‘Recoding America’ Review: A Tale of the Tape

Apparently the swamp in Washington, D.C., is not a political but a bureaucratic mire. As Jennifer Pahlka writes in “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better,” bureaucracy “bogs down our systems,” creating a chasm “between policy intentions and actual outcomes.” She believes we “desperately need to simplify and rationalize” it all because the bureaucratic “implementation crisis threatens our democracy.”

Given the allusion to computer code in her book’s title, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “Recoding America” is about algorithms and artificial intelligence put in the service of taming, not draining, the swamp. But the term “artificial intelligence” appears only twice here, both times to dismiss its relevance. While that omission may be refreshing in the wake of all the ChatGPT hype, it’s also puzzling given how Ms. Pahlka asserts that our “digital age is different from previous eras.”

Among her many roles in government, Ms. Pahlka has served as President Barack Obama’s deputy chief technology officer for government innovation. Most of her book is a chronicle of her experiences working on various task forces for President Obama and California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom. There are her journeys through bureaucracies involving the reclassifying of criminal records that have been rendered moot by California’s marijuana legalization; implementing ObamaCare; reforming the Veterans Administration; taming the Medicare morass; and, most recently, distributing California’s gusher of Covid unemployment payments. Ms. Pahlka details the “messy task of [policy] implementation through digital technology,” as well as the challenges created by “archaeological” layers of legacy computer systems and bureaucratic processes that bog things down.

Ms. Pahlka saw firsthand the “gap between policy intentions and actual outcomes” and “the famous slowness of bureaucracy.” One cannot resist paraphrasing the author’s former boss: “The 1300s are calling and they want their bureaucratic characterizations back.” In 1321, Dante, himself a Florentine bureaucrat, wrote “The Divine Comedy,” which frames Hell as the epitome of bureaucracy. And that was before the invention of the printing press and its epic contribution of paperwork.

For those not steeped in the modern bureaucratic process and its intersection with the arcana of computer systems, Ms. Pahlka’s clear, diarylike explanations of (and frustrations with) bureaucracy are illuminating. As she notes, it’s a daunting task even to get an accurate count of the number of eligible recipients for government largess. While her concern for quickly and fairly delivering government services is universally shared, it’s in the procedures used to get “the outcomes the democratic process has agreed upon” where we find the devil-in-the-details truism.

As advice for well-meaning bureaucrats, Ms. Pahlka admiringly quotes Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s dictum: “Don’t follow my orders, follow the orders I would have given you if I were there and knew what you know.” But that is precisely where the battles over bureaucratic authority are being fought. As Ms. Pahlka observes, Republicans are opposed to “federal activism” and look for “ways to curb the power” of agencies. Democrats, meanwhile, want “administrative agencies to be able to exercise their own judgment.” That’s no mere detail; it’s the essence of the political debate over the administrative state.

Ms. Pahlka sees two main problems with today’s bureaucracy: a lack of sufficient “technological know-how” in the workforce, and too much outsourcing. “Why do we treat the experts we do have with so little regard?” Ms. Pahlka asks. “It wasn’t always that way.” Indeed, that’s the core of the debate of our times; serious tomes have been devoted to that question.

Ms. Pahlka’s proffered solutions include improving the bureaucratic “culture” with more internal training programs, more tech talent and less outsourcing. She suggests that the government seek out the kind of young graduates—as identified by a survey of Stanford undergraduate students—who prioritize a project’s mission ahead of building their own skills or compensation.

The debate over outsourcing is not new. Among the many known benefits of outsourcing is that contractors can be more easily held to account and fired when underperforming. When it comes to the U.S. government, however, insourcing all outsourced labor would expand the civil-service workforce from today’s three million people to about 10 million. Moving in that direction would be a political issue of consequence.

But Ms. Pahlka is onto something. Before Congress created the Office of the President in 1939, for example, a president had but a handful of advisers and personal staff. Today that one small office, among the dozens of administrative agencies, has a $1.5 billion budget and more than 3,000 employees (only a few of which require Senate approval). The world and the economy are bigger now, but bureaucratic expansion has been incommensurate in scale, complexity and authority.

Ms. Pahlka’s book is a cri de coeur for better “product delivery” from the now massive labyrinth of government services. Count me among those who believe the artificial-intelligence revolution could unlock some bureaucratic transparency and superior service delivery. But whether that will happen, or whether the bog will assimilate yet another technological revolution, is a matter of politics, not process.

Mr. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a partner at Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, and the author of “The Cloud Revolution.”