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- [00:04]
Santi Ruiz
I'm Santi Ruiz and this is Statecraft. We interview top political appointees and civil servants about how they achieved a specific policy goal. You can find the transcript for this conversation and many others at www.statecraft.pub.
- [00:19]
Jennifer Palka
Today we're talking to a friend of the pod, Jennifer Palka. You may have heard Jen talk to us in the past about how to actually implement a policy or how to build state capacity. Many of my best ideas come from her. Jen's a senior fellow at the Niskanen center and the Federation of American Scientists. She served as America's Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board under both Obama and Trump. She's also the founder of Code for America and the author of Recoding why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. That last bit, why Government is Failing in the Digital Age is what we're going to talk about today. Jen has just published a paper with a British co author, Andrew Greenway, on exactly that question. Andrew is a co founder of a consultancy called Public Digital that has advised dozens of governments to radically change how they work. Previously he was a senior British public servant and one of the founders of Britain's Government Digital Service, or gds.
- [01:18]
Santi Ruiz
Andrew and Jen, thank you for joining. Andrew, you're British, Jen, you're American, but you're both interested in state capacity, broadly understood in the US and in the uk. I'm wondering if maybe you guys could start by helping us understand what is state capacity.
- [01:35]
Andrew Greenway
You know, it's a term that I had only heard in reference to sort of countries receiving international aid. And now I think it's actually quite relevant to our country. But the academic definition is just the ability of a government to achieve its policy goals. And yeah, it's relevant now because we're seeing our lack of ability to do that even with a very robust state and enormous budgets.
- [02:01]
Unnamed British Speaker
Yeah, I mean that's it. And I think particularly over here it's sort of manifesting as that translation of political and democratic intent into tangible outcomes that the public can Chile feel.
- [02:13]
Santi Ruiz
At C in undergrad, for me, state capacity was very much like a political science concept. It was an academic term. But recently it's the phrase state capacity actually comes up in a bunch of more common contexts. Like it's something that the public actually is interested in this idea. Do you notice that? And is there a particular reason for that?
- [02:33]
Andrew Greenway
Well that that may be a stretch. I'm not sure the public is at entrance to anything.
- [02:37]
Santi Ruiz
Maybe sections of the educated as recline listening public.
- [02:41]
Andrew Greenway
Yeah, it is having a bit of a moment. It is also often confused because people think it means in the US context that we need more capacity at the state level as opposed to local or federal, and we don't mean that at all. You know, if it is sort of relevant to the average person these days, it's because of what Andrew said, the frustration of not feeling those outcomes, those tangible outcomes, that sort of disjuncture between hearing, oh, we're going to be investing in, you know, new infrastructure for clean energy or EV charging stations, or, you know, during the pandemic, you're going to get your unemployment insurance, your pandemic unemployment insurance, and then it kind of doesn't happen, or it happens in a different way than you thought. It doesn't happen in a way that the people who wrote that law really intended. And so though I don't think know most of the public knows the word, I think they actually would say it's important to them if they understood the meaning of it, because we do. We. That's in the end of the day, that's what we care about in the uk.
- [03:46]
Unnamed British Speaker
I think there's probably a bit less sort of discourse around state capacity as a phrase. It's definitely coming through, though. One of the reasons I think it is coming through a bit more over here is because people have got quite tired of other sort of phrases. So we talk a lot about civil service reform here, we've talked about public service reform here, and I think those phrases have not, maybe not become discredited, but I think there's a sort of an element of weariness with those concepts, partly because people have heard them sort of trotted out for decades and not really seen or felt the difference. But I think it's equally strongly felt by people within the public service, the officials and public servants. So I think there's a sort of a hunger for some new language as well as something to actually happen.
- [04:32]
Santi Ruiz
Sure. You both wrote a paper together that we'll get to in a second. I'm very excited to talk about it. What's the point of writing a public policy paper that's partially British and partially American? What's the similarity on both sides of the pond that makes it valuable for the two of you to collaborate?
- [04:51]
Andrew Greenway
I wanted to write about state capacity in the us, but it feels to me like some of the things that we need to imagine we can't imagine without being able to see it somewhere else. And I've been following what Andrew's team has been doing both at public digital and before when they. Most of them were part of the government digital service in the UK, which came about in around 2011, 2012, and always found that they were a bit ahead. And it's not just because they have done the gds, for instance, but also do they have a different system in which some of the things I think we need to do, like closing the loop between policy and implementation, they're actually able to show real examples of. And I don't have great examples of them in the us I wanted Andrew to join me in that so we could sort of move the Overton window for what people are thinking about here.
- [05:45]
Unnamed British Speaker
In the U.S. as you know, Brits tend to be kind of polite, so we would never put ourselves forward at this bit, the lead. So I, I kind of, you know, always feel slightly embarrassed on our behalf that Jen says you guys are way ahead, you know, sometimes doesn't feel like that. But certainly, I mean, I guess the UK has played, you know, a leading role in some of this thinking in the past. And as lots of listeners will know, we've got a new government here, the first labor administration in 14 years. And they have, I think, come to the realization quicker than some governments have that, that the system of government is not quite ready or quite fit to deliver the level of ambition that they have. And in fact, there was a speech last week by a senior kind of cabinet minister that was laying out some of his intentions around this that we can maybe come back to. I mean, the other thing I will say is that we could have easily brought in lots of other countries who I think are feeling the same sort of pain that my company does a lot work with governments around the world. And, you know, you could talk to people in Canada, you could talk to people across Western Europe. You could talk to an awful lot of countries, advanced economies or otherwise, who are struggling with this and feeling a lot of the same pains.
- [06:53]
Santi Ruiz
Will you explain to our American listeners a little bit more about what's going on politically and culturally with the new labor government on this question of state capacity?
- [07:03]
Unnamed British Speaker
Sure. I mean, so as I say, new government, a Labour government came into power in July, so they're still relatively early days. But one of the ways that they kind of set themselves up and trained the government was describing themselves as being mission driven. So they were kind of leaning on some of the work, which I'm sure people will have come across some of Mariana Matsucato and that kind of entrepreneurial state sort of side of things that Obviously gave them a sort of framing about what they were about. So they set these five missions like growth and health and care and crime and so on. But strongly implicit within that was that they were also going to approach how they went about things in quite a different way. And we wrote a report back in the spring called the Radical how, which was sort of putting some meat on those bones, like what might mission driven government might mean. And looking back at some of the work, not just in the uk, but primarily in the uk, about the good, bad and ugly of governments delivering complex things. And often some quite common threads appeared in the successful examples. So things like taking iterative test and learn approaches, having multidisciplinary teams and so on to some of the things that paper that will come to the political context here is one where there's a sort of a sense of effectively this government having to show people quite quickly that government can do things. This is not so much the usual UK fight of centre left versus centre right, Labour and Conservatives. There's a kind of a growing sense here, I think, that people don't buy either of those shades because both of them haven't stepped up and delivered what people perceive as real progress. And so this government, I think is staking quite a lot on showing a different way, delivering something tangible, in effect, to rebuild trust in politics and institutions in that broader sense. And sort of as a guard against the kind of the sense of populism. And we have a sort of increasingly kind of harder right party reform, which is gaining in polls, which is essentially trading on the fact that it doesn't matter what shade of politics are, they're not doing anything. And I think this government is sort of framed a lot of this work around reform is countering that and showing the difference.
- [09:07]
Santi Ruiz
Jen has talked a lot about how in the US context, civil service reform more often pops up on the right with ideas like Schedule F in particular from Trump or. Jen, you've written a lot about Doge about this, this initiative which is obviously occurring under a Trump administration. Andrew, I'm curious if you could give me, has civil service reform been equivalently more of a right of center interest? Because obviously it's a Labor government that's really taking up these questions now.
- [09:35]
Unnamed British Speaker
Yeah, I think, I mean, so looking back to some of the work I did when I was a public servant, helping sort of set up digital teams, the government digital service that came in under a center right government, that our minister at the time, a guy called Francis Moore, drove that, but he sort of approached that problem with quite an intentionally cross party perspective. Like he had just come in that was part of a coalition administration, Labour had just left. So effectively you had the three biggest parties in the UK who either were in government or had very recent experience of government and kind of had all collectively came to the same conclusion that the state of affairs that was currently in place wasn't working. We just spent the thick end of $12 billion on a healthcare IT system that spectacularly broke. Like that's not a party political issue. That's just a sense that the system is not delivering here. And I think here as well, the debate is perhaps less framed in terms of left and right. I think there's quite a strong kind of center around this that spans the parties, but it's sort of a debate almost about people and systems. So there's a guy here, Dominic Cummings, who's got flavors of musk about him who I think would kind of argue that actually, you know what, there are thousands of officials who've just been throwing sand into the gears. We need to get rid of a hell of a lot of people and just properly shape this up and effectively cull quite a lot of the public service. And we need some more technologists in the room. And that's really traumatic versus those who go, okay, well that's not wholly untrue. But equally there's some fundamental structuring things we used to do about incentives within the system that get the most out of the talent that we've got in public service, of which there's much. So I think it's a bit less kind of party driven here and perhaps a bit more about waste maids.
- [11:16]
Santi Ruiz
Jen, you wrote an essay earlier this year called the Brits Are Way Ahead of Us Again talking about these questions of state capacity. What exactly did you mean when you said they're ahead of us?
- [11:27]
Andrew Greenway
Before I answer that, I just want to say one quick thing about your last question to Andrew, which is that I don't think Schedule F is civil service reform and I do think we need civil service reform of the kind they're talking about in the uk Making it possible to hire on the basis of merit, fire underperformers, promote the right folks, is all a merit based system. And I think Schedule F is very, very, very, very different territory. But yeah, this speaks to what I mentioned earlier. I think the fourth sort of pillar we have in this paper is that we have to be able to close the loop between policy and implementation. And that's illustrated by this sort of metaphor that we've been working with for many, many years, which is a waterfall versus sort of a loop, an agile loop. And the way it works today, you pass a law or write a policy and it goes into this machinery of government. It's a hierarch which descends through the layers. And there's really no affordance for, for feedback during, you know, not just at the end when you're like, oh wow, this didn't turn out that well, but in the middle as you're doing the implementation, both for checking with the folks who wrote it about their intent, not high level intent always, but sort of low, more low level intent, but also for the teams to explain to the folks who wrote it. This is what we're learning while we're implementing it. If we do this thing that seemed like the right thing, in fact, we're going to get a very perverse outcome. I have some good examples of this in the last third of my book where you see teams realizing that if they do exactly what it sounds like Congress asked them to do, the outcome of that implementation will be very, very different from, from what the authors of the law actually intended. And so when the report called the Radical how that Andrew Helped Write came out, it has at least one really fantastic example of a team in the UK closing the loop in real time in ways that I don't think we could even imagine. And maybe I'll let Andrew speak to a little bit more, but maybe to set it up you have this policy that's quite complex that has to do with the combining of a number of social benefits together into one. They did such a hard reboot on it that they were able to create this small cross disciplinary team that was able to really, really take this test and learn approach in a way that's far beyond, I think, what we've been able to see in the US so far. You know, I'll jump to the end and then hand it to Andrew. But it's like when you have the Minister responsible for the department in the room with implementers who have done user research earlier that week showing that this policy sort of edge case creates a benefits cliff for somebody who needs this certain benefit. And they show that artifact of user research to the Minister and the Minister says, yes, that's wrong, let's change it. That is closing the loop that is testing and learning in a way that's going to get you a policy that actually gets the, you know, the outcome you intended. And I really want us to be aspiring to that level of tight feedback loops. Andrew, maybe you can explain It a little bit better.
- [15:00]
Unnamed British Speaker
I mean, I think you covered it really well, Jim, but just to kind of put a little bit more meat on the bones. So what Jen's referring to is a program in the UK called Universal Credit, which as Jen said, was sort of the combination of a bunch of working age benefits into one. And it was kind of effectively the biggest sort of domestic policy of the administration over sort of 2010 to 2015. So it's not like this was the kind of an innovative thing on the side of government business. This was kind of as hardcore as it gets.
- [15:29]
Santi Ruiz
And to clarify for Americans, the idea was you consolidate a bunch of existing benefits programs in one program that was administered through one entity centrally.
- [15:40]
Unnamed British Speaker
That's spot on. That's exactly right. They initially approached that problem through a very kind of typical traditional government lens. The minister had an idea, he gave it to some smart people. They turned that into a lot of policy requirements and regulations. They then tried to convert them into a bunch of technical requirements. They then chucked that over the wall to the sort of the usual outsources trying to build this thing. And there was sort of three years of that. And after three years they'd spent about half a billion dollars and got quite a lot of paperwork and not a single user who tested this thing. And there were red flags all over the place. So there was a hard reset call at that point. And nsgen says they started again, new building new team, multidisciplinary, not that many people, maybe sort of 30 odd people in a room, even less to start with. And they started by building an end to end prototype of the service that they tested with a very small number of people in a specific part of country, looked at it, learned a bunch of stuff, went back out and incrementally over time tested it with larger and larger populations of people over greater regions. Eventually kind of scaled the service nationally. And the kind of the real proof of the pudding in Universal Credit, if you'd like, was when it came to Covid in 2020 and overnight there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions additional people claiming this benefit because of the sort of circumstances that had played out that team not only needed to deal with, but I think it was a 12x increase in scale of demand on that service without it falling over. But they were also changing the policy. They were changing the actual rules behind that service as well as the operations kind of on a daily basis in those sort of first three, four weeks when it was kind of really crazy. And they could do that because they kind of set the whole thing up on that footing from the get go. And it was one of the, you know, to use a sort of Sherlock Holmes metaphor, it's one of the dogs that didn't bark over Covid. Right. It worked. And people kind of didn't notice because people expected to work, but it did.
- [17:43]
Santi Ruiz
I won't ask Andrew to make the British UK comparison direct here, but, Jen, will you compare how universal credit performed under the stress of COVID to how our benefits programs performed? Maybe you can do the bragging that Andrew is loath to do.
- [17:59]
Andrew Greenway
Well, let me not throw our country under the bus entirely. We had some benefits programs that did pretty well. Sure, we offered SNAP benefits to kids who weren't able to, you know, get meals from school. And a lot of the, a lot of states chose to deliver those automatically without making people apply. And I think that worked relatively well. But yes, famously a big one was unemployment insurance, because, of course, the crisis of the pandemic threw so many people out of work, and every state developed a pretty enormous backlog of claims. I happened to work on one, the unemployment insurance crisis in California, where we had a 1.3 million claim backlog. And it really brought to light how broken those systems are. It's not just that those backlogs occurred, but pulling up the hood and looking at how they really worked was shocking.
- [18:50]
Santi Ruiz
Can you toast, can you tell us a little bit about that? I think plenty of our listeners will have a, you know, a passing familiarity with this, but when you open up the hood on, say, unemployment insurance in California, what do you see?
- [19:03]
Andrew Greenway
So, you know, what most people said was, oh, the problem here is that a lot of these systems are written in cobol. And while that is somewhat true, there is COBOL in sort of the bottom archaeological layers of these IT systems. And then you've got layers that have accrued on top of that over the years. The problem really is just outdated processes that don't make sense anymore and really have never been challenged. Those archaeological layers of technology all map to archaeological layers of policy and process that have come down from the Department of Labor, the state itself, the, the courts, and the decisions they've made. So you have this incredibly complex mix of both technology and policy that, you know, make it such that, you know, one of the things we found out is that in order to be good at, to be competent at processing a claim in California, you need to have worked there for something like 17 years. So they had hired all of these people. I think at the time that I had that started they'd hired 5,000 contractors, mostly through Deloitte, to come in and help process these claims, but didn't seem to be aware that not only on a practical basis, but like legally those people could not process claims.
- [20:30]
Santi Ruiz
Just explain that to me, like what was the legal requirement?
- [20:34]
Andrew Greenway
The legal part of it is that there are provisions in state law, and I think this is true in many states that preserve that kind of work for what's called merit staff. You're not allowed to have somebody outside come and do that. And I think that's for two reasons. One is it's a safeguard against people trying to do something that's crazy complex without the training. And the other thing is, I think the unions put that in, you know, as essentially job security. But these people have great job security. We were pulling people back out of retirement as fast as we could to get people in the door there. But on a practical basis, you're talking about having to know many, many distinct systems that don't work in intuitive ways whatsoever. And a lot of rules and hacks and sort of workarounds to process a claim. Now, the reality was that if a claim was deemed to be like valid, it actually kind of sailed through. I don't want to undersell that. We got out some ridiculously high number of claims.
- [21:37]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah.
- [21:38]
Andrew Greenway
But the ones that were the problem are the ones that had to get sort of handled by claims processors in a non automatic way. And the really scary thing about it was that how we decided, or how the system decided whether you got that special handling was that if there was a concern that you were not who you said you were, you got that handling. Well, the way the system ran, you got flagged for additional identity verification. If there was any mismatch between your name, Social Security number, date of birth, and what's in, say, the Social Security database and other databases that we check against. Well, think about the ones that match perfectly. They're the ones that are auto submitted by folks who have gotten lots of data off the dark web, where when it's submitted by computers, it's absolutely going to say Jennifer L. Polka and it's going to get my Social Security number. Right. The ones that got flagged for additional processing were the ones in which I forgot, say, to put my middle initial. And so it flagged it. Humans make mistakes, computers don't. And we saw all of these very valid claims getting flagged for additional processing, whereas the ones that went in perfectly because they were submitted by bots through fraudulent crime rings sailed right through. And so this is a big reason we had that enormous problem with not only poor service delivery where legitimate claimants were waiting many, many months for their check, but also enormous fraud.
- [23:23]
Santi Ruiz
What's the British instinct or idea or framework that would have helped in the unemployment case?
- [23:31]
Andrew Greenway
Well, you know, I think unemployment insurance is just an example of literally decades of neglect. People who run unemployment insurance systems in states have been subject to enormous criticism over the years. Essentially whenever there's a dip in economic activity which creates more unemployment and they have a surge in claims, they get very, very highly criticized. But they're often criticized for backlog in times of high claims in the normal years, nobody wants to invest in them, nobody wants to spend the time understanding how they're broken. But also those times are when that if they get any attention, it's for a fraudulent claim. And so the culture, you could really feel it in the employment development department in California is so afraid of fraud. And the sad and ironic thing is that fear of fraud pushes them to be very defensive of the systems that they use today. These processes like flagging you if you miss your middle initial in order to avoid the criticism of having opened this up to fraud, which actually opens us up to fraud. Right. We get more fraud because we make public servants so defensive. And the only thing they have to stand behind to defend themselves is existing processes that don't work. But we really need to get in there with sort of the air cover the interest in the how from the elected officials, from leaders with power saying let's stop the blame game and care not just about the policy that's been passed, but that the mechanics and the talent and the procedures that we're relying on to deliver these policies and we just completely tune those out between crises.
- [25:32]
Santi Ruiz
Can I just follow up here though? Isn't it my mental model for this stuff is that the public cares a ton about fraud and that pressure from the public that services be delivered fairly and that people not take unfair advantage of services. That's like a fundamental feature of democracies, is that voters care a ton that. So if you assume that that's just a background pressure, that there will always be some sources of pressure on civil servants from that perspective, how do you avoid putting them in this position where they're creating cruft and more bureaucratic process and more difficulty for the recipients, for the correct recipients of these benefits?
- [26:09]
Andrew Greenway
Well, I think we think about fraud just fundamentally as incompetence on the part of a state agency instead of the result of years of always layering on mandates and constraints Instead of ever removing them, it shouldn't take 17 years to learn how to process a claim for unemployment insurance. This is not that complicated, at least in its basic conception. So I think that speaks to one thing we talk about in this paper, which is that legislators need to learn to subtract as much as they add and they need to learn to think differently about oversight. I think oversight's really important. I'm not calling for less oversight. I'm calling for a very different kind of oversight. That's not the, oh, look, we got a bad outcome, let's go have an outrage hearing, but let's be involved as it goes along and understand the many mandates and constraints we've placed on this agency, which makes it so hard for them to operate in a way that's competent, in a way that can actually deal in a, you know, 2024 kind of way with fraud, and then help them get those competencies and capabilities, enable them to actually deliver the service instead of constrain them so much they can't move and then yell at them for failure.
- [27:30]
Unnamed British Speaker
Maybe just to build on that, because the Brit in me is desperate to qualify how good we are by explaining that it's not all that great. I mean, it's one of the things that the frames that was really important about universal credit getting to the place where it dinged was a crisis was declared, right? There was a point at which everybody realized, both politically and officially, we got to get ourselves out of this hole. And I say that because it's certainly still true here in the UK hence the sort of speech by the minister last week, that this kind of working does happen here now and again, but by exception, right? It's because of exceptional circumstances and usually exceptional leaders who are within those organizations, political and official, who drive this through, despite the kind of wider structural pressures, be they the kind of the perceptions around fraud, be they even the kind of the natural inclinations around internal governance where, you know, the inclination is, oh, we'll have a sort of program steering board on this thing every six weeks and a lot of papers will get rid of them for it. And a lot of senior people will sit around the table and read the paper papers and try and figure out whether the rag rating on the sort of status updates is lying to them. It's like, okay, well let's not do that. Let's maybe get the minister, as Jen said earlier, let's get the minister and the kind of, the senior officials who are responsible for this whole thing in the room with the team and they can show them what they've built this week and then they show them the user research and you make the decisions in that room. But it is, it's really important, I think, to emphasize that, like, I'd love to say this is happening right across the UK public sector right now. We do this all the time. We don't, we just don't. And part of the reason for that is some of those deeper structural issues that we touch on in the paper to the US as well.
- [29:19]
Santi Ruiz
Both of you, I think, in your separate work as well as in this paper, talk about the value of multidisciplinary teams as opposed to having single generalists come in. You guys both like this team model. Andrew, I'd love to hear about your experience in the UK's Government Digital Service, which is, I think, modeled on this team approach. And then I want to hear, Jen, about what you picked up from the UK government digital service in helping stand up the American version.
- [29:47]
Unnamed British Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was incredibly lucky to join the government digital service at the time that I did, because, you know, hands up, I'm, I'm. Guess what, I'm a journalist. I'm one of those dangerous people. I was a sort of young, ambitious civil servant at the time. I could have easily gone to the dark side. What you get from the start was kind of made up of teams who I guess I could, you know, the simplest way of describing is that they were just formidably smart, but in completely different ways. Like you were sitting alongside developers, service designers, people who wrote Welsh, the web, user researchers, genuine deep practitioners in what they did and what they do, and you were collectively brought around an outcome that you were there to deliver. Like, my job as a sort of more policy guy wasn't to write the policy paper. My job was to work with the other people in my team to deliver whatever the overall outcome of the thing that we were sort of shooting for. And that was seems sort of super basic really, and kind of is kind of recognized practice in lots of parts of the private sector. But that just didn't happen in government. And that's partly because obviously you get these tribes in the silos thing is getting tossed over walls to the other. But there's also some quite interesting stuff about power and power dynamics between those worlds too. I think certainly in the uk, the generalists and the kind of the policy types or the sort of treasury, economist, finance types, they were kind of the first among equals, right? They sort of sat at the top. And if you were involved in tech or even More so in operations, like actually doing the stuff and being kind of on the front line. You were kind of below stairs, really. And so you just got these gaps between these different tribes. That reality kind of failed to intrude until it was too late. So gds, I think one of the more profound organizational changes that it espoused was bringing those kind of worlds together around an outcome in the same team, as well as delivering a bunch of stuff that turned out to be a lot more effective. It was transformative to the experience of being a public servant and you get to see rather than the thing that you can kind of tell your parents about that you've done at work. I went to a meeting or two and I wrote some stuff. It's like I did that thing. It's easier to get a passport now. Part of that was me. It's a really transformative experience to be a part of as well as for the public.
- [32:03]
Santi Ruiz
Jen, as I recall from reading a couple stories from this, you visited the uk, the gds, and came back here and said we should do the same thing. Do I have that actual kind of literal order of events right?
- [32:18]
Andrew Greenway
Yes. What happened was an interesting confluence of events. I was running Code for America at the time and had briefly met two of the folks who started the gds, Mike Bracken and the minister responsible. They'd brought Francis Maude over to the US and he'd come by Code for America. And about, I want to say, nine months later, I happened to be in the UK and got invited to come see this team. As it had started to evolve, Andrew just talked about sort of things being like visible, tangible. It's very different from reading a paper or hearing about something. But the experience of being in the office that day in November 2011, it just blew my mind. Like you could see people working in a different way and they had this amazing thing called the Wall of Dunn. So you would see somebody get up and take something from a different place and put it on the wall of done that. What they were doing at the time was taking this incredibly fragmented set of really, I think, bad websites and putting them all in gov uk, taking out a bunch of useless content and stuff that was confusing and make it clear and simple and easy for people to use. And so you could, you know, you had this sense of like, oh, that's happened, that's happened. And the ceiling was just so different from what a typical government office feels like. And I just was like a kid in a candy store. I was like, this is my Disneyland. I was Meant to be here. And it happened to be while I was in that office that Todd park, who was at the time the Chief Technology Officer, called me to ask if I would come work in federal government. And he wanted me to run the Presidential Innovation Fellows. But because sort of based a little bit on Code for America, they had fellows in for a year, except Code for America was doing it at the local level and he had started this program for the federal level, going to federal agencies. And I said to him, you know, I can't come to D.C. unfortunately, but wow, do you need to see this? And there's a very, very long story that proceeds from that. But, you know, over the course of. Of the year that I did end up going, we. We got USDs set up as our version of the government digital service.
- [34:45]
Santi Ruiz
What is the status of USDS right now?
- [34:49]
Andrew Greenway
Yeah, it's done some super amazing work. I mean, Andrew just mentioned online passports. I think actually there may be another version of that coming out. But what a success to be able to do that. I don't want to take away from the team at the Bureau of Consular affairs, but there's a little bit in the paper about how USDS got that I think to be far better than it would have been if they hadn't been there to bring all the practices that Andrew's just been talking about and sort of share them. I think it's a good example that there are many other examples of great work they've done in the past couple of years. But I like that one because you can see the ways that Consular affairs is now saying, oh, we don't want to go back. This is so much better. We can deploy changes every day, not every two months. We can actually test this with real users and understand before it launches what complaints people are going to have. We can instrument this site so that we know when there's a problem instead of waiting for it to fail. I mean, they. That sense that Andrew just talked about of being proud to be a public servant and like really enjoying your job and having greater energy and sense of accomplishment. I think you also see when you have a great engagement between USDs and an agency such that when USDF leaves, like they don't stay at consular fairs, like they'll go visit again. I think they're going to launch a new version of it. But like when they go back and say, get redeployed to a different federal agency and you see the agency they just work with, not just stick with those new practices, but spread them to other teams and just have no tolerance now for what used to be just the normal way of doing business. Like, that's a huge win. That has far greater impact than just getting the passport renewal online. It's going to affect visas, it's going to affect everything else. And then, you know, somebody at Consular affairs talks to a different part of State Department and somebody in State talks to somebody else, you know, over Department of Education. And that's how these practices spread. So, you know, I'm really proud of the kinds of work that they do. They've also done a whole lot on some of the core stuff like, you know, hiring and procurement practices. I am sad though, that they've really just gotten their funding really, really reduced. It used to be that they had their own appropriation and that way they could just send a team over. Now they have functioning largely under sort of a pass the hat mechanism. So essentially, well, if you want me to work with, say, Consular Affairs, Consular affairs has like, give us money for it, which takes time and energy. And then they kind of feel more like consultants and, you know, then they have to kind of please the client, which is not the kind of engagement that I think has gotten. These really transformational engagements. So I'm really hoping that in the next administration we can return to resourcing both USDs and the other groups that work in this way the way they should be resourced and they should be empowered.
- [37:58]
Santi Ruiz
I want to get to the meta level recommendations that you guys make in this paper, which by the way, for readers is called the How We Need Now A capacity agenda for 2025 and beyond. But before we get to your set of recommendations, will you both give me what are the object level places in the British and the American governments where you kind of most clearly notice the lack of state capacity? What are the specific things? If I'm a British citizen or if I'm here stateside, what are the places where that kind of gap is most obvious?
- [38:34]
Unnamed British Speaker
That's such a good question. I mean, in the UK there's a couple of areas and interestingly, ones which GVs, certainly in the time where I was working there sort of quite intentionally didn't go because we thought it would sort of swallow us up and kill us because they were quite big problems. So I think there's a real need for more of this within our sort of health and care sector, the NHS National Health Service here. I'm sure listeners will be well aware it's a sort of absolutely enormous, I say enormous organization. That's sort of a myth it's not an organization. It's a lot of different organizations that are sort of up for a brand. And you know, health and care costs sort of continue rising as we have all bunch of kind of demographic issues you can kind of only begin to imagine very similar in the states. We're spending more and more on it, but the quality of service and the quality of health outcomes that we're getting and the ability to make the most of prevent, preventative health or giving care in the home, we are way, way off the pace of what is needed and what is possible. So I would say that's, that's one big area where a kind of an uplift in state capacity could be totally transformative here. And the other is local government. So the UK is a very sort of centralized system historically like very centralized, much more than the US and the whole of the UK public sector has gone through a period of austerity and kind of budget cuts over the last 10, 15 years. But that's really been felt at the local government level Then there's plenty of critiques of gds, but one I think that's valid is that we focus pretty squarely on central government and we didn't get down into that local level. And you know, government is government is government to people. They don't care if it's federal or national, they don't care if it's local, they just want it to get done. And the kind of, the services at that level are hurting for lack of that sort of state capacity. So there would be the two that were top of my list here.
- [40:32]
Andrew Greenway
I'll start with, I think some places where it is working pretty well. Just like we don't want to hit everything with such a broad brush. I mean I manage my grandmother's Social Security benefits and site works great. It's pretty simple for folks who needed to finally file their taxes for free this year. Low income folks. Direct File is a fantastic product, has you know, incredible customer satisfaction reports. A nod to the local level since Andrew brought it up. Like I live part time of the year at a part of California where you have to burn your burn pits in this in the winter. And you know, you apply for your burn pit and it just like your, your, your burn permit and it just comes right back at you, right? It's an automatic thing. They send it to you immediately now to bridge to where it's not as good. In Australia if you want to put solar on your house, you do it the same way I get my burn pit. You type in A little thing, and it returns immediately. You get that permit, you hit submit, it comes right back into your email. We don't have that here. So all of the work that we are doing to try to transition to a low carbon economy, enabling solar, wind, new transmission facilities, all of this stuff is really encumbered by a part of it that I think is less about just the digital world and about that procedural bloat that we also tackle in this paper, where it is just really hard to put solar on your house. It's really hard to build new transmission lines, it's really hard now to move into a separate category that I think people really feel in certain parts of this country. Housing. It's really hard to build housing. And there's digital ways of working that I think help fix this, which I don't necessarily mean to say there are like great digital tools we can bring to the people. That's also true. But when Andrew talks about a digital way of working, it's one that doesn't accept that all the steps in the process that exist today should just be digitized. It says we don't need a lot of those steps in the process. Or I can see why somebody thought this step was important at one time, but it's no longer fit to the goals of our country. Like, we have to build more housing, we have to build this green infrastructure, and we have to go back and say, let's redo the process. That's the right size process for the goals that we have. And I think that's a place where. That's a number of places where people really feel it. I think another thing that people increasingly have in the back of their mind as an incredible anxiety is national security and our national defense. Like, we are spending more and more on the Pentagon and we keep losing war games. We have all these headlines about how the many, many billions of dollars are going into things that are too big and too slow and we're not actually prepared for the kind of war that's coming at us. That all has to do with procedural bloat and the cultural problems of what we call in the paper the cascade of rigidity applied to this monstrosity of the Department of Defense that like, really, really needs to get over that and start doing things far faster in a much more agile way. And, you know, I think people know that we're not as safe as we need to be.
- [44:08]
Santi Ruiz
You guys have been great. As we close, I'd love to hear a quick fire set of recommendations from this paper. What do we need to do, in your view, to fix American state capacity?
- [44:20]
Unnamed British Speaker
Sure, let's, let's have a go at that. So I mean, we've talked a bit about the kind of the personnel side and hiring the right people and being able to kind of exit the wrong people. And like there's a sort of a certain brutality to that. But equally, I think there's a really common thread that across countries that certainly the UK has felt and the US is feeling and you know, the paper kind of draws out some, some pretty kind of eye popping stats in terms of the hiring processes, not finding not just the best people, but any people who, who would fit the roles that are urgently needed by the state and is not yet giving public servants the tools to deal effectively with poor performance. And you know, speaking as a former public servant, as general remember, there's nothing more frustrating than poor performance just sort of sitting there and kind of adding to the rotten, the feel of the place. So there's some sort of relatively important tactical stuff around that, but really key in terms of process and boldness as well as thinking more strategically about the workforce as a whole and the kind of, not just the skills and experiences of those people who work as public servants, but as much so you think the attitudes and incentives on them. We talk about sort of stop people and go people. We're not talking about government, just let's just not do kind of compliance stuff. Let's just not check things, let's move really quickly. Clearly that is mad. You need those people in the system. But equally, you've got to find the balance of those forces of people who are keen to drive things forward and push things through as well as those who are making sure that that's being done responsibly and appropriately. And that demands a certain kind of workforce planning that we think could come through more strongly from opm. And then the other one that I sort of touched on is around, we talked a lot about kind of closing the loop over the course of this sort of podcast. I mean that kind of tightness around closing the loop around outcomes, but also aligning some of the broader processes that sit backstage in government around that enable teams to do that. So that means aligning funding in a way that supports working in those kind of test and learn more experimental ways and allowing teams to test their riskiest assumptions first. And you know what? Maybe stop stuff if it doesn't work and kind of turn the tap off. One of the things that we certainly found a lot in the UK is it's basically as Easy to go to our finance ministry and ask for, you know, $100 million as it is for a million dollars. So you're going to ask for $100 million. So find out how you can like putting in place the mechanisms that allow for that more agile and iterative funding. And again to something Regen touched on earlier, that sense of oversight that also supports that. Rather than building up to your big set piece meeting where 50 people sit around the table every two months and check the work. How do you get that more incremental oversight and course correction from senior folks. So those closing the loop and making sure that you're paying close attention to personnel.
- [47:21]
Andrew Greenway
And I'll pick up on two other broad categories with some specifics under them. You know, we've got to reduce the burdens on civil servants. We've got it. Which means they're tackling this procedural bloat that they have to work under. Obviously we're at a moment when LLMs and other forms of AI can help with that in ways that they haven't been able to in the past. So I think we're going to see that coming out of doge, but I would also like to see it coming out of Congress and the agencies, you know, of their own accord. And we're doing some work at the Wisconsin center to help various entities, mostly at the state and local level at this point do that. But love to work with more federal agencies, but you really just have to find ways to sort of right size these procedures. So like the procedures are downstream of that procedural bloat or the policy bloat that can be tackled now by, you know, a little help from, a little help from a computer. And I think there's another big category. We're not going to go into great detail, but we do have to reduce the surface area for ATT and CK by, you know, adversarial legalism essentially where we've created a real noacracy that is a big part of what I talked about earlier with not being able to build housing in green infrastructure. It's just, it's really, really easy to sue, to stop things, things that really need to happen. So we have to look at things like the Administrative Procedures act and other sort of cross cutting laws that affect all areas of government. And I think we have to tackle trade off denial. Right? We're always saying like, oh, but this would be a good thing. Well, yes, it would be a good thing in the abstract, but combined with everything else, it's just too much. And then lastly this idea of investing in digital and data infrastructure. We talked about the need to fund USDs. We also really want Congress to take seriously the notion that the way we fund these projects actually sort of the original sin of their big bloated mega project development model. We have to move from what we call in the paper, you know, a project model to a product model. And a product model has both the right team in the way that Andrew's talked about, but also is done in an incremental agile way where you can learn along the way. The funding model has to match the development model. We have a lot of work to do to educate authorizers, appropriators, people who do oversight in what this model looks like so that agencies can actually not just adopt it up front, but then get held accountable to this new model instead of constantly held accountable to the legacy ways of working. So there's a lot there. We hope that people take it seriously and can pick up whatever part really resonates for them.
- [50:03]
Santi Ruiz
Jen, Andrew, thank you. As a reminder, listeners, their paper, which is out now, is called the How We Need Now A capacity agenda for 2025 and beyond. Jen and Andrew, thank you guys for joining.
- [50:15]
Andrew Greenway
Thank you, Thank.