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Technical.ly
20-04-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
I know civic technology. This is not civic technology.
Defined in the 2010s, civic technology describes efforts to use digital tools and design processes to improve the effectiveness of government, nonprofit and community efforts. Elon Musk's DOGE is formally a rebranding of the US Digital Services, an Obama-era unit that sparked today's civic technology efforts. From afar, Musk's use of startup culture and engineers to 'traumatize' bureaucrats might seem a part of civic technology. Instead, its leaders call DOGE a corruption of their movement. In February 2011, co-hosted a community listening event for one of the first local cohorts from Code for America, the organization that largely defined what we today call civic technology: using digital tools and design processes to improve resident outcomes. The national nonprofit got its start by recruiting civic-minded software developers to accept below market-rate salaries for a year of service with willing city governments. Their remit? Make stuff work better. At that event, we put 50 residents into small breakout groups led by these new Code for America 20- and 30-something software builders. Attendees identified big problems and tiny annoyances. Several became projects that CfA group developed across their year of service. Technocratic optimism was alive in American cities then. The economy was slowly rebounding from the Great Recession. Many regions were retaining do-gooder millennial college graduates. The Obama administration was credited with following its data-backed presidential campaign with digital-leaning government reforms. That included the US Digital Services (USDS), a unit launched in part by tech industry exec Jen Pahlka — who later founded Code for America. Computing, internet databases and accessible websites have a decades-long tradition in federal, state and local government. In the 2010s, the practice of leveraging code, web services and emerging user experience and design processes there started going by the name civic technology. Inspired by leadership at the federal level, city champions followed, with a similar assumption — that lots of systems for residents could be improved with a sprinkle of the era's tech and innovation pixie dust. Alongside startups and software jobs, how technology could be used to make government more responsive and effective was a cornerstone of earliest coverage. Elon Musk, the world's richest man, repeat entrepreneur and self-styled engineer, is crashing the federal government via his Department of Government Efficiency, which is formally a rebrand of Pahlka's USDS. Amid a slew of constitutional crises, DOGE could fade from a top alarm. Worse, to those farther from the conversation, one could reasonably connect the dots between the 20-something tech entrepreneurs and software builders of the 2010s to Musk and his team of 20-something technologists of today. So is DOGE a continuation or a corruption of civic technology? If the answer is obvious to you, then here's your chance to spread the differences more widely. 'Civic tech is an enabling function for the public good,' said Christopher Whitaker, executive director of the Alliance of Civic Technologists. 'It's not about efficiency. It's about helping your neighbors.' Not all broken systems are accidents A US Army veteran, Whitaker started his career as an Illinois bureaucrat, working in the state unemployment office during the Great Recession — using a system built in the 1970s. 'You'd log in and see a blinking green DOS screen,' he told me. 'Then you'd print out a ream of paper the next morning to check if anything was rejected. That's how we knew if someone would actually get their benefits.' Like thousands of other technologists, his frustration is what led him into civic tech. Whitaker later worked at Code for America, which evolved its model to include 'brigades,' semi-autonomous groups of local civic technologists spread around the country (Code for DC and Code for Philly, for example). In the 2010s, lots of well-paid and highly-skilled software builders wanted to volunteer their expertise to help their neighbors. Code for America helped thousands of them do that better. It seemed as if civic technology spirit was already taking hold at the federal level, so it was time to extend that approach to state and local governments. I first met Whitaker in 2017 when helped him organize Code for America's first national summit for local civic tech leaders. That brigade summit was a kind of pep rally for tech-enabled, responsive city government, which the largely politically progressive attendees needed. Years into local civic tech organizing and under the first Trump presidency, Whitaker, his local 'brigade captains' and a growing coalition of supporters were confronting something insiders already knew: not all broken resident services are accidents. 'Some government systems don't work by design, ' Whitaker said. I had lunch last week with a social entrepreneur, one of hundreds of founders follows whose company's intent is to address some social ill by fulfilling a market niche. Social entrepreneurs are civic technologists with cap tables. Sometimes government lacks the know-how or the focus to improve a system, the entrepreneur told me, and that's when civic technology can work well. Other times, though, government is broken exactly because someone wants it to be broken. Civic technology is much harder to take root there. Unemployment systems, for example, are often complicated because enough local leaders want it to be difficult to collect benefits. In this way, these systems are working exactly as intended. Academics Don Moynihan and Pam Herd call this 'administrative burden' — deliberate friction to reduce program usage. This isn't about ineffective government. It's about political intent. DOGE is not civic tech If DOGE really is about the efficiency of government, laying off revenue-generating IRS agents would be an unexpected choice. If DOGE really is about the effectiveness of government, effectively shuttering 18F, the federal government's tech consultancy, would be a strange decision. 'A good product manager always asks, 'What problem are you trying to solve?'' Whitaker told me. 'DOGE doesn't seem to be asking that.' Or, DOGE is addressing a very different problem than more effective government services. In February, Whitaker and fellow technologist Derek Eder published a call to action: Civic tech must focus on harm reduction. Not systems for their own sake, but work that directly helps the vulnerable. 'If food prices go up, helping a food pantry get food on the table is a win,' they wrote. 'If the administration targets our cities for mass deportation campaigns, every door that doesn't open without a warrant is a win.' They highlighted Civic Tech Atlanta, which recently helped a local food pantry prepare for a data migration — by cleaning up spreadsheets and validating addresses. No big reveal. Just real work. The kind that actually helps. In spring 2023, Code for America announced it was ending its formal relationship with its brigades, sending 60 or so local civic tech organizations on their own. Several changed their names, others folded other organizations, most are evaluating their place in the world. Next month, Code for America will host its annual national conference, a few miles from where DOGE's young technologists are sleeping in offices. Both groups say they're making government work better for the American people. Once its inspiration, the federal government is now civic technology's most divisive battleground. 'What civic tech learned again and again, is that it isn't just what you build,' Whitaker said, 'But how you build it.' Let's remember what we're for I got my civic tech start attending and hosting weekend hackathons, mostly in Baltimore and Philadelphia starting around 2010, not long after launching Looking back, we were generating hundreds of hours of free consulting from what were then some of the most in-demand professionals. And we mostly did it for pizza and a sense of community. Government, at the federal, state and local levels, will always need reform and modernizing. These systems are designed for stewardship, not disruption. The Clinton-era 'reinventing government' initiative cut federal workers, slashed spending and brought in emerging digital tools. It was controversial in its day, but was done legally, and now is fairly well-regarded. Those Code for America fellows I followed in 2011 were like so many other civic technologists I've come to know: smart, nerdy, motivated by a satisfaction that better systems can help more people — and cautious of how technology can be destructive. 'This is not a good-faith effort,' Whitaker wrote in January of DOGE. 'They've said they want bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. Civic tech has no business working with bullies.'
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
She co-founded the office that became DOGE. Now, she sees ‘irresponsible transformation.'
Jennifer Pahlka is perhaps best known as the founder of Code for America, a widely respected nonprofit that helped formalize the principles of civic tech, a movement leveraging design and technology expertise to improve public access to government services and data. Notably, the organization reimagined the online application for California's food assistance program, which once had one of the country's lowest participation rates, transforming it from a 45-minute endeavor requiring a computer to a mobile-friendly process that can be completed in under 10 minutes. Pahlka's 2023 book, 'Recoding America,' outlines her views on why the government so often fails to achieve its policy goals in the digital age. In it, she argues that "archaeological" layers of policies, regulations, and processes center the bureaucracy, not the public. As a deputy chief technology officer under President Barack Obama, Pahlka helped launch the United States Digital Service, a unit within the White House that paired top technology talent with federal agencies to make government services more efficient and user-friendly. It was the predecessor to Elon Musk's 'Department of Government Efficiency,' or DOGE. On Feb. 25, 21 employees resigned from the renamed service, saying they would not 'carry out or legitimize DOGE's actions.' Pahlka believes bolstering the government's tech chops and relying less on contractors could save taxpayer dollars. However, as the administration looks to slash spending, she worries that DOGE's 'very indiscriminate' approach to date could wind up harming people who rely on public benefits such as Medicaid. KFF Health News spoke to Pahlka, now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, about what she sees as 'irresponsible transformation' and how best to fast-track government reform. This interview, conducted in mid-February, has been edited for length and clarity. A: It's really easy to look from the outside of government and say, 'That's crazy it works that way. I'm going to go in and fix it.' And when you get in, it's that way for a reason, and you gain so much more empathy and sympathy for people in public service. You realize that people who you thought were obstructionists actually are just trying to do their jobs. Civil servants deserve respect. We're just not transforming government fast enough. A: One, you have to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. You also have to be able to reduce procedural bloat. When the unemployment insurance crisis hit, every state's labor commissioner got called in front of the legislature and yelled at for the backlog. Rob Asaro-Angelo in New Jersey brought boxes and boxes of paper — 7,119 pages of active regs. And when they kept yelling, he kept pointing them to them and saying, 'You can't be scalable with 7,119 pages of regulations.' The third pillar is investment in digital and data infrastructure. And the fourth is closing the loop between policy and implementation. In California, you get thousands of bills introduced every year in the legislature. We don't need that many. We need legislators to follow up on bills that have already been passed, see if they're working, tweak them if they're not. They need to go into agencies and say, 'If this is hard for you to do, what mandates and constraints can we remove so you can make this a priority?' A: When we started working on California's SNAP application, it was 212 questions. It started from, 'What are all the policies that we need to comply with?' Instead of, 'How would this be easy for someone to use?' I think it can always be helpful to have fresh eyes on something. If those eyes have experience in consumer technology, they're going to see through that lens of, 'How do we deliver something that is easy for people to use?' A: Let me say what I hope for: I hope that the states now get that when we don't transform fast enough in a responsible way, you are inviting irresponsible transformation. I hope this gives governors and mayors all over the country a kick in the butt to say, 'Whatever we have done so far, it has been insufficient. We really need to work on the capacity of our state to deliver in a modern era.' A: Maybe there is good stuff that DOGE is doing now that I don't know about or good stuff that they will do in the future. I don't have a crystal ball. But I do see that there is a huge difference between illegally stopping payments without Congress' permission and making an IT system work better. A: I think the thesis that better technology could reduce waste, fraud, and abuse is sound, but you want to see both better use of technology to ensure that taxpayer dollars aren't wasted, and that people who need their benefits are going to get them. You need a North Star that includes both of those things. A: They have not expressed great care for what damage can happen to people who rely on benefits. I'm just seeing large, very indiscriminate cuts. They have signaled that government needs its own internal tech capacity and that it's shocking how reliant on contractors our government is. I would agree with that. We have a very dysfunctional government technology contracting ecosystem. There's this set of big firms that we've outsourced our technology to that get to charge taxpayers a shocking amount of money to implement changes. A: We've overrelied on the idea that we should bring people in from the outside and underinvested in helping career civil servants to do transformation work themselves. When I wrote my book, the biggest hero was Yadira Sánchez, who I think now has been at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for 25 years. She's a leader who really pushes for the kinds of decisions that are going to make a service for doctors that's going to be usable. She gets pushback and comes back and says, 'If you make that decision, we are going to alienate doctors. They're going to stop taking Medicare patients. And we've got to do it this different way.' We need more of her, and we need to empower lots of people like that. This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. KFF Health News is the publisher of California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. This story was originally featured on
