Jennifer Pahlka is perhaps best known as the founder of Code for America, a widely respected nonprofit that helped formalize the principles of civic tech, a movement leveraging design and technology expertise to improve public access to government services and data.
As a deputy chief technology officer under President Barack Obama, Pahlka helped launch the United States Digital Service….
KFF Health News spoke to Pahlka, now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, about what she sees as “irresponsible transformation” and how best to fast-track government reform. This interview, conducted in mid-February, has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: To that point, DOGE’s purview seems to have shifted from modernizing government systems to, ostensibly, rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse. What do you make of that change?
A: I think the thesis that better technology could reduce waste, fraud, and abuse is sound, but you want to see both better use of technology to ensure that taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted, and that people who need their benefits are going to get them. You need a North Star that includes both of those things.
Q: And you’re not seeing that in DOGE?
A: They have not expressed great care for what damage can happen to people who rely on benefits. I’m just seeing large, very indiscriminate cuts.
They have signaled that government needs its own internal tech capacity and that it’s shocking how reliant on contractors our government is. I would agree with that.
Q: Thousands of federal workers are now being pushed out. In light of your view that we outsource too much, what are your feelings on that?
A: We’ve overrelied on the idea that we should bring people in from the outside and underinvested in helping career civil servants to do transformation work themselves.
Lambert here: Which DOGE is doing. “No, not that way!”
When I wrote my book, the biggest hero was Yadira Sánchez, who I think now has been at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for 25 years. She’s a leader who really pushes for the kinds of decisions that are going to make a service for doctors that’s going to be usable. She gets pushback and comes back and says, “If you make that decision, we are going to alienate doctors. They’re going to stop taking Medicare patients. And we’ve got to do it this different way.”
Lambert here: Liberals! What about the patients? Then there is this material as well:
Q: What are the key changes you think would speed things up?
A: One, you have to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones.
Lambert here: For some definition of “right” and “wrong” (not DOGE’s but why, exactly?)
You also have to be able to reduce procedural bloat. When the unemployment insurance crisis hit, every state’s labor commissioner got called in front of the legislature and yelled at for the backlog. Rob Asaro-Angelo in New Jersey brought boxes and boxes of paper — 7,119 pages of active regs. And when they kept yelling, he kept pointing them to them and saying, “You can’t be scalable with 7,119 pages of regulations.”
In California, you get thousands of bills introduced every year in the legislature. We don’t need that many. We need legislators to follow up on bills that have already been passed, see if they’re working, tweak them if they’re not. They need to go into agencies and say, “If this is hard for you to do, what mandates and constraints can we remove so you can make this a priority?”
Lambert here: Too damn many laws! Again, different from DOGE how, exactly? Tone?
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