Jen Pahlka on an Optimistic Vision for Government Renewal!

Summary

ChinaTalk Podcast Summary

Episode: Jen Pahlka on an Optimistic Vision for Government Renewal!
Date: March 27, 2026
Host: Jordan Schneider
Guest: Jen Pahlka (author of "Recoding America," founder, Recoding America Fund)
Theme: An exploration of how to renew and reform American government for the AI era, reduce dysfunction, and create a more effective and optimistic future for public service.

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Overview of the Episode

This episode of ChinaTalk dives deep into the future of American government with Jen Pahlka. The discussion centers around her optimistic vision for government renewal, driven by advances in technology (especially AI) but requiring fundamental operating model reform and civil service rejuvenation. Jen shares insights from her experience as a government reform leader and explains the mission of the Recoding America Fund: catalyzing a field for state capacity reform to make government as responsive and effective as the private sector.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Case for Optimism in Government Renewal

• Government Must Meet Modern Needs: Jen argues that government’s core purpose is to meet people’s and society’s needs, which requires a leapfrogging of capability, not just incremental improvement ([00:38]).
• Closing the Expectations Gap: There’s a growing disconnect between the everyday digital experiences of Americans and their experiences with government, risking trust in democracy ([01:30]).
• Leapfrogging, Not Tinkering: Rather than “getting 10% better,” government must adopt transformational changes, especially as technology rapidly accelerates expectations ([00:55]).

“People want a government that works and they will support that government and care about our institutions because their institutions work for them.”
— Jen Pahlka ([02:20])

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Historical Perspectives: Glory Days and ‘Cruft’

• Postwar Golden Age: Jordan and Jen reference the mid-20th-century administrative state, fit for purpose due to ongoing renewal (e.g., Eisenhower-era “work simplification”) ([04:04]).
• Layered Dysfunction: Over time, government accumulated regulatory “cruft”—layers of outdated or unnecessary policy and process—making programs brittle and hard to scale ([04:45]).
• Current Crisis: Example: New Jersey’s Unemployment Insurance program has 7,119 pages of active regulations, making it effectively unmanageable ([08:16]).

“Success is adding rules and adding mandates and adding constraints instead of…constantly asking, what should that process look like?”
— Jen Pahlka ([05:13])

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The Role and Promise of AI in Government

• Structural Transformation: Referencing Lucas Ilves’s “Agentic State” paper, Jen and Jordan discuss how AI could deliver real-time, adaptive, and personalized public services through 12 functional layers (6 for implementation, 6 for enablement) ([05:59]).
• AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: AI can help unwind regulatory complexity but still requires political will and human action to make meaningful changes ([08:38]).
• Risk of Guardrails Becoming Barriers: Sensible AI guardrails can ossify into insurmountable barriers if bureaucracy is too risk-averse ([12:32]).

“AI is a tool in the hands of people trying to make government better. Our limits are not the AI, but our political system.”
— Jen Pahlka ([14:12])

• New Productivity Potential: As software becomes almost free and non-coders can build tools, there’s a huge opportunity for faster, cheaper government innovation—if procurement and contracting can get out of the way ([15:11]).

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Barriers to Change

• Regulatory and Statutory Inertia: Even when technology provides solutions, existing laws (“You cannot change a public servant’s job because of AI” in NY) or legacy contracting block progress ([39:07]).
• Political Dynamics: Real transformation faces resistance not just from politicians with explicit agendas but from those benefiting from the status quo ([27:36]).
• The “Cascade of Rigidity”: Each layer of process, approval, and review adds inertia, making adaptation difficult ([13:00]).

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A Vision for the Recoding America Fund

• Mission: Acting as a field catalyst for government reform—catalyzing philanthropic, legislative, and grassroots support to overhaul how government works for the AI era ([17:43], [21:16]).
• Maslow’s Hierarchy for Government: Before good policy can be implemented, government needs functional basics: hiring, management, fit-for-purpose systems, and agile processes ([19:14]).
• State-Led Testbeds: States like North Carolina are serving as proving grounds for civil service reform and process redesign ([22:34]).

“You can have better policy, but if it’s not having the intended impact…that’s because just like Maslow’s hierarchy, you can’t have self-fulfillment without the basics.”
— Jen Pahlka ([19:14])

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Political Trade-Offs and Outcomes-Driven Legislation

• Pareto Frontier of Effectiveness: Much waste and dysfunction (~80%, per Jordan) are non-controversial and could be reformed without major ideological battles ([32:12]).
• Principled Trade-Offs Remain: Eventually, decisions like benefit eligibility or work requirements must be subject to legislative debate and elections ([26:50]).
• Need for Goal-Oriented Policy: Many regulations specify process, not outcomes, leading to confusion and inefficiency. Greater clarity on goals would allow agencies to innovate ([27:36], [29:30]).

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Competitive Dynamics and Change Incentives

• State Competition: Differences in state adoption of technology (e.g., New York barring AI replacements, neighboring states not) will spur accelerated change as laggards fall behind ([39:54]).
• Federal Sluggishness: Without market-like competition, federal change may be slow, but national crises (e.g., defense, war) can spur action ([43:00]).

“Constraints drive creativity, but constraints are part of transformation.”
— Jen Pahlka ([44:00])

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Building a Field for State Capacity

• Fundraising for Impact: The Recoding America Fund aims for $120M over six years; $40M raised so far. This would fund coordinated action, field-building, and create a community for state capacity reform ([47:50], [48:22]).
• Coalition Building: For true transformation, a cross-partisan center of gravity is needed—media, nonprofits, legislators, philanthropists all rowing in the same direction ([49:53]).
• Grounded Leadership: Jen’s conviction stems from front-line experience during crises (healthcare.gov, COVID-19 UI), ensuring the vision is not abstract but deeply pragmatic ([52:58], [54:01]).

“When you see those dysfunctions up close, you realize these problems cannot be solved from a high perch that misses what actually happens day-to-day in an agency.”
— Jen Pahlka ([52:58])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On AI vs. Political Will:
  “If you actually do it right, you have to engage with these things to understand what they are capable of—and what they’re not.” ([13:48])
• On Civil Service Reform:
  “We need to be very careful that in the interest of making a workforce that can be properly managed, we don’t create this massive turnover every time there’s a change in administration and create a culture of fear.” ([22:34])
• On the Feedback Loop:
  “We don’t have a responsive cycle…there’s no sense of correlation between doing something harmful…and getting punished for it because it's always in this sea of, well, politicians did this.” ([29:50])
• Making Legislative Work Exciting:
  “Let’s make legislators’ jobs more exciting.” ([36:04])
• Personal Motivation:
  “It feels to me, frankly, inevitable…I believe it’s the right thing.” ([51:38])

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Key Timestamps

• 00:38 Jen’s foundational vision for government renewal; leapfrogging, not incrementalism.
• 04:04 The administrative state’s golden age; how and why reform mechanisms eroded.
• 08:16 New Jersey’s 7,119 pages of UI regulations as a case study in regulatory bloat.
• 12:32 AI’s promise and the risk that regulations (“guardrails”) become absolute barriers.
• 15:11 The cost of software drops dramatically—but government is slow to adapt procurement.
• 17:43 Introduction and backstory for the Recoding America Fund.
• 19:14 “Maslow’s Hierarchy” for government effectiveness.
• 22:34 Civil service reform case study: North Carolina.
• 27:36 Distinguishing between political trade-offs and bureaucratic inertia.
• 36:04 Discussion on making legislative jobs more engaging and AI’s role in policy modeling.
• 39:07 Barriers to adopting AI in government (e.g., job protection laws for public servants).
• 43:00 Defense as a case study for crisis-induced government transformation.
• 47:50 Funding the Recoding America Fund: goals and field-building strategy.
• 52:58 Jen’s personal reflections on moving from operational to strategic roles.

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Calls to Action

• Support the Cause: Recoding America Fund is actively fundraising and looking for major funders.
• Get Involved: Open positions are available; they are interested in connecting with state leaders and media.
• Broaden the Narrative: Invitation to those wanting to tell new stories about the future of administrative reform.

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Episode Tone

• Engaged, Pragmatic, Hopeful: While honest about systemic challenges, Jen and Jordan maintain optimism and focus on practical levers for real improvement, blending historical awareness with forward-looking ambition.

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This summary captures the full sweep of the episode’s discussion on the future of American government, AI’s potential, and the mission-driven work to catalyze transformational change in public service.

Transcript

[Jordan]

Jen Palka, American hero.

[Jen Palka]

Oh, please.

[Jordan]

Welcome to chinatalk.

[Jen Palka]

Oh, it's really, really an honor to be here. And you're overstating things already.

[Jordan]

Where should we begin? I want to talk about the Recoding America Fund and the bright future that you envision for American governance. I don't know. If this all goes great, what can we expect our federal, state and local governments to be able to accomplish?

[Jen Palka]

Oh, that's a good question. And I do feel like often it's, you know, we just go to the negative, and there's plenty of negative to talk about. But, you know, I think people are driven more by wanting to get to a good place than away from a bad one. And I think it's like, you know, there's. We could talk about that question for two, three, four hours. But I think it sort of just comes down to the basic thing of government is supposed to meet people's needs, and it's not just individuals needs, but society's needs both. And we're really struggling to do that right now. And we're stuck a little bit in this sort of like, oh, can we get 10% better here or 15% better there? Instead of, wait, we need to leapfrog to what is actually needed. Right. Whether it's, you know, we need to administer a social safety net that actually protects people when they are in vulnerable times, or we need to protect our country and deter its adversaries. Like, that's the. We need to start thinking in terms of the. Actually just meeting the moment rather than moving slightly ahead from where we are today. And I think part of that is like the kind of the same thing that we were talking about when I started in this business of government reform and sort of the late 2000, early 2010s was like, well, if you want to meet people's needs, their expectations have changed. Right. They now expect to be able to do business online. It was a very basic thing then. And if there's a real gap between how they get things done in their private lives and the burden that we impose on them for getting stuff done with government, it is not good for democracy. And so if we can close that gap, which now, of course, has sped way, way out in front of us with AI and, you know, people, people want a government that works and they will support that government and they will care about our institutions because their institutions work for them. I think it really comes down to is like, what are people doing in their private lives? And how can we, how can we keep.

[Jordan]

We're running this in parallel with a show with Kevin from FAI talking a little bit about the history of the civil service. And there is this idea that we had a bit of a golden age in the sort of early middle of the 20th century, after the sort of progressive era reforms kicked in, where you had like truly excellent organizations and truly excellent people. And so on the one hand you have that kind of like degradation, but also like the point you make of just the expectations of what you would want these organizations to do have also kind of increased as like services provisions in the private sector have dramatically improved over the past 50 years. I mean, do you want to apportion blame there? Are those the two factors that have led people to be most frustrated? Is there anything else going on?

[Jen Palka]

Well, I think what you have is this very effective administrative state in that, yeah, sort of glory days of Post World War II that Kevin talks so eloquently about. It was very fit for purpose for that moment. And then, yes, I think part of what Kevin so brilliantly pulls out is that part of why it was fit for purpose is that it built in its own sense of renewal. Right. Like he talks for instance about there was a practice under, I think it was the Eisenhower administration of constantly renewing and streamlining business processes. It was called work simplification. And you read that and you're like, that is what we need now. Right. And it doesn't actually need all that much translation to the current era, but what we kind of lost that notion of constantly relooking at things and got lazy and said, we're going to let policy and process just accumulate like layers of cruft or archaeological layers that you can then dig back through. And I think our legislators and policymakers got the idea that success is adding rules and adding mandates and adding constraints instead of, wait, what do we. What should that process? Constantly asking, what should that process look like? What do we need to take away so that it is effective? How do we make good trade offs? So, you know, it is certainly about, in some sense a return to past practices. But those past practices by definition were good because they weren't stuck in a moment in time.

[Jordan]

So there's a paper that you wrote or that you blurred wrote, written by Lucas Ilvis, called the Agentic State. And it has these two paragraphs of what our sort of AI near future can accomplish. They said they analyze the transformation through 12 functional layers. Six implementation layers where agents can deliver immediate value, include public service design that becomes proactive and personalized workflows that can self orchestrate policymaking that adapts continuously based on evidence, regulatory compliance that operates in real time, crisis response that coordinates at machine speed, and procurement systems that negotiate autonomously within policy constraints. I mean, that seems pretty cool, right?

[Jen Palka]

I don't think I can improve on that. I think Lucas said it very, very well. I mean, the next piece is these like six enablement layers that go with that. So gets a little enablement complicated.

[Jordan]

But like I want to stay on this sort of like, okay, the world is more complicated. We do have another 75 years of cruft and like, I don't know, like Nader era pushback and you know, Republican like, you know, undoing of like state capacity. And now we got to deal with it.

[Jen Palka]

Right.

[Jordan]

You had this great.

[Jen Palka]

Let me, let me, let me pile in on one thing there though. We have undone state capacity. I would agree with it. We've sort of undone it by doing too much in a certain way.

[Jordan]

Okay.

[Jen Palka]

Like it's the. I think it's primarily the laziness of sort of not cleaning up our messes rather than the, the intentional undoing of anything. In some ways, the intentional undoing of what has been done would create more state capacity.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Jen Palka]

Sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, no.

[Jordan]

So, so I guess like if we're in that state. Right. The human man hours that would take to undo all of this. You and Greg Allen recently did a show where you talked about the 7,000 pages that the New Jersey unemployment insurance has to operate.

[Jen Palka]

Yes. 7,119 pages of active UI regulations.

[Jordan]

Okay. And to undo that would take tens of thousands of man hours to sort of link everything together or whatever. You know, you just have an AI get like 95% of the way there. It just, it seems like the only way out. I don't know.

[Jen Palka]

I agree. I mean, I don't like. I think the good news is that the moment that we arrive at the realization that 7,119 pages simply creates a program that is unadministerable. Right. Like, I think maybe we're not all there. I'm there. But I think we're starting to get there. It will never be robust and scalable with that amount of. It just creates this fragility and brittleness in the program. And that's a program that by definition needs to be operating at very low levels. And then we'll see spikes where it has to go 10x20x in the number of claims it can process. So it just. Scalability is a key need there. And that's going to be true. You Know, for a lot of what we're trying to solve here, you know, the moment at which we realize that we have a very big problem, the tools have arrived that make that problem a lot easier. The pushback we'll get on that, and I get all the time is like, you can't let, you know, AI isn't. You know, AI is not necessarily in the driver's seat there, like I think, but it is a. I think people can be in the driver's seat should they choose to use those tools and tackle that task. And it is absolutely true that the AI can't do anything about the political will to actually unwind those memos and guidance and policy and regulation and statute that need to be unwell. Like, there's still action that needs to be taken by humans to get to, you know, a volume of regulation that makes that program administerable. But we don't. We haven't really tested that human will because nobody has been able to figure out what you would put forth. Like, what do you need to do to, you know, how many pages should it take to describe how to run a program that gives you a certain amount of money for a certain number of weeks under certain circumstances? Right. Well, it's not. I don't know what it is, and it's certainly not going to be 20 pages, but it needs to be a lot less than 7,000. And until we put forth what we think that should look like, we haven't tested, you know, the, the will of our political leaders to get us there.

[Jordan]

So there's two, like, kind of things that would get in the way of this beautiful future. One is politics and the other is like, fear of the AI. I am relatively optimistic on the fear of the AI thing. I remember people being terrified of Uber and Airbnb.

[Jen Palka]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

And I think the sort of up, like, the daily utility that people get out of these products and are going to continue to get more out of in the next year or two. Like, like, you're going to start having, like, everyone have a personal assistant. Right. And maybe like, part of the answer will just be like, okay, all the government bureaucracy, I'm just out interaction. I'm just going to outsource to my AI, which, like, gives you a bit of a sort of like a breathing space and cushion to the, to the pain. But then you're kind of stuck with like, okay, but, like, is the unemployment check coming out or not? But I'm less worried about that type of thing of like, okay, people are resistant to it, but it's just going to be so good and so amazing that like you're going to want to have it be in more corners of your life and you'll have some kind of like demand function both from the politicians as well as the government, but as well as the people. But I'm, I'm, or maybe let's start there. What's your take on this? Like is, are people going to get over their fear of these tools?

[Jen Palka]

I think, I guess, I think that people will. I think the question is, will we have already put too many rules in place that mean that the cultural barriers start to dissolve, but the statutory and regulatory barriers are pretty, have, have sort of been put in place before we really understood what was possible. And you know, and I don't know. So, you know, I wrote when, you know, back when there was like the Biden EO then and then they were doing the guide, OMB was doing the guidance. Dan Ho and I wrote a letter, you know, they had a request for comments on the guidance from that EO and we wrote a letter that basically restated a paper that I wrote called AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity. And the concept there is that you can create what sound like really normal and reasonable guardrails on paper. Great, that makes sense in the way that those guardrails function in a risk averse and sort of overburdened bureaucracy can be not as guardrails but as barriers that you simply can't overcome. So we just have to be careful about that. And I think that like the example that we just gave of using AI to tease apart and simplify regulations of a program that we really need to have work is a reasonable example of something where if you actually do it right, you actually have to engage in these things to understand what they're capable of. And frankly, what they're not capable of. And what they're not capable of is writing. Like they can rewrite the law, but they can't get that law passed. They can rewrite policy, but they cannot get that policy passed. Humans have to do that. And so if you just, you know, if you want an example where there's no fear that the AIA is going to take over because it can't, then use that example and you will realize at the end of the day that it is a tool in the hands of people trying to make government better, that you know, where our limits are. Not the AI, but you know, our political system.

[Jordan]

Yeah, because, you know, and what didn't exist in 2024 or even for most of 2025 is this idea that like software is basically free or close to free or that sort of productivity of software engineers is now going to be like 10x or 100x and people who would never even imagine themselves being software engineers are now going to be able to like make tools to build things.

[Jen Palka]

And it's crazy just to, you know, back to this question of like, you know, the fear of the AI and like how fast we're going to adapt. If you think about it like we now know this, that software is close to free and yet basically the entire federal government and most states government are not adapting to that. Like they still have contracts with government vendors that have people writing code. Now those people may be using cloud code to help them code. They may not be because again there's restrictions, you know, policy clarification. Until that clarification comes down, we're going to take the stuff. But like, even so, those contracts don't account for the dramatic drop in cost of software development. Like it's going to be decades before you see the government actually paying less for software. And in fact I think right now we're just going to start paying more. And like, yeah, we should be on a full five alarm fire running around going how do we get what we need, right? How does the government start to get all of the software we need a lot faster and a lot cheaper? And I don't really think that's entirely what's happening yet. I mean, and not to say that there aren't great leaders pushing this issue,

[Jordan]

but you're so polite with it.

[Jen Palka]

No, I mean they really aren't. I meet them all the time and I talk to them and they're doing great stuff, stuff. But they are held back by not necessarily things like guidance around AI, but our procurement systems and our contracting and our legal reviews and just the legacy ways of doing things that in the parlance of the recoding America world, sort of at the bottom of that Maslow's hierarchy of needs of government, all the basic ways that we function, that need to change, that don't necessarily on a day to day basis look like they have anything to do with AI, but fundamentally either enable or constrain the ability of government to move into an AI era and just to throw it out there. The thing at the bottom, bottom of that pyramid that everything rests on is like, do we have a functioning workforce? Is our civil service set up to, you know, to be fit for purpose for this era?

[Jordan]

Let's come back to our 7,000 pages of regulations. You Know I am like recoding or. Sorry, pause. Let's do a 30 second introduction to recoding America, what it is and the vision.

[Jen Palka]

Yeah. So I'll give you a little bit of a backstory. How's that? My book Recoding America came out in 2023 and as I went around sort of talking about it, people kind of kept saying like, okay, you're describing the dysfunction of government and how critical it is that we fix that dysfunction for the future of the country and the world. And yet there's no political power essentially and no oomph behind your recommendations, like their ideas, without a constituency. And it was actually Kumar Gargat at Renaissance Philanthropy who said the way to put some teeth on this agenda is to raise funds and essentially act as a field catalyst for government reform. And I don't mean government reform of sort of necessarily just the flavors we've had over the past couple of decades, but government reform that is trying to leapfrog government into an AI era. So yeah, that's essentially what we see is that whatever you care about, whether it's yes, defending our deterring our adversaries, or you know, the abundance agenda, or a social safety net that works, or small government. Small government, well, that's more of a cross cutting thing. But I mean like you might care about education, you might care about housing, you might care about transportation.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Jen Palka]

You know, you might care about the criminal justice system. All like these are like the big things that our philanthropists that are elected leaders like focus on. And they say, okay, I'm going to bring in these better policies in criminal justice or education. That's why you should vote for mayor. That's why, you know, my philanthropy is, is the best thing. And what you start to realize is like you can have better policy, but if it's not having the intended impact. And I believe that's because just like Maslow's hierarchy of needs says, you can't have self fulfillment and self actualization, which at the top of the pyramid if you're not fed and clothed and housed, that's at the bottom of the pyramid. We are trying to iterate on policy in an environment where the basics are not covered. The basics are the operating model of government. And our operating model of government, as we talked about earlier, is really an industrial era model fit for that economy and that society that has, that was excellent at its job back then, but then we moved into the Internet era and we kind of like slapped websites on the front end of that model without actually fundamentally adapting it and now that we're entering the AI era, we need to leapfrog it into that. And so the thesis of the recurring America Fund is that if you want government that can achieve its policy goals, it needs to be able to hire, manage, retain the right people. So we're going to have to do civil service reform. Those people need to be focused on the right work. So we'll have to do procedural reform of all sorts. And that speaks to sort of the reduction in that policy and process cruft that we talked about. They'll need purpose fit systems, of course, including but not limited to AI

[Poet/Performer]

that

[Jen Palka]

we have had problems with this for years. And then there'll be need to operate and test and learn frameworks instead of this sort of waterfall methodology that infuses everything that is done in government. And we are trying to sort of catalyze a field of civil society, NGOs, nonprofits that push and enable government to make that leap.

[Jordan]

Cool. So on the vision, like you, you, you kind of walk through a lot of different policy areas which people have, you know, strong feelings about one way or another and don't necessarily always agree. I'm curious, like, like how far are we from the Pareto frontier of effectiveness where you start making those sort of more principled policy ideological trade offs? Can we keep the middle 75% of the viewpoints in political system if we're just going to not worry about the fringe views? How far can we get with this agenda?

[Jen Palka]

Well, let me qualify the question itself by saying that we're sort of focusing naturally on the federal government and your world is certainly focused there. We also work with states governments, and to the extent that this whole update of an operating model is sort of independent of whether we're talking about education or national defense, states are great because then you have a lot more opportunities to find, you know, to find where there is that energy and prove it. And then other states can adopt that, cities can adopt that, but the federal government can learn from it as well. So it really, you know, it's the classic like the future is here. It's just really unevenly distributed. You know, one of the things that people are going to have really strong feelings about, for instance, are, is civil service reform, which hasn't happened in really since sort of 1947. We did have the Civil Service Reform act of 78, but if you really dig in, that was pretty well, you'll get into far more depth on that with, with, with Kevin Hawakhors done that in a different podcast. But this is a pretty minimal reform. It didn't. It didn't. It tinkered around the edges more than sort of, you know, pulled us into the paradigm that we need. So that's gonna be really hard, especially since there's great concerns about the protections of our civil servants. They do need to be independent and we need to be very careful that in the interest of making a workforce that can be properly managed, we don't create just this massive turnover every time there's a change in administration and create a culture of fear where civil servants are not able to do their jobs. That would be a very bad outcome. But I think there's absolutely possibilities for great transformation at the federal level. But back to my point about states, State of North Carolina is already doing this. The legislature there sort of looked at their system and said this just is not fit for purpose. They have asked the state human resources director to, you know, to totally. Well, to propose a complete reboot of how this should look like a major, major reform. Luckily, we've been blessed to be able to support that. We've got fellows there helping out and pushing their thinking. We are. What an opportunity. Like that's like my dream. Right. Is to be able to work on a civil service system. And you know, since we believe in like test and learn frameworks, great that we can do this with North Carolina, you know, while we're looking for the opportunities to do it with other states and with the federal government. But like you're going to, you kind of need to just start like building the muscle and riding the bike around the block while you wait for those policy windows to open.

[Jordan]

Okay. I felt like a bit of a dodge. Let me try again. So, okay, we have our 7,000 pages of unemployment reform. Like imagine that there is a, let's say 75% of that.

[Jen Palka]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

Is just kind of like dumb and silly. And then you start to get to things which are real trade offs. Right. Like, like, are we going to prioritize people with children? Are we going to make sure that there's some, like try to find, you know, are you going to have to prove to the government that you're looking for a job? Right.

[Jen Palka]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

And then, you know, recently, over the past six months, we had a whole bill where the big savings for Medicaid were predicated on like new work, new regulatory craft, which is intentionally trying to make people's lives harder so they don't do it, so they don't get the benefits. Right. So like, I don't know, is, is your sense that that we can go really far or, you know, we can get 50% of the way they are to our like, beautiful functioning future. Like where, like, at what point do you start to hit the. Oh, no, like people just have principled disagreements and like we're going to have to have legislators and elections decide these, these things.

[Jen Palka]

Yes. Oh my God.

[Jordan]

Not a harmful, not a harmless, like helpful, whatever, AI, no.

[Jen Palka]

Yeah, but we do need to. Just. So my, my brain is going in a million different directions on this, but let me say a couple things. I mean, I don't, I don't know, like, I'm not going to give you a percentage because I just don't know. But you want to distinguish between stuff like the work requirements in Medicaid, which clearly are there for a particular purpose that will make the system operate very poorly and stuff that is there that really is just sort of captured by the status quo and isn't trying to, to make things worse. It just accidentally does. Right?

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Jen Palka]

Now it's also true that in that second category of like, much less, much less politicized, it's still hard to change. Right? Because there are still people who are like, yeah, but my business model is built around that dysfunction and I know how to work the system. And I think one of my learning arcs over the past 15 years is, is from thinking that all of those things are just like, can, can be washed away as soon as you just make it clear how dumb they are. Right. And like, no, there's like, there are constituents for every dumb thing, sadly, even when it's not like to the level of, you know, I'm actually trying to make this program or, you know, in the case of Medicare, Medicaid, I'm trying to ration Medicaid dollars through friction, which is just a dumb way to ration our, a terrible way to ration our scarce resources. So you want to, you want to pull those things apart in a certain way. And I think the other conclusion I have come to this is, is that like in a perfect world, instead of legislating, you're going to do X and Y and Z to this incredible degree of specificity. You tell agencies here's the goal that we're trying to achieve and you give them far more freedom. And to get to that goal by removing these constraints, it's a, you know, it's like a fundamentally different model of, of policymaking. And it's not saying there's no, no constraints, but like, we can go way further towards what we call outcomes driven legislation. You can pop Fox foundation has great outline of what outcomes driven legislation can look like. You can go on their website, we could go way, way towards that and still not be like at the, at the, at the, you know, at the ideal for it. But you also realize that in some ways we have whatever the opposite of outcomes driven legislation, in part because our legislators don't actually agree on the outcome. They can agree on what can be done. Like this would be the rules of the system, and then you're locked into administering those rules. But one person might look at that program and say, the point of this program is to make sure, for instance, that like, people don't end up in the emergency room, that they have the care that they need. And another one might say, no, the point of this program is to, you know, is to, to keep costs down. Right. And I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. And what they have agreed on is the rules of the system, not actually the goal of it. And I think that is going to be a significant problem for where we want to go because the ability to say, I think the future, this positive future that we should be talking about. Right. Is one in which we are much clearer on the goals and have the tools and agencies to sort of pivot and tact your way to that goal rather than just follow A, B, C, D and E down the very waterfall wave. Getting there. I don't, I think the other thing I would say about your, your, your question about the, the role of politics and saying, look, at the end of the day, voters are going to have to say, we don't want this, you know, work requirements in Medicare, Medicaid, for instance. Completely agree with that. The problem is that right now we don't have a responsive cycle. Like the things that we do take so long to get implemented that voters are always reacting to something that like the last guy or the guy two before did. And so there's no sense of correlation between you do something that is harmful to the American public and you get punished for it because it's all in this sort of like, sea of like, well, politicians did this and we've got to speed up implementation in part so that if you do something and it is good or bad, you feel the consequences of it in the next election. Sure.

[Jordan]

Can you slide back like half an inch?

[Jen Palka]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

You're like a little. Oh, no. Towards the well. Or. I can pull. I'm fine. I'll pull the mic this way.

[Jen Palka]

It just, it hit the cord on the floor.

[Jordan]

You're good.

[Jen Palka]

Okay, great.

[Jordan]

You're Good.

[Jen Palka]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

So, okay, you won't give the number. I will. I think it's like 80% that you can, like, fix before you start really getting into. Getting into the nitty gritty stuff. But maybe, maybe when you say nitty

[Jen Palka]

gritty stuff, do you mean the like,

[Jordan]

like hard ideological policy trade offs?

[Jen Palka]

Yeah, the like.

[Jordan]

Or like there is so much that it, it does not seem to me to be like a waste of time. Like, like, yeah, I love that that's your number.

[Jen Palka]

And I, and I. And I think you may be right about the percentage of stuff that is like, much more trivial. But I, but we do still have to face the even smaller degree of capture in that 80%. It's much less, but we still have to face it and, and, and get people in a trade offs mindset.

[Jordan]

All right, you were leaning on the left, now you're leaning on the right. You can lean on the right, but I'll just move it closer.

[Jen Palka]

Okay, great.

[Jordan]

So, okay, like, how to make legislators jobs more fun. I think the. All right, so we have our 7,000 pages. Let's say we take 6,000 of them. Are just like dumb requirements that are like having the fax machine that everyone's going to agree can be sort of aied away. I am sort of excited for just so you like.

[Jen Palka]

You mean like there's a requirement that something get faxed? We can get that out.

[Jordan]

Yeah, just like things that you can get your, you know, 85% of a legislator consensus on. Yes. This is worse. This is more, more impact for less money. Like, we're all in favor of it. Yeah.

[Jen Palka]

What signature requirements? That kind of thing.

[Jordan]

Great. So like, like teasing up or like teeing up, like what the actual things are and saying, hey, legislature, like, if you like, you guys should all focus on these 10 things. Because if I have answers to these 10 things, then I can reach the next, like, Pareto optimal, like, impact for policy thing. But you, like, it is not up to an AI to decide, like, should the single mothers get more than the, you know, families or whatever or like, how much should alimony be or this and the other thing. But then, you know, but once you start to get into that world, then like, I mean, then what the AI is the political valence of the AI teeing up the thing, then it starts to get really tricky.

[Jen Palka]

Teeing up the policy decision or do you mean making a benefit determination?

[Jordan]

Oh, I mean, when you have the model not just doing the boring stuff, but helping facilitate the discussion and sort of do the modeling and, and you Know, ultimately like get to recommendations on the naughty principled stuff. Right. I mean like we're, right now we have the CBO which is like the closest thing you can have to some like objective scoring. And it's not really all that. Whatever there's, there's nuances around it, right. But like there's some aspect of that which is like truth, right. Like I imagine in the near or it is a truth that both sides like have some sort of interaction with.

[Jen Palka]

Right.

[Jordan]

Like I think like a version like there is going to be something like a CBO that an AI is just going to do for an enormous other swath of, you know, trade offs and decisions. Right. And like having you know, instead of having like, you know, beleaguered congressional staffers, but like models providing the sort of, you know, the simulation and ground truth and the data and the projections. This is going to be a really weird future.

[Jen Palka]

It is and I think. But one thing that excites me about it and by the way, I love the framing of like let's make legislators jobs more exciting. I'm going to use that and pitch that it gives you the ability to interrogate actually goals. Right. So instead of like you, you, you so much more easily can now can say things like will this policy intervention properly implemented help more people return to work? Right. Like so I'm talking in the, in the unemployment insurance context, right. Like if the one of the goals of unemployment insurance is to make sure that people can get another job, right. It's not just like, you know, okay, you don't have money, but like you don't fall into greater poverty so that you are able to get re employed. Well like that whole world is changing dramatically right now and so we need to be saying okay, is that one of the goals? If so it's not just the way that we verify that the terms of someone's separation from their past job. Does that make sense? We do need to ask those questions because enormous amounts of administrative burden and time and energy go into that question that just might not make that much of a difference to the goal of the program. Not as bad as like the work requirements in Medicaid, but like still it's a lot.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Jen Palka]

But we need to ask the questions like what is the right design of this program if what we want to do is prepare people to not be, you know, perpetually unemployed?

[Jordan]

I just think like, I don't know, like, like coming back to my, my not worry that people are going to start to use this stuff is and maybe this is part of the amazing future. But like the experience you have with Claude Code where it keeps asking you for permissions and you just say, yeah, sure, just do it, like, whatever, this is great. And maybe I'm coming back to the Biden folks a little bit is like, again, it's not today, it's not tomorrow, but like, probably within three to five years, the amount of things that the models will strictly dominate human beings on, Especially when it comes to a lot of government work, which is just like taking some rules and procedures and applying them. We're going to be handing over a lot to technology and there's going to be a real. Or maybe not in government, because maybe government will be slow or whatever, but in a lot of corners of your life, like, you're going to be kind of putting it on your model to figure it out for you. And I do think there's like, however messed up the system is, we do still have elections and legislators.

[Jen Palka]

Right, but that's what I mean by. When that time comes, where it is just patently obvious that that is the right thing to do, to hand that over, will we have constrained ourselves? I mean, we are talking in New York. New York is a state that has passed a law saying that you cannot change a public servant's job because of AI. So that's the kind of constraint that you will hit up against that. I can see the logic. I understand why they say that, but it is going to, it could really fundamentally exacerbate the gap between public and private sector effectiveness in ways that could be devastating.

[Jordan]

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's. I think that like, there's a, there's an aspect of like, those type of dumb things going to go the way of the dodo bird when Pennsylvania and New Jersey don't do that. And like, are like, literally 10 times better, though. I guess it's taken phonics a really long time to like, get out into the world, so. So who knows? Maybe not.

[Jen Palka]

No, it's actually true. That is a. It took a minute there for something that was very clearly the right answer.

[Jordan]

So. So yeah, there's a, there's a nice aspect of the, like, at least at the state level, like, you have that kind of like, competitive dynamic. But yeah, I'm more in the sort of like 2030 phase where everyone's like, gotten it and then we're just not used to making the sort of like, ideological debates and decisions because we've already decided that AI has already gotten us 95% of the way there this is like the future that we wish we could get to one day. So maybe we'll come back to this, Jen. But are people really freaked out about this? Is this like.

[Jen Palka]

Freaked out about what?

[Jordan]

I don't know, whatever you're gonna say.

[Jen Palka]

Well, I was like, that's one of the reasons I love that like this. Like it's great that we have 50 states. Right. Because New York might pass this law that I think is a terrible mistake. But yeah, they will hopefully be forced to do something about it when their neighbors are kicking ass.

[Jordan]

Yeah, yeah. The sort of, the competitive dynamics which is going to make this stuff proliferate in the non government parts of our life. I mean, I think the sort of New York versus New Jersey and Connecticut and Pennsylvania feedback loop is like a slow ish one. But it exists. The federal government, like, yeah, I guess we have elections every two years. Is that what is going to unlock like AI services? I don't know. We like sort of had a version of that with doge. I'm not sure that's exactly what we, you know, what the future is. And then you have this sort of defense establishment, right. Which is like, like, you know, they're running the intelligence community runs into this every day with. And I guess now we're fighting wars every month. So like we have that feedback loop too. Yeah. How do you, how do you think about the kind of like if you where on the sort of spectrum of private sector capitalism, pressures to adopt and innovate versus, I don't know, the IRS or something. How do you see that spectrum and where do you put things on it and how do you get at the places that have the least amount of competitive pressures to modernize?

[Jen Palka]

You mean within say the Department of War?

[Jordan]

Take it wherever you want. I don't know. I trust you more than you.

[Jen Palka]

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting on the one hand, yes, the fact that we are now, as you say, kind of war month at this point ought to sort of, you know, kick us into, you know, crisis mode. And our history in this country is that we act in crisis. Right. Like transformation into the digital era has really only come in these sort of leaps where, you know, healthcare.gov is a great example. Like I was in the White House at the time and we were trying to start us what became usds, US Digital Service. And it kind of truthfully like was going very, very slowly to the point where I just don't think it would have happened if you hadn't had the crisis of healthcare.gov oh, interesting. Oh yeah, yeah. So, so the fact that we are now in like, you know, a hot war with Iran might, might change things in the Pentagon. I think one problem though is that we just keep giving them more and more money and there's, you need to actually constrain. Constraints actually of course drive creativity, but constraints are part of transformation. Right. I was sitting next to this guy once in an event who's a very senior leader in the Air Force and I said this thing about after my four years on the Defense Innovation Board, my conclusion was that the only way that you would be able to defend our country better would be to cut the budget. Because the bigger these projects, the more you get into this massive, you know, just this massive set of rules and everything moves very slowly with lots of people touching it and it just, you know, there's just no ability to move quickly. And I kind of apologized to the guy except I was sort of insulting him. Like no one wants to hear that the institution they're involved with needs to be cut. And he was like, oh no, no, lady, let me, let me edit what you just said. A cut is not enough. You know, we've had that at sequestration and it just is a, you know, a haircut across the top just makes everybody cut all the wrong things. You need to cut the budget by half. And I said, are you saying that our department would be more effective with half the budget? And he said absolutely. Like this is not even me saying this, right? So we need that kind of crisis that would force, and I'm clearly not saying, I don't think he was saying there, that we want like half the defense, we want double the defense, we want to get out of that gumming up of the works, the 25 year cycles, the literal ships that are not just dysfunctional but not needed by the time that they're delivered. We just need to speed things up. And the way that you speed things up is you contract the resources so that they have to go through more streamlined channels. And will war do that for us? Maybe, but there's a lot else going on there that's pretty chaotic and distracting us from the core work of making the Dow fit for purpose.

[Jordan]

To what extent are this, how much do you want to attribute, I don't know, slowness or dysfunction to the political economy questions? I mean you mentioned software, right? It's like, okay, well maybe if you paid one fifth less, the people who make the sue are the contractors for the software will have like 150, like political heft to slow Things down and make them optimize for their business models as opposed to the country. Like is that a big part of the problem? Medium part of the problem?

[Jen Palka]

I mean this is a sense, this is an interesting field in which one of the big voices for transformation are vendors actually not the Beltway bandit so much, but as sort of the insurgents in that space are actually making the case for, you know, moving to, you know, what is the term? I think it's something like attritable mass, like lots of little drones instead of, you know, big, these big platforms and for speed. But there is concerns about like the, you know, the new breed of vendor also, you know, getting in on the game of capture. It's just that sort of the natural cycle is of capture. But yeah, I think it's a big part of big to medium part of it.

[Jordan]

Okay, all right. You guys got $120 million?

[Jen Palka]

No, we don't. No, no, no, we have. No, we have.

[Jordan]

What a bummer.

[Jen Palka]

We are fundraising. Give us money. We have about a little less than 40 and we'll be raising the rest of it over the next couple years.

[Jordan]

Okay, you heard it, you said. What's the email address?

[Jen Palka]

JennecodingAmerica Fund.

[Jordan]

Amazing. Okay, well, let's put it this way. What is going from 40 to 120 get you.

[Jen Palka]

I think really it's the ability. So we're a six year fund and it's the ability to plan and execute over the course of six years in such a way that what we have done at the end of that is meaningful and sustainable. Right. So it gives you the, the ability to execute on a strategy. I mean we're going to check in at that three year point and say, you know, do we need to go bigger or do we need to make some changes here based on not just like how we are doing but obviously, you know, the policy window opportunities that we have. And you know, we're not, we're not in charge of the macroeconomic environment or the political environment that will deeply impact how well we can do on this. But you know, really what we, we need to do is there has not been a field of state capacity. There just never has been like I was part of this, you know, quote unquote field called civic tech. And then there's people who are sort of good government reformers and congressional modernization groups. But there's never been a center of gravity that's says here is a set of organizations and a community that's beyond just the organizations, but people and legislators and media that all see this future that we could be media.

[Jordan]

You heard that?

[Jen Palka]

Yeah, we all see this future that we could get to. It's going to be needed, really. I think in whatever political scenario we end up in and. All like row in the same direction towards it. Let's have some common goals because, you know, there's philanthropists out there, you know, feeding, you know, this organization to do this one thing and these other folks over here to do another thing. But that's not the same thing as saying a set of, you know, of orgs and people are all saying from the left, center, right, maga, progressive or whatever, hey, we went on a degree on what civil service reform looks like, but we need to do it. And there's probably a common ground in the middle. We know there's a big common ground in the middle that everyone from the magas to the progressives actually agree on. And yes, that's going to take several years, but you have to be able to not only fund those groups, but have a coordination layer that says, hey guys, let's all push on this from all over different social. And let's bring together and let's, let's, let's. You guys get Elizabeth Warren talking about it, we'll get Senator Young talking about it, we'll get the state talking about it. Like, and that creates, you know, a critical mass for something to happen that's just not been on the table for decades. So, you know, we, you can't, you can't do that with. I have enough funding for this year, but I don't know what's going to happen next year.

[Jordan]

How does this work feel versus, I don't know, doing healthcare.gov or writing a book?

[Jen Palka]

It feels to me, frankly, inevitable. I would not have done that work. I would not have written. I shouldn't have bothered to write the book if I wasn't going to do this work. You know what I mean? As much as we live in, as we say, interesting times that sometimes, you know, worry me quite a bit, it's nice to have something to do that I like fundamentally believe in and believe needs to happen in parallel with whatever else is dominating the headlines. And that I feel good about because I can't do much about the rest of the headlines. But I can say let's not take our eye off the ball here. We know we need to do things like civil service reform. That is my role. I'm going to stay focused on that because I believe it's the right thing.

[Jordan]

I guess, like, okay, doing healthcare.gov or like building USGS is like, you know, the types of, kind of like the type of work and negotiation and persuasion or whatever to do those sorts of things versus like create a national coalition. I don't know. Do they feel similar? Do they feel like. I see the progression obviously, but I don't know. How does it feel different?

[Jen Palka]

Well, I should say I did not work on the healthcare.gov rescue team. I was adjacent to it and I was standing up USDS from the, from OSTP at the time. And so we sort of retroactively claimed USDs. But you cannot credit me with that. There's some wonderful people worked on that. But you know, they feel to me all part of a whole really because I think I'm uniquely suited to do this work because I've somewhat fought in the trenches. I mean maybe a better example of that is like the unemployment insurance stuff I did during the pandemic. Like when you see those dysfunctions up close, you realize these problems cannot be solved from a high perch that misses the what, you know, what actually happens in a day to day basis in an agency. Right. And yeah, I mean, I guess, I

[Jordan]

mean just like we are now going from an operational to a strategic level in a sense. Right?

[Jen Palka]

Again, it feels like yes. But to me it's like if you've actually fought the battle and have the, the, you know, the scars from it and frankly the frustration, I'm not the only person who've come to the conclusion that you got to go upstream. And that is essentially what we've done is just we've from, from, yeah, from the front lines of like this thing needs to work. And it's not whether it's, you know, in the, you know, I mean I went to all these military bases when I was in the Defense Innovation Board and saw people, you know, sat side by side with people who were like struggling with incredible constraints to just do a thing that didn't seem like it should be that hard. Right. Like if you have that then, you know, then that informs the, the strategy that you have for the next layer up and the next layer up. And so this is the highest layer up that I've been at. But I bring with me everything from, from all of, all of those, all those battles. And I hope it means that we are armed with the, and that will continue to sort of have that ground truth to it. So it's not this sort of abstract idea, but truly designed for the problem we're trying to solve.

[Jordan]

All right, so besides asking for funders, you guys hiring, you're taking pitches. What other calls to action do we have for the people out there?

[Jen Palka]

Oh, such a good question. We do have some open positions and they're on, I think they, on our LinkedIn. We are absolutely looking for major funders. We are looking also, I think for people who want to connect us with state legislators, state leaders. And you mentioned media. You pointed at the camera and media. We need to be telling a different story. And so folks who want to engage in this sort of parallel universe of administrative state renewal alongside everything else that's going on in the world, like, come come to us. We've got stories we can point you at. And I think shaping the environment that way will allow for more people to be in this mindset which, where you started, which is not just like how is government sort of bonked today? But what is the, what is the future that we're going for and how can we start to imagine ourselves there?

[Jordan]

Amazing. All right, I think we'll call it there. Jen Palka, thanks for coming over. Thanks so much for being part of ChinaTalk.

[Jen Palka]

Thank you, Jordan. I'm glad we finally did this. Hooray, Hooray,

[Poet/Performer]

Rational soul Rewrite the operating system Give the machine go from the punch card pass to the cloud we're climbing through Gonna get commit the constitution Push it branch by branch it's true Sporadic arteries of red tape cholesterol will rule the administrative heart attack the golden age is mule but now the civic hackers gather bipartisan and raw Compiling hope from spaghetti code Finding elegance in law 4 competencies 4 horses on a carousel of change Workforce procedure, infrastructure feedback loops Arrange, test and learn Fail fast iterate the stardom meets the state Agile in the marble halls Democracies of day

[Jordan]

from

[Poet/Performer]

the semiconductor fabs to the section 8 weightless line where the user experience dies by a thousand cuts in time we're mapping the ecosystem Resource in the gaps bottom up wisdom top down will collective impact traps We're e coding America semantic version 2.0 patch the Legacy systems Let the river of data flow 6 years to refactor the Republic Clean code open source Government as a service of the people, by the people, for the people Fix democracy. We the people

[Jen Palka]

Bad day.

[Jordan]

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