Volunteers know it is difficult to accomplish change. When I sought along with several others to get a Restorative Justice program implemented at a Los Gatos school, I initially encountered great enthusiasm for the idea. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm was followed by inaction on the part of the school’s administrators, requests for more information, and indications that higher ups needed to approve the project. The program was never implemented. Frustrated by the delays, long periods of silence from the administrators and late-in-the-game roadblocks placed in our way, our experienced group of mediators moved on.
Similarly, I sometimes face barriers when challenging policies as a commissioner on the Community Health and Senior Services Commission. I understand what Robert’s Rules of Order is about. However, I believe in having and exercising some discretion when it appears appropriate. Although I am the commission chair, I’ve been met with resistance when I sought to place items relevant to our commission on our agenda. I’ve also occasionally encountered resistance when seeking pertinent information and been rebuffed when requesting meetings with leaders of organizations we oversee.
I decided to better educate myself at policy processes and implementation by reading a book titled “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing In the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better,” by Jennifer Pahlka.
Ms. Pahlka is founder of Code For America and a former U.S. deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration. Her book is a nonpartisan call for action that equally criticizes Democrats and Republicans while offering concrete suggestions for improving how our government creates and implements policy.
Ms. Pahlka describes what she terms the “waterfall effect.” It is a hierarchal system involving policy makers at the top who impose mandates that are often thousands of pages long. These mandates meander downstream to states, local governments, administrators, and to outside high-tech companies, the latter of whom often wish to complicate things so that they may ask for more money. These downstreamers have little or no voice in how these mandates arose, and how to successfully implement policies. At this downstream level, the main incentive is to go by the book. Otherwise, the implementers may suffer loss of lucrative contracts, loss of a job, legal consequences for not following the mandates, or in the case of the governmental entity, a denial of funds.
Ms. Pahlka describes several governmental failures, including the turmoil involved at California’s Employment Development Department.
Pahlka talks about why it was easier for scammers to get unemployment money than for some workers
She co-led a “Strike Team” deployed during the pandemic, as benefit delays and stories of fraud arose. State officials found that payments were delayed to millions of workers and may have been improperly denied for another million. Meanwhile, the state lost billions of dollars to fraud.
Ms. Pahlka discusses why it was easier for scammers to file successful unemployment applications than it was for some workers, how a multimillion-dollar modernization project by a contractor essentially collapsed, and why the uproar about outdated online systems has more to do with flawed state and federal policy than old software.
She explains that government is constrained by a rigid, Industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy, while being disconnected from and oftentimes disdainful of the details of implementation. Goals transform as they cascade through the complex waterfall hierarchy.
Recoding government involves rationalizing and simplifying the policy and process it supports. It means looking at the user’s (ie; the citizenry’s) experience, training product technology experts who can look at proposed policies before they are mandated and determine the technological and practical impacts of the proposed policies, and giving those expected to implement the policies flexibility in interpreting the policies so they may fulfill the goal of helping those in need.
Jeffrey P. Blum is a family law mediator who lives in Los Gatos.
