things in government. And the culmination is,
is in this fantastic book. Yeah. What led you to this moment? To write the book
and give a very, very unvarnished take on what it actually takes
to make things work in government? Well, I have been on a journey
from thinking we just need better tech and government to realizing that
it is something much deeper than that. And I have seen so many people
fighting the fight to get the right outcomes for people not not just a better website,
but it's not the website that matters. It's whether you get your SNAP benefits,
it's whether veterans get their benefits. It's whether we get the vaccinations
out to the people and they're all fighting for the system to work for people. And I wanted to explain to the American public,
to our elected leaders, to anybody who cares what needs to change
for them to be able to succeed. Now they are increasingly succeeding,
but it's still a really uphill battle. And I and I really want the people who
have the power to change the environment in which these fighters are fighting
and make it easier for them. So I'm trying to, you know, get past
preaching to the choir and talk to those who can make this
make a difference for them. Mm hmm. Well, let's take a particular
let's take one of those problems and dig in to one of them,
because I think it's so helpful to see because so many times
they think we think of government, as I mentioned earlier,
go to get our driver's license. Maybe we need to pay taxes like we touch
only a little bit of government. Oftentimes, you know, especially from
many of us come from a privileged place where we don't have to deal with or need
or require other services. But you really go
into the details of this. Could you pick one of the ones
that you find that really showcases you would wish the American public and our
audience out there to really understand that's easy. We were all very frustrated
in that first year of COVID that the unemployment insurance systems in every state buckled under the load. I mean, it was quite an increase. And, you know, many places
tenants sometimes for more than that number of applications. Just this is because of stay at home
orders, people having layoffs. Yes. And then now need to now qualify
for benefits federal government gives. It says states you have a ton of money
to give out and that's. You have a ton of money to give out and you have a ton of people
who are suddenly unemployed. And neither unemployment
insurance benefits. And many of them really it's
not a nice to have it to have to have and waiting to get them their checks
in a reasonable amount of time and as Ken mentioned, that Governor Newsom asked me to co-chair
a strike team with the secretary of government operations,
Yolanda Richardson, and brought in some some other folks
to help and go really be on the ground. And I think one of the things
people don't realize is you've just got to see the systems
from the bottom up in order to be able to understand
what's going wrong. Now, when we came
in, the governor and the legislature and everybody had said, obviously,
this is a big problem. Throw any resources we can at it. They had brought people back
that were tired, but more importantly, they had hired about 5000 people
to come help process these claims. And I think they were missing something
important there, which we learned through my colleague Marina Nitze was there on the ground working with these claims
processors day after day. And one of them is
she would ask them all sorts of questions. One of them said to her, you know, I kept saying, I'm
the new guy. I'm not quite sure
how to answer that question. Let me go ask the other guys. And he said that enough times. She finally said, Well,
how long have you worked here? And he said, Well,
I've only worked here 17 years. The folks who've worked,
who really know how this system works,
have been here for 25 years or longer. Now, this wasn't somebody who knew
how the technology worked. It wasn't the back end coders. It was a claims processor. That is how complex the policy
and regulations and processes that govern unemployment
insurance in California are. It's California is not unique,
if you think about it. Unemployment insurance derives
from the Social Security Act of 1935. So since 1935, you have federal and state. You you have the judicial, legislative
and executive branches all piling on changes
and changes over time. And nobody ever goes back and says, okay,
this is what the rules look like. Now, this is this is what may mean. In fact, you know, I'm fond of saying people think
that there's like a binder of regulations. There is no binder. There's just a steady stream of changes
for what's now almost 90 years. In fact, if the new state joined the union tomorrow and went to the federal Department
of Labor and said, Great, give me the rolls,
we're going to set up a new system. They literally cannot tell them
there's there's literally no binder. And that's the complexity
with which our public servants and. You expect 5000 new people to learn it
just like that to process. So you so the
when you realize that's happening this was Marina's immediate insight was if it takes 25 years
to learn how to do this, what are those 5000 people doing? Well, not only were
they not able to help process claims, but they were taking up the time
of the experience claims processors. And they were the bottleneck, obviously. I mean, certain
number of claims can only be handled by, you know, actual claims process. They're not going
to go through the automatic sort of assembly
line that we were hoping to get more on. And because of that,
every person that the state of California hired to speed processing slowed down processing of claims. And you just look at that situation,
there's nobody in there trying to make this hard. There's no one intentionally saying,
let's not give people their unemployment benefits. Except in the state of Florida. Well, that may be true. Florida is a unique situation. But, you know, the governor
and the legislature have opened up the pocketbooks, spend whatever you want. The claims processors are working.
Oh, my God. I think they were just all of them
working 18 hour days. The management just like never stopped. Everyone was trying drunk so, so hard. But you have a system that isn't going to scale
until you simplify it. And I think, you know, when I went in,
everybody said, we know what's wrong. It's the COBOL. There is no. Way out the programing. COBOL. A programing language
that is famously dates back to 1959. Yeah, that sounds really bad.
It sounds like. Oh, this is terrible. Of course it won't work
because there's code in there from 1959. Well, the code is not from 1959. The programing language is from 1959. When you buy a plane ticket,
you're using COBOL. I mean, there's many, many systems
that scale beautifully in this country that rely heavily on COBOL, in fact, more heavily, I think, than a lot
of the unemployment systems. The problem
is the complexity of the policy, which then drives complexity and fragility
in the tech systems. But I don't think we're ever going
to solve that problem until we actually fix it. So you guys get in there, you kind of look at this,
you're able to find some process. My reading of it is really
it was a bunch of process. We just said, we, those people. Yeah, get them to the right places
and look at the things in the in a in a more clever way
to get through this and that got you that you and your team helped
get California through that phase. Yes, we're through that phase. Everyone is. I is like we're off of that problem. Is anyone going back and saying, hey, this? We still just have layers and layers. It's like it's like you imagine like one of these things like
you look at sediment in like a cliffside. Exactly like historically. Before that appeared to us. Yes. Who's
like whose job is it to refactor this? So reevaluate this or rip it down
and rebuild it in a good way? That is exactly the right question to ask. And I don't even know
who knows how to answer it. I think it's generally true
that it is often nobody's job to design a system
that works. It is very frequently
a lot of people's job to operate the system
that they've been given. That system is an accretion
of layers over the years. And this is true very, very, very broadly. And we have to redesign government
such that it is someone's job to actually actively design
something that is made to work in this day and age for the people
it's supposed to work for. Who is
going to do that in the end of the day? It's not going to happen,
I think, until everybody decides that we're going to hold our elected leaders accountable to that kind of change
that needs to happen. I think when the problem with government
is that when it is no one's job, it becomes our job. You know, one of the things that you
you talk about is in that I didn't actually it never really jumped out at me
in the way that you, as you put it in the book,
is that there's no one's actual job
to make sure that government solves. The problem is there's somebody whose job
to make sure it's legal, but there's nobody's job
to solve the problem. Well, I think that our elected leaders
would say it's their job to hold the bureaucracy,
the executive branch, the administrative agencies responsible
for doing what they told them to do. Right. Congress has a couple of levers. It writes rules. It allocates money and it does oversight. But the problem is that they hold the agencies accountable to outcomes. But the public servants are often called up for hearings
in front of Congress. In fact,
I saw this firsthand and in a very painful and powerful way when I was working
with the people at the E.D. and they were being called up
in front of hearings. Same thing, of course, during
healthcare.gov, like there's ten hearings during the first month
of the failure of healthcare.gov. And at the same time. All do the job. But supposed to be getting the site back
up. Well, I remember this. Even during the collapse
of the Silicon Valley Bank, the secretary of Treasury is testifying
and you're like, wait a second, there's got to be something. Should they be helping this bank
that's about to fail? Right. Right. So I appreciate that. That's
what our elected leaders want to do. But they're calling those public servants
up and holding them accountable to the outcome that they expected without
a recognition that those public servants are held accountable in their day jobs
to process and procedure, not outcomes. That is what they get hired
on, rewarded on. They get promoted
for having a clean record where they didn't violate,
you know, policy or procedure. So they're in a trap. I call it an accountability trap. I mean, you pointed this out. If I got this right,
you quote about a national public, the National Academy
for Public Administration, finding that they found that only 16% of their members and these are really top notch
policy people. These are like secretaries of state,
treasury, etc. and they found that only 16
of their members considered government proficient at designing policies
that can actually be implemented. And I think there's a huge frustration
among what I hope this isn't an insulting term
I call the policy class in the book. I think there's an increasingly increasing
frustration among the policy class
that what they do doesn't work. They know how to write laws,
they know how to allocate money, they know how to do oversight. And none of those things are working. And when I say policy class, I mean
not just yet, former secretaries of state. I mean, also, you know, Congress allocated a ton of money
during the pandemic. Some of it worked great
and a lot of it didn't. So they just feel like,
okay, I'm putting my paddle. You know, I've got the car here. We're pressing on the gas,
the car should go faster. And just in a lot of cases,
it sort of doesn't. And they're going, wait, what's wrong
here? And in part, I wrote the book for them
so that they can understand what they need to do differently if they want to have
that car be responsive again. Mm hmm. Well, you at one of the stories
you talk about is concrete boats. Yeah. And especially this story
you tell about the VA, where people are held to the line. Well, maybe I should just ask you. Tell us the story of concrete boats. I was working in the White House for a year trying to stand up what became
the United States did full service. And one of the things we did was
to sort of started doing these projects that we thought would be illustrative
of how us ideas would eventually work. So I had a team of up to technologists who'd come in for a short
time to work with me on a problem that we had understood
at the Department of Veterans Affairs with the Veterans
Benefit Management System. One of the things we had heard
was that there was very high latency, which means that if you're processing,
you know, an application, you hit a button to go to the next screen and you have to wait a very long time. And we met this leader
who I call in the book, Kevin, and sort of our first day on the job
are talking to him about, you know,
what's what's we're here to fix. And one of the first things he says to me
is, I'm so glad the White House has sent somebody
to verify that nothing is wrong. You know, it's all taken care of. And we found out later
that the way he had taken care of it was defined latency as over 2 minutes. So if you clicked and waited
for one minute and 59 seconds, you were not to report latency. So it sort of defined the problem away,
which was my my first clue about how he was leading. This is like how my kids. You're fine cleaning their room. Exactly. It's like, no, no, no. I've my performance review is awesome. Exactly. To set the bar so much like how Marina was talking to this claims
process, just asking a bunch of questions. We were asking Kevin questions about why had Vrms been written this way? Why did they make this decision?
That decision? And he kept saying, I don't know. You're going to have to ask the program
people or you're going to have to ask the the policy team or,
you know, he just kept deflecting. And I asked him why and he said, look,
I have spent my entire career teaching my team not to have an opinion
on the business requirements, which is completely contrary to how
I thought about building technology. In fact, I had sort of come to Washington
to get people like Kevin a more of a seat at the table so that
we could have a better conversation. He doesn't want the seat. He doesn't want it. And he said,
If they tell us to build a concrete boat, we'll build a concrete boat. And I said, Why? And he said, Because that way,
when it doesn't work, it's not our fault. And at the time, the statistic was that 80 veterans a day were committing suicide, in part because they did not have access
to their benefits. And I remember
very well sitting in that cafe outside of the White House
and feeling like I had been punched in the gut, and I still feel that way. But I also know that what he was saying is, in a certain sense, true, the system is set up for people not to have that responsibility. What he was saying was, is being held. He is held accountable for checking all the boxes
and he was checking all the boxes. It's the system that I felt punched
in the gut by in the end. This is one of the things and you bring this up also in your book,
which is one of the things that I learned is user research and implementation. That whole theory
that we think is a Silicon Valley phenomena was actually started
by the government. The government is the one that
actually created that whole idea. Yes. Can you walk us through
a little bit of that? Yes. I mean, just as background,
I mean, this is this practice that's very common in technology. Well, I think it's necessary
in any consumer technology where you expect people to be able
to use it without reading a manual. That has happened because user
researchers have understood that, you know, the people who are going to use this service
or this technology and watch them use it and tested and done all these things
to make sure it's easy to use. And yes, we absolutely identify that now
with sort of, you know, easy to use consumer tech out of Silicon Valley
and other places. But it acts the human centered
design essentially, we started in after World War Two or during World War Two when we were trying
to get planes that would fly better. And these two colonels in the Air Force
saw that these some of these planes that had been built
for incredible performance. Right. Like they could fly really well,
had a terrible what we would now call user interface, like different switches
that did, you know, very different things were right next to each other
and it was easy to get them confused. And so they kept saying, you know, there's
there's nothing wrong with these planes. And mechanically, technically,
there wasn't. But they most of them weren't flying
because. They were they were crashing,
they were killing, hitting. You know, they'd go up
and then they'd crash and kill people. But they the problem wasn't with the specs. The problem was with how the pilots
were using them for a long time. They called them pilot error
and they're flying like this. Can't be pilot error. All of like the best
pilots are getting these things confused. And so these two colonels worked
on, you know, changing the controls and making this one red and this one green
and putting them in the right places so that, you know, in a moment of stress,
you could do the right thing. And that's
that was called human factors engineering. And it became human centered design. It started in the government. Where did the government lose it? I think we lost it in part because we decided
to outsource everything. Not just technology, though. Technology definitely got caught up
in this huge enthusiasm for outsourcing. But, you know, in the sixties we started defined through memos and statutes, this idea
of what is inherently governmental and what is inherently commercial,
and it's called commercial. And there these two concepts
and I think, you know, for a long time
it was like kind of made sense, right? That there are these like big computers
and we have to buy a lot of them and processing time,
you know, all this stuff. Yes, that's a commodity. We're going to buy it from people
who know how to build it. This is not something that the government
should try to do itself. So it became something was defined
as commercial, but computing changed a lot and it became
something that was much more strategic. And we missed that. We missed that boat and we said, Nope,
this is something that we will buy, not something we do. But anybody who has run
tech enabled businesses knows that software isn't something. I mean, sure, you're going to buy
Slack or Microsoft Word. Those are commodities. We get that. But if you're trying to actually run your business on technology,
it has to be something you do. It has to be adaptable. You need to be able to change it
as your needs change. And if you don't have that core competency
in-house to do that, you kind of can't meet people's needs. And we we missed the part where we needed to reach refigure out, what part needed to be in-house,
what are the core competencies that we need to have inside of government
so that we can. Kind of outsourced government? We have outsourced government and we
certainly outsourced digital government. And I have to be clear, I'm
not calling for like bring all technology development back inside of government. It's not going to work
and it's impractical and it's probably not even a good idea. But we have to start asking ourselves,
what are the core competencies that government needs today
and how do we how do we have them? How do we build them? Because we can't just keep saying, Oh,
I'm sorry, that was the vendor's fault. When it doesn't work, it's,
it's it's our job to deliver the service. And we do it now
through a lot through technology. Before we switch gears to some solutions,
you know, you talk about this in the book, which I thought
was a really great to think of as it is. And to quote you is it's policy
vomited on the floor. And, you know, many times
I feel like that is like you get this piece of paper
from the government. I mean, it took me filling out security
clearances takes like close to 100 hours of work to fill out everything
you get asked, all these random questions. Some of them don't make sense. You actually tell a story about that, but you also talk about how much time is
spent on these these things. And it's and to quote you, it's Americans
spend 10.5 billion hours a year, about 42 hours per adult on paperwork
just for the federal government. And that doesn't even include the state
and local sectors. You know,
I imagine government people are also having to fill out paperwork
and they recognize this. So where's the gap as is,
you know, in terms of that usability and trying to make sure
that government works for us? Well,
you know, it's also you mentioned earlier, I just want to
call out I mean, that number. Many of us don't spend those hours right? Many of us have a lawyer that can,
you know, file the immigration papers for us or we have a tax accountant
or we're not applying for SNAP. And it's there's a huge difference between
how much we're exposed to that paperwork burden
based on our privilege. And I think that's something
we need to recognize. Yes. Government
employees are also frequently very frustrated by not only the paperwork
that that that they have to put out into the world, but
the paperwork that they're required to do. I mean, a good example of that is, you know, a lot of what gets done in
our country is federal grants that go to states and local communities
and, you know, don't think for a minute
that governments aren't frustrated by the paperwork burden
of other levels of government. So the smaller communities
that need those grants the most are the least likely to get them
because they don't have people who know how to find the grant, fill out all
the paperwork, you know, get it through those grants, go to the communities
that already have those resources. You know, what's what's the gap? I think the gap is the empowerment to say
I don't just have to and I'm sorry will repeat that awful word vomit
the policy and the paperwork. It's just a when
when you see public servants get that. Oh, wait, there's a process
that goes in middle that's called design that says what information do we need
from them now? What information can we collect later? Do we need to collect
all this information? How do we make this as easy as possible
for them? And, you know, and very often, do we even need to do this at all? I mean, I start and end the book
on a project that that Code for America ran and is still running
to clear criminal records where, you know, where it started was,
you know, really almost a whole year of persisting through gathering information from police departments and other action. Let's step back and frame this problem,
because I think it's such an important it's a such an important
lens on the problem. So can you step back
and sort of frame the big problem? So I think
now far more than half of the states have decriminalized marijuana
in some way, shape or form through, you know, ballot initiatives
or laws passed. And when we do that, we also say, okay,
so the people in our state who have a former felony record from marijuana need to have
that expunged off their record. You know, having that felony means you can't get a job,
you can't get public housing. There's all these different things that make it incredibly hard
to recover from incarceration. So let's get that record off. But that process of expungement was sort of assumed to be again,
because no one designed it. It just accrued over the years to be this sort of year long process of going and finding your rap
sheets from various places and filling out forms and filing them
in other places, and then waiting to hear. About there's no like single place
you can just say delete. Well, there there needs to be. And that's really
where the team came from, is like there was, I would say, two years of us
watching people try to get through this process
and thinking, how can we streamline it? How can we streamline it?
Until we realized you don't need to streamline,
it doesn't need to exist at all. What that felony record is
is a field in a database, and it is not that hard to have software
tell you who are all the people in this database who have that
particular record, you know, that. Particular
like a Google doc or something else. It's like control. Fine. Yeah, exactly. It's it's
it's a little bit more complicated, but not that much more complicated
than that, really. But the imagination say,
oh, that's what we need to do is find the records,
change them in the database. You know, we sometimes just, you know,
don't even dare to dream that. I mean, you know, and but when we when we did and we started doing,
it sort of became became possible. And I think that's the kind of thinking
that needs to spread. Like do we need to streamline this
paperwork or do we need to get rid of it? Well, it's almost stunning because when you think about this,
in this type of thing, a law gets passed and you just assume that law gets pushed
out to all the people that are impacted. It doesn't in this case,
it turns out that everyone's got to apply. And so people don't even know about it. And so I think it was Christine
de Soto. Yes. Teamed up with and you, sir, said,
hey, look, we should just go tackle this. And I'm curious, like, as. Christine just said,
it was the chief of staff for the district attorney in San Francisco,
George Gascon. Well, and then the reason I'm bringing her
name up here is not only because it is amazing work,
but what what got her as that person really is like technology
in a different way is going to help. And what does that tell us for
how we should think about other policy problems out there? Christine is a great example of one of those public servants
who does ask that question. You know, why does it have to be that way? And there are a lot of them many more, I think, than people realize. And some, I think also in this room that I think there's this like magic that happens
that I've seen happen over and over again. And there's some stories
in the book of this of somebody who knows what's possible given today's technology
and somebody who knows what's possible, given the law and policy
coming together and going, oh, wait, something
totally different is possible here. And yeah, Chris, Christine is
is just a fantastic public servant who was able to work
with some members of the staff at Code for America, including Jasmine Lattimer,
who I write about in the book. And they, you know, they each brought
their perspectives to the table and fundamentally changed
how we how we do this. Well, let's switch to some solutions,
okay. And maybe walk us through your framework
of what do we need to do to get this right, especially given
that the Biden-Harris administration has gotten signed into law, the largest
spending that is ever about to happen. And we're going to implement
a whole bunch of things. We're going to try we're going to try. And and you talk about this
also in the book, the cost. Yes. Of what happens when these things
fail, just raw dollars costs. How do how do we get this right and
and not just throw away this singular opportunity to build systems in a way
that are going to serve American public? Well, let's talk for a second about what
that opportunity looks like right now. So the Chips and Science Act
has to work, right? We need to have more resilient supply
chains. It's a matter of national security
and economic development. It to work. The Inflation Reduction Act, the parts
I'm most familiar with are the parts that are designed to electrify our country
so that we can avoid a climate collapse. It's our shot. It is our shot. Sure, more
stuff is going to have to happen later. But if we don't get this right, we haven't bought the time
for all the rest of that stuff to happen. So whatever you might think about the IRA
being not a perfect law, no laws are. IRA being the. Inflation Reduction Act. It is literally our shot. We have to implement this
and that's going to mean a whole bunch of things have to go right
that often. Don't go right. So people need to be able
to get their rebates for their heat pumps. They need to get their tax credits
for electrical upgrades. Like all that stuff
doesn't just happen, right? Public servants do it
and they make choices about how to do it and they can choose to do it in the policy
vomit sort of way. Well, this is what the law says. So that's what the form will be
or they can design something that you and I and everyone else in this room
will find so easy that we'll do it right. That's the whole
point of these incentives. So I want to try to do in the book
was really give examples of public servants
who have made the right choices sometimes, you know, under duress
and with real risk to themselves that because they made those choices, the programs that they were administering worked for people and got the outcomes
that the law had intended. Another person who's like, Christine, who I profiled pretty extensively in
the book, is a woman named Yadira Sanchez. And one thing I have to know about
your daughter is she's now been at the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is known as CMS,
part of our Health and Human Services Agency for, I think, 25 years. It's the only job she's ever
had is her first job. So she's not somebody who's like a white
knight from the tech industry. She's this is it's not some political
appointee political get another job. She's she's in the thick of it. She's and you know, just
the thing is that she just cares so deeply about the agency's mission. She understands how critical it is that
we improve health care in this country. And Medicare and Medicaid are big,
big drivers of that. You get that right. The whole rest of the industry
follows in a certain way. So she's in it. Project manager there for many years,
already doing a better job than I think her peers in the sense
that she wanted to color outside of the lines
things like user research where we were talking about
earlier wasn't required. I mean really never talked about. But she would do it anyway. She would be asked to go train people
and she would say, Well, I'm going to use this as opportunity to ask them
What parts of this do they like? What parts of them are they going to
actually use, what doesn't work for them? So she was always sort of, you know,
making good trouble, so to speak. Then HealthCare.gov has its floundering of trying
to give the right word for that. Somebody said, I call it the troubles. But reminder that healthcare.gov actually quite succeeded
in its first enrollment period. But boy, was it rocky in the beginning. You know, the first day,
I think only eight people were able to enroll in health
care through healthcare.gov in 2013. And she was one of the people
who are thrown this problem of fix it. You know,
we are our former boss, Todd Parker, because he
didn't work directly under Todd, did you? I can't remember. Well, that devoted. Yes. We've worked together on many, many years. So so people like Todd
Park were brought in from the outside. But a lot of the people who fixed
healthcare.gov were people like Yadira, who are just there
at Sam's and knew how to make it work. But and she did
she did some amazing stuff. But the thing that came out of that was she learned the word agile development
and user centered design. She never heard these terms. She was doing them,
but she didn't have a framework for them. And so she comes out of that
with this absolute passion for making CMS better
based on what she's learned and had. CMS never have a disaster like this again? I mean, it. Has it party and it hasn't. Since it it not only has it not
but she they got given their next, you know, implementation of a law called
MACRA, the Medicare Access and CHIP
Reauthorization Act. And she's like this one
we're going to get right now. This was. And this is way harder is. Way. Way harder than Affordable Care Act implementation, healthcare.gov
implementation. Well, yes, and it's very different. So essentially, she
this is a program that will pay doctors better for better quality
care, value based care. So her users in this case
are not the general public as trying to sign up for
for health care through the exchanges. It's doctors who are, by the way,
like already hugely frustrated with CMS, the interfaces that they're asked to use
to submit their quality data and they're billing already
drive them nuts. They never know if they've done it right. You know, they they put in this file
and they're like, it's a black hole. And if I got it wrong and I submitted my data in the wrong
format, I, like, don't get paid. And now I had a year of stress about this. So they know that this new law is going to give them a new interface. And the only thing they hate
more than what they have is the thought of having
to learn something new and equally bad. And so people are projecting
that because of this, millions of doctors is going to walk away
from taking Medicare patients, which is going to degrade
the quality of care, not improve it that that's Congress wanted to improve it,
but this is going to degrade the quality of care. So she knows that it's not about like up
time on this new website. It's about will it work for those doctors? Will they solve the problem? Will they be able to use it and not leave,
you know, leave leave the program and the things that she does
to get that right. And other people there's a Ucsd's
team there initially and woman named Natalie Kates is pushes back
on the first set of things. So the first thing that happens is they're supposed to make a website
that just explains this to doctors before they have the way
that they have to file their quality data. And she's like,
okay, well, we'll write it up first thing they have to do is decide
whether they're tell CMS, whether they're an individual doctor, you know,
in a private practice or a medical group. And there are nine different
definitions of a medical group. And she's like, well,
that's never going to work. But I think in the past, you know,
it would be Kevin building the concrete. But well, that's what they said.
That's what we're going to do. And this team says we cannot do it
that way. They push back
and push back and push back. Eventually they get to two different
definitions of a group. They don't get to one,
but that starts them out on a path where they keep
pushing back on the policy team and saying famously, I think this is a line
that I will always remember they say that. Then I get that it's complicated. It has to make sense to a person. And over and over again they make
the choice that makes sense to a person. And when they ship that program
called the quality payment program
that was required by this law, MACRA, the call centers are braced for angry
doctors calling to yell at them and instead they're getting calls saying
something must be wrong. This is too easy. The doctors love it. There is not a mass exodus from Medicare. And, you know, more important in a certain sense, more importantly,
the CMS team is like, we got this, we know how to do this now
and they keep going on that. And my last story of Yadira is,
you know, this minor thing that comes down for her
to implement regulation from from Congress saying
you're going to give these data extracts out on pharmaceutical data so that the ecosystem can use them
something you know a little bit about the and she's and the law says you will give
these quarterly data extracts and she knows that there's a nine month
process to package up this data
and it's not the right way to do it. And that there's something called an
application programing interface, an API that would allow those same, you know, people in the ecosystem
that want to have access to data to just plug in and use it
any time they want. It's not wouldn't be a slice of data
every quarter, but constant access to it. She's like, Well, what's a
we're going to do right to do an API? And when I tell this story to people,
they're like, Well, she can't do that. That's not what Congress said to do,
but it's what Congress wanted her to do. All right. It's better, faster and cheaper and
gets the outcome that Congress intended. And that's the kind of thing
that we need to be lifting up. Like when we talk about
congressional oversight, we always think about calling up
public servants and yelling at them because they did something wrong. We never call up Yadira Sanchez
and say thank you for interpreting what we said in the right way and being,
I don't know, slightly disobedient because you got us the outcome
that we need, that kind of oversight that rewards public servants
for making the choices, that makes these systems
make sense to people. You're here, you dedicate the book
actually to public servants. This is public servants. How many can the public servants here
stand up, please? Or people who've been a public servant? Thank you for all you've done. And I see several people in the audience
who I know have made those choices, and I know they have felt
the stress of those choices. And I just wish we all knew how to
thank them and reward them more often. And for those public servants who are listening out there also,
thank you for all that you have done. And many of the questions I have to tell you, in all my time doing this,
I've never gotten this many questions. And so this is great
and many of the questions actually are from people
who have worked in public service or want to work in public service. And they're wondering,
how do you deal with how do you actually become one
of these people that you're talking about? How how do you become one of these
change agents when you're in that culture of risk averse environment, you have
generational change that's happening. What people don't aren't familiar
with some of these tech techniques or technologies. This is the question I get most often, and it's the hardest one, because I recognize that when someone's
asking that question, they are trying their hardest and feeling
frustrated by a system that feels like it's just so hostile
to what they want to get done and I have just a couple of sort of quick things that are not easy
and but the first one is find community. There. There are allies around you. And when you're having a bad day,
you're going to need those those friends. I think every public servant
I know who's been able to be anything like you or Sanchez has done it
because they have found like minded people and been able to go to them
and and solve problems and get support. And a lot of times
it's just, frankly, emotional support. I mean, the
the dedication that book is to public servants everywhere don't give up. And that's thing
it's really hard not to give up but it's we only don't give up
when we have people around us that help us to help that do that. And the other thing that I
that I advise folks to do is that when you're in government
and you're being blocked, it does not work very well to just go at that barrier. You have to step around and see the issue
through the eyes of the person who's blocking you and understand
why they don't want you to do that. Empathy. Empathy. I have very rarely met a public servant who disagreed with me
on what I wanted to do, who didn't have a really good reason
for believing what he or she believed and really was blocking me
because they were protect. They felt like they were protecting
government and protecting taxpayer dollars and protecting their fellow public
servants. I is they're mostly have
unbelievably positive intent. So if you can see where they're coming
from, then you can, I think, sometimes help them
see the ways in which what you are doing is also trying to honor Congress's intent, get the right outcomes
for the American public. But you've got to meet on that common
ground instead of just going at each other. We were talking about you and I've talked
about this a lot over the years. Is that the importance of listening and
just asking people where they come from? I remember even at Code for America,
we used to teach the early fellows, like, say,
just ask them how they got to their job and why they're doing this job
and how do they keep their resilience. And it's amazing. You hear these stories and you talk about
some of them in the book. This is why I think it's so important. Everyone should read this book. Is is those those those that that deep conviction to serve. And so one of the things I want and this is another question
that somebody asked, which I think is fantastic, is
how do we create the incentives for governments
or elected officials to both lift up these kind of these good practices
rather than shaming the just the bad ones? And how do we get them to to clean up the
the stag nit layers of policies, sediment
that have built up? I think that we haven't
really even tried yet. And so I'm hoping
we'll start trying. I mean, when an
elected official asks you for your vote or your donation, do you ever say,
what are you doing about implementation? Do you ever say,
what are you doing about policy clutter? No. You say, What law
are you going to pass that I will like? What policies do you stand for that match
my values? That's very important. I want a public servant. I want the elected officials that I vote
for to have something in common with my values. But I also want those values to be
in action, and that's implementation. And that's a lot of cleanup work. And they don't think it's their job because we haven't told them
it's their job. What do you advise
somebody who wants to get into public interest technology
characteristics? What do they need to be prepared
for as they go into into the field? Well, we already covered
the most important one, empathy. We also also talked about persistence. I think the ability and willingness to to see it to see the problem through the eyes of the people
who are most affected by it. If you're not willing to do that, it will
you will be challenged to be effective as a public servant. And I think just you know, I don't think
it has to be a particular thing. But every time I have seen
people try their hand at government, you know, dipped their toes in the water,
what they get addicted to is the impact they see how much they can really do
to help something. And so whatever that is for you, like
just dip your toes in and see what really, what really strikes you
as the way you can make a big difference. Because I have never seen anybody
not find something. And one of the questions I get asked
the most is how does where do how do people
actually put their skills to use? If somebody has the skills out there
and they're either here in the audience or listening on the radio or watching this, what's the advice of how
they should get involved? So there are a lot of ways
to get involved. Obviously, I think everybody should do
some time working in government. I'm not just talking about tech people. I think any of us will benefit. I know I personally hugely benefited
from having a year inside government where you get to see how the sausage is made
and you get to see the frustrations that the people who work for you you have
and you get to realize the impact that you have. You don't have to go straight
to that, though. For instance, there's lots of ways
that you can work around government. With government,
you can do various kinds of volunteering. I will give a shout out
to the United States digital response, which is a fantastic way
for people with tech and design and data skills to help. If you sign up with UC Digital Response,
they will find a partner for you in government who needs your exact skills
and gets you to be able to help. It started during COVID when there were
a lot of governments that needed people to fix a data pipeline or stand up a forum
for emergency rental assistance. And they just didn't have the capacity. And people came from all over
to be that capacity and that is still needed by the governments and
there are people who still want to do it. And a lot of those people
I mean, to warn you, if this if you do it, have ended up taking full time jobs in government
because of that impact that they saw. So it's a little bit of of a feeder, but lightweight ways and full time ways. But just try it. There's a line from Secretary Carter that he used to say,
which is once you try government, you really can't ever let go
because there is no higher calling mission and the ability
to scale your individual impact. I think that you feel that when you go in. And it's so much there,
what do you do when you know in the little remaining time left
that we have? Want to talk
about the political environment as it matches up
with the implementation of policy. And, you know, we've seen certain states work aggressively to use technology
to block people out of things. There's questions for people
who are working on issues to implement decisions
that they may fundamentally disagree with, like the Dobbs decision
or the Docker database being weaponized to go after people
who are legal under the law and what what advice do you have for people who are caught on
policy issues that are in the middle of this this conflict of politics? Yeah, I think you're talking about people
who are working for a government that is by policy and intent, not actually serving its people
in some cases. That's right. They're not serving the people or the elected officials change,
but by the will of the people. Yeah. And that changes. So I think it's easy to focus on that and and while it is always happened,
it's not just now. Right. We've always seen this. There's a wonderful book called
Administrative Burden by Dan Moynihan and Pam Hurd
that talks about all the ways in which in which you can defeat a policy after it's passed by essentially
making the implementation terrible. And that's happened. But that is the minority actually. And I think there was another
quite a few people that that I knew and that you knew who were working,
for instance, for the Obama administration, happened to be Democrats
match their values. And then Trump came into office
and there was a real question about whether they should stay
because they might be asked to do things that were very inconsistent
with their values. And I think it happened very little,
to be honest. And mostly what people found was that there were still problems
that needed to be fixed. You still had SNAP recipients. Some stuff went crazy with snaps and
the public charge role, but those copies. Equivalent of food stamps. Who this is exactly you. We still needed to make our tax system
easy to use. We, you know, states still needed to
to provision their services. There was so much work that still needed
to be done that really wasn't contested. And in fact, in some ways,
the Trump administration, because they were very sort of,
you know, blow it all up ish, were actually supportive
of new approaches in certain ways and not saying that there wasn't
there weren't places of conflict. But I do remember a tweet
by a woman named Caitlin Devine when this all happened
that said, you know, to say that you don't need a government
that works for people just because you don't like the person in office
is the height of cynicism. We still need all those functions to work. And by and large, they're still not
working as well as they should. And you still have an opportunity
to make them better. So I think just find those places
where you can have a positive impact. They're going to be the cases where you're going
to have to make difficult choices. But I there I would get back to something
we talked about at the top of the hour. Decisions are made by those who show up. It's so glad you say it that way
because, you know, many people don't realize
I started my government time actually under President Bush
and in a department run by Rumsfeld, somebody who I disagreed with
many of the policies. But you don't choose
your commander in chief. You don't choose the secretary of defense, but you show up to work on problems
and make an impact and difference. And I chose to stay on the Defense
Innovation Board under Trump. That's where I was going to bring up is you actually not only stayed
on the defense innovation under Trump, you joined the Defense Innovation Board
at a time where there was a fair amount of of pushback and concerns of technology
being used in the Department of Defense. And so what what when you are thinking about the policy
things you try to focus on in those things, how what do you look for? How do you internally look for that get that strength to challenge things
when people don't agree with it? But, you know,
this is what the public needs. I think it just goes back to the people
we're trying to serve. So I became passionate
about the work of the Defense Innovation Board and other change agents
inside the Department of Defense. Actually, when I
when I heard Stanley McChrystal speak and I realized that all the dynamics
that I saw in working on SNAP and criminal justice issues, you know,
were the same inside the department. But the people that we were trying
to protect here are, you know, men and women in uniform
and that they deserve better. And so for me to go
back to that, what is this really about? Who or what are we trying to do
and are we going to act in an ethical way? I mean, and then reminding myself that that is why other public servants
are there, too. That's just really,
I think, my touchstone. I do ultimately believe that. And I think
I think a lot of people on both. All across the ideological spectrum
believe this to that we can disagree
about what a government policy should be, gun control, abortion,
all of these things. But ultimately, we have a government
that cannot do what it says it's going to do if we have so little state
capacity that we can't get it done. That's a very dangerous situation
and that's something that people of all political stripes
should come together to fix. And I think there are
I think the people who care about. This bipartisan. State capacity,
there are people on the left who are concerned about state capacity
for totally understandable reasons and don't like this idea of making government
better at what it's supposed to do. And there are people on the right who I think a lot of folks on the left
would say, oh, they don't want that. Like they're, you know,
they'll actually care deeply about this so that the people who care
most about state capacity don't look like a particular ideological flavor at all. But to go back to the
Defense Department, I mean, however you feel about what the military does
and I had a deeply conflicted feelings about America's military I had before
I won the Defense Innovation Board. And I still have those feelings. But the idea that we are just terrible
at what we do when what we do sometimes involves
killing people is even worse idea we're going to miss
and hit the wrong targets. We're going to hit innocent civilians. We're going to put our own people
in greater danger. You know, the metaphor I used is my mom teaching me in the kitchen,
never cut with a dull knife. You slip
and that's when you hurt yourself. When you're cutting with a sharp knife,
you can actually cut what you intended to cut. I completely understand. I do not always agree
with what we decide to cut, you know,
in terms of our military actions. But I don't want that knife slipping everywhere
and just hitting random hitting. I think that's a great analogy
for almost everything you talked about. And Secretary Carter,
the late secretary Carter, who appointed you to the Defense
Innovation Board, used to say security. Security is like oxygen. Yeah, you only know it when you need it. We lost a great man
when we lost Ash Carter. And in particular,
I think about all the serve, the public servants, everyone is out there
who's building these systems. This is their oxygen. And so I just want to thank you, Jen,
for all the work that you've done in public service,
all the the unbelievable amount of things that you've created
to benefit the entire country. And I just want to congratulate you
on your book recorded America Why Why Government is Failing in
the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. It is so phenomenal. And I want to thank Ken and Jacqueline Broad Family Fund and the U. U.S. Seed Dornsife Center for Political Future
for supporting today's event. And I also want to thank all the public
servants out there, and I think it'd be appropriate to end this with don't give up on D.J patel thank you and take care. Join.
