Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better By Jennifer Pahlka

Metropolitan Books 336 pp.

By Greg Berman

The political tell-all is an enduring American genre.  Our libraries are full of books by presidents, cabinet officials, and senators describing policy fights and political victories, many of which are already well-known from newspaper and cable news coverage.

By contrast, there is no strong literary tradition of writing from those whose job it is to actually implement government policy.  We are much the poorer for this.  Schoolhouse Rock seems to have been the primary source of civic education for all too many Americans.  (A recent poll suggests that fewer than half of Americans can name all three branches of government.)

In the tiny canon of books written about the nuts and bolts of government by system insiders, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding stands out. Moynihan would later go on to prominence as a senator and United Nations ambassador, but he wrote Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding at the start of his career based on his experience as a bureaucrat at the U.S. Department of Labor. Published in 1969, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding is a first-hand account of an ambitious federal effort to launch community action programs across the country – and how this effort ultimately went awry.  A cautionary tale of government overreach, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding is still being cited in the New York Times more than 50 years after its release.

Thankfully, a new book has emerged as a worthy successor to Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. It is early days, but Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better is already being hailed in some quarters as one of the best policy books ever written.

Of course, the world has changed a lot since Moynihan wrote Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding.  Instead of focusing on the War on Poverty, Recoding America is devoted to Pahlka’s speciality: the development of digital technology. 

Pahlka founded Code for America, an award-winning technology nonprofit. She also served as the deputy chief technology officer for government innovation in President Obama’s administration.  While she was working in the White House, she had a ringside seat for arguably the most high-profile government technology disaster of recent years: the crashing of the healthcare.gov website that hampered the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Recoding America’s focus on websites, software, and databases is fitting for our times, but it does present some challenges for the reader.  Passages like this one are littered throughout the text:

The software then used another network protocol, called SOAP…to put this XML message onto something called an Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB.  The ESB eventually delivered the XML message to yet another piece of software, at which point the process ran in reverse.

Pahlka’s case studies may not sing (at least to this non-techie) and her prose style might lack a certain flair, but she does manage to match Moynihan in one important respect: they both share an eye for the absurd.  Recoding America is devoted to the proposition that American government is often “technically correct but entirely unhelpful.” 

An old bit of Beltway wisdom suggests that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary program. Pahlka presents ample evidence of how the Rube Goldberg contraption that is American government has been built up over the years, one temporary fix after another. Pahlka catalogs the inevitable “policy clutter” that results from design by committee. She also calls out an overabundance of risk-averse, legalistic thinking that has left government with a “procedure fetish” and trapped many workers in a system of perverse incentives.

It would be reasonable for a conservative to read Recoding America as evidence for Ronald Reagan’s famous quip: “I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.”

But Pahlka’s mission is not to drown government in the bathtub (the professed goal of conservative activist Grover Norquist).  She is a committed liberal who wants to unlock the potential of digital technology to facilitate improved government services. For Pahlka, this means cutting back on process, procedures, and paperwork. In this respect, Pahlka is updating the arguments of James Q. Wilson and Phillip K. Howard, both of whom warned against the American propensity for overregulation and overlegislation.

Like many policy books, Recoding America is stronger on diagnosis than prescription. But Pahlka does offer some bracing wisdom for Americans on both sides of the aisle who want government to function better.

Conservatives will have to give up their relentless focus on shrinking the footprint of government. Pahlka makes a convincing case that, at least when it comes to technology, this obsession is penny wise and pound foolish. For Pahlka, it is essential for government to develop in-house capacity instead of just relying on external contractors to do technology development.

Recoding America’s message for the left is equally challenging: the fixation on “equity” is getting in the way of good governance. In Pahlka’s telling, lawsuits brought against government by left-wing activists, “however just the cause,” can have a long-term negative impact on performance, undermining agency culture and the “zeitgeist of government.”

Pahlka’s narrative demonstrates how the urge to be all things to all people can undermine effective government action. According to Pahlka, the rollout of healthcare.gov was hampered by the insistence that it serve all Americans immediately at launch, including difficult “edge cases.” By insisting on equity from the start, government lost the ability to set priorities and engage in the kind of incremental, user-centered, and agile product development that Pahlka favors. The perfect ended up being the enemy of the good.

Regardless of their political orientation, the ultimate lesson that readers should take away from Recoding America is simple: We talk too much about politics and policy and not enough about implementation.  Pahlka argues that we need to focus more energy where the rubber hits the road -- the interface between government and its citizens.  And increasingly that interface is mediated through technology of one sort or another.

Let’s hope that tomorrow’s policymakers heed Pahlka’s call about the importance of implementation.  Let’s also hope that Pahlka serves as an inspiration for others with direct experience trying to get things done within government. Recoding America may not be quite as entertaining as Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, but it has the potential to cast a long shadow if it influences other system insiders to follow Pahlka’s example.  It is high time for us to expand the canon of books about the nit and grit of government operations.