now it is my absolute pleasure to introduce our guest speaker. jennifer pahlka is the founder of code for america, former deputy chief technology officer under obama. her book, recoding america why

government is failing in the age and how we can do better was recently called one of the best policy books i've ever read. and the book i wish every policymaker could read by new york times ezra klein, who, as probably all know, has quite, quite a big reach. her book, a bold call to reexamine how government operates it goes beyond a call for more money or fancy or technology and into root cause analysis of the improvements that need to be made to end growing bureaucratic dysfunction, governments simply must start better delivering for citizens or populism will be the end result. you'll more about the poor implementation of healthcare.gov of the federal level and then the appalling $32 billion in fraud losses at california's employment development department. jen importantly is optimistic throughout the book and dedicates the book to public servants everywhere. don't give up. that's the intro moderating

tonight's is d.j patel general partner at great point ventures, former u.s. chief data scientist and a member of the commonwealth club of governors. so please join me in welcoming both jen and dj. thank can. that was lovely. thank you. i know. i'm excited to be here. they really like you because they got orchids. yeah, that's very special. but they wouldn't let me wear my earrings. oh, well, it's. it's being recorded so. i hope you all buckled up. and this is going to a wild ride because there's so much to cover, especially in jen's book. because jen parker, one of the greatest change agents ever met to making sure that government actually works for you. and so absolutely it is well said that and it's being said by

the greatest change agent so. well let me get humbling as well as because this is live going to be on the radio. let me just of give a quick high line as of all the amazing things you've done. you founded code for america, a nonprofit that makes sure government is for the people, by the people, the digital age. you not only did that, you co-founded the us digital response in wake of covid to help governments respond more quickly to critical. you were chief deputy chief technology officer for the united states, the us digital service and what people don't realize about that you did that at great expense your family to serve your daughter was in high school at that time and you were traveling back and forth to d.c. you were also on the defense innovation board for both president obama and president trump to help to transform the department of defense. and you chaired newsom's strike team on unemployment insurance during the pandemic. much what you were about to get into and you've won so many

incredible about this and as was mentioned you know being also named as one of the most important policy books for anybody to actually to understand how government works and. so thank you for being here at the commonwealth club and congratulations on the book. let me start with with one of the favor quotes i hear you say and, it just always sticks for me and something i myself repeating, which is government is who shows up. what does that mean? and why is so important? i think really easy to be frustrated with government. many of us are pretty frequently. it's also easy to forget the great things that government does. that becomes invisible. but it's a lot more meaningful to get in there and figure out how to make it work than it is to complain about it. and i think people who go to work in government haven't and haven't worked before are often shocked at. the ways in which they get to make the decision as that it is

a sort of corollary saying, you know, decisions are made by those who show up and you really do have a chance to shape government. if you're if you're willing to to dig in. well, how do you so how did you become one of the people who showed up or and continues to show up? where did that come from? well, when when obama was this? why not even further back? how did you get. because i think someone let's look at your background. they wouldn't have said, oh, you're the person that's going to going to show up to government and do these kind of jobs within. yes. well, i think many people would at my skills and say she can't be very helpful and that i can't code i can't design and i don't know that much about government still after all of these years you know my first job out of college i worked for a child welfare and ended up working in media. we were doing the web 2.0

conferences back when that was a big thing with my now husband tim o'reilly and it was sort of recognizing the power or of that sort of second wave of the internet participate story lightweight the things that moved very quickly and really well for people that we realized the best application those principles and values would in government. i mean that's really the thing that's supposed to work for all of us. and so when obama was obama's success in being elected was sort of credited to the several of us sort of started to say, okay, well if it can help him get elected can help him govern better. and that was really the beginning of my journey to, you know, realizing that we we could bring people in, get them involved, people who not thought about government work. and that was the beginning of code for america and when as you were going along and starting

for america and starting to talk about with government, you know, for many people out there, it's the first year we see government is maybe we go to the dmv, maybe we we try to we try pay our taxes. we get frustrated with these forums oftentimes or other services, we wait in a line. what was that? talk to us a little bit about what that moment you realized we can actually do something as you're interacting with these government. i think the first moment i really realized this was was going to work was first year of code for america. we had a team of fellow us program doesn't really rely on fellows anymore, but when we started it was a service program essentially, and had a team working with the city of boston and they had a problem where they'd changed, how kids were allowed choose or the parents were choosing the schools for the kids. so they were trying to make it more walkable and the city had a

really big problem sort of communicating this the way they normally communicated it was a 28 page printed brochure in sort of 8.40, you know this all about these different schools but it didn't help you know if the school was in your zone it was really a mapping problem. and so these these wonderful technologists and designers that were working the city that year got together and they made, you know, a pretty simple that allowed you to put in your address and the age of your kid and whether there were kid any siblings in another public and it would tell you which schools kids could go to and they know they did it in about eight weeks. and when they were when they were able to show it to their partners in you know, they were just blown away. they said if if you had done this through normal channels would have taken at least two years and cost at least $2 million. but now we it for parents.

now so that much faster and you know almost no cost really and it works they like using it it look like a consumer application instead of a government application. and the head of the boston public schools, you know, you're just changed our relationship with parents it's and i think that was when i started to realize this isn't just about cheaper this isn't just about you know make it look like twitter something you know i had a very naive ideas i think back then about what i thought would make a difference. it is about relationship to government whether they believe governments really there for them or not. and imagine having that for two years you know, two years has been rolling kids through. note without without a map to help them out that that's it really started to become meaningful for. so you know that was almost 15 years ago oh was it just the what the reason i bring this up and i wanted to start talking about your entry point is you

know over that arc you've seen so things and you've done so many in government and the culmination is is in this fantastic book. yeah. what led to this moment to write the book and give a very very unvarnished take on it actually takes to make things work in government. well have been on a journey from thinking just need better tech and government to realizing that it is something much deeper than that and i have seen so many people fighting the fight to get the right outcomes for people not just a better website, but it's not the website that matters. it's whether you get your snap benefits. it's whether veterans their benefits. it's whether we the vaccinations out to the people and they're all fighting for the system to work for people and i want try to explain to the american

public to our elected leaders or to anybody who cares what needs to change for them to be to succeed. now they are increasingly succeeding. but it's still a really battle. and i and i really want the people who have the power to change the environment in which these fighters are fighting and make it easier for them. so trying to, you know, get past preaching to the choir and talk those who can make this make a difference for them. mm hmm. well, let's a particular let's take one of those problems and dig in to one of them, because i think it's so to see, because so many times they think we think of government. as i mentioned earlier, go to get our driver's license. maybe we need to pay taxes like we touch only a little bit of. oftentimes, you know, especially from many of us come from privileged place where we don't have to deal with our knee to

require other services. but you really go into the details of this. could you pick one of the ones that you find that really showcases how you would wish the american public and our audience out there to really understand that easy. we were all very frustrated in that first year of covid that unemployment insurance systems in every state buckled under the load. i mean it was quite an increase. and you many places tenants sometimes for more than that number of applications some just this is because of stay at home orders people having layoffs. yes and then need to now qualify for benefits federal government gives it says states you have a ton of money to give out and that's you have a ton of money to give and you have a ton of people who are suddenly unemployed and need their unemployment insurance benefits. and many them really it's not a nice to have it to have to have. and we need to them their checks in a reasonable amount of time and as ken mentioned, governor

newsom asked me to co-chair a strike with the secretary of government operations, yolanda richardson, and brought in some other folks to help and go really be on the ground. and i think one of the things people don't realize is you've just got to see the systems from the bottom up in order to be able to understand what's going wrong. now, when we came in, the governor and the legislature, everybody had said, obviously, this is a big problem. throw any resources we can at it. they had brought people back who had retired, but more importantly, they had hired about 5000 people to come help process these claims and i think they were missing something important there, which we learned through my colleague marina nitze. i was there on the ground working with these claims process thursday after day and one of them is she would ask them sorts of questions. one of them said to her, you

know, i kept saying i'm the new guy. i'm not quite sure how. answer that question. let me go ask the other guys. and he said that enough times finally said, well, how long have you worked here? and he said, well, only worked here 17 years. the folks worked who really know how this system works have been here for 25 years or longer. now, this wasn't somebody who knew how the technology worked. it wasn't the back end coders. it was a claims processor. that is how complex. the policy and regulations and processes govern unemployment insurance in california are. it's. california is not unique if you think about it unemployment insurance derives the social security act of 1935. so since 35, you have and state you you have the judicial legislative and executive

branches all piling changes and changes over and nobody ever goes back and says okay this is what the rules look now this this is this is what we in fact, you know, i'm fond of saying people think that like a binder of regulations, there is no binder, there's just a steady stream of changes for what's now almost years. in fact, if the new state the union tomorrow and went to the federal department of labor and said great give me the rolls we're going to set up a new system. they literally cannot them there's there's literally binder and that's the complex with which our public servants you're expecting 5000 new people to learn it just like that to process. so you so the when you realize that's happening this was marina's immediate insight was if it takes 25 years to learn how to do this what are those 5000 people doing? well, not only were they not able to help process claims, but

they were taking up the time of the experience claims processors and they were the bottleneck, obviously. i mean, certain number of claims can only be handled by, you know, actual claims process. they're not going to go through the automatic sort of assembly line that we were hoping to get more on and because of that, every person that the state of california hired, speed processing, slowed down processing of claims. and you just look at that situation and there's nobody in there trying to make this hard. there's no one intentionally saying, let's give people their unemployment benefits except in the state of florida. well, that may be true. florida is a unique situation, but you know, the governor and the legislature have opened up the pocketbooks, spend whatever you want the claims processors are working.

oh, my god. i think they were just all of them working 18 hour days. the management just like never stopped everyone was trying drunk. so so hard. but you have a system that isn't going to scale until you simplify it. and i think, you know, when i went in said we know what's wrong it's the cabal there. is this about the programing cobol a programing language that is famously dates back to 1959. yeah, that sounds really bad. it sounds like. oh, this terrible. of course it won't because there's code in there from 1959. well the codes not from 1959, the programing language is from 1959 when you buy a plane ticket, you're using cobol. i mean there's many systems that scale beautifully in this country that rely heavily on cobol, in fact, more heavily, i think, than a lot the unemployment systems. the problem is the complexity of the policy which then drives complexity and fragility in the tech systems but, i don't think we're ever going to solve that

problem until actually fix. so you get in there, you kind of look at this you're able to find some process my reading of is really it was a bunch of process we just said reassign those people yeah get them to the right places and look at the things in the in a in a more clever way to get through this and that got you that you and your team helped get california through that phase. yes, through that phase. everyone is ai is like we're off of that problem. is anyone going back and saying, hey this? we still just have layers and layers. it's like it's like you imagine like one of these things like you look at sediment in like a cliffside, exactly like disaster recovery that appeared to us. yeah. who's whose job is it to refactor this? so reevaluate this or rip it down and rebuild it in a good way. that is exactly the right question to ask. and i don't even know who knows

how to answer it. i think it's generally true that it is often nobody's to design a system that works. it is very frequently. a lot of people's job to operate the system that they've been given that system is in a crisis of layers over the years. and this is this is true very very broadly and have to redesign such that it is someone's job to actually actively design something that is made to work in this and age for the people it's supposed to work. who is going to do that? in the end of the day, it's not going happen, i think until everybody decides that we're going to hold our elected leaders to that kind of change, that needs to happen. i think when the problem with government is that when it is no one's job, it becomes our job. you know, one of the things that you you talk about in that i didn't actually it never really

jumped out at me in the way that you as you put it in the book, is that there's no one's actual job to make sure that government solves. problem is. there's a somebody job to make sure it's legal, but there's nobody's job. solve the problem. well, i think that our elected would say it's their job to the bureaucracy. the executive branch, the administrative agencies responsible for doing what they told to do. right. congress has a couple of levers. it writes rules, allocates money, and it does oversight. but the problem that they hold the agencies accountable to outcomes but. the public servants are often up for hearings front of congress. in fact, i saw this, you know, firsthand and in a very painful and powerful way when i was working with the people at, the fed, and they were being called

up in front of hearings thing, of course, during healthcare.gov like, there's ten hearings during the first month of the failure of health dot gov and at the same all do the job supposed to be getting the site back up. well, remember this even during the collapse of silicon valley bank, the secretary of treasury is testifying and you're like, wait a second, something should they helping this bank that's about to fail. right, right. so i appreciate that. that's what our elected leaders to do. but they're calling those public servants up and them accountable to the outcome that they expected without a recognition that those public servants are held accountable their day jobs to process and procedure not to outcome jobs. that is what they get hired on rewarded on. they get promoted for having clean record where they didn't violate you policy or procedure. so they're in a trap. i call it an accountability

trap. i mean, you pointed this out. if i got this right, you quote about a national the national academy for public administration, finding that they found that only 16% of their members and these are really top notch policy people are like secretaries of state, treasury. and they found that only 16 of their members considered proficient at designing policy is that can actually be implement it. and i think there's a huge frustration amongst what i hope this is an insulting term i call the policy class in the book i think there's an increasingly increasing frustration amongst the policy class that what they do doesn't work know how to write laws. they know how to allocate money. they know how to oversight. and none of those things are working. and when i say policy, i mean not just, yeah, former secretaries of state, i mean also, you know, congress allocated a ton of money during the pandemic. some of worked great and a lot

of it didn't. they just feel like, okay, i'm putting my paddle, you know, i've got car here, we're pressing on the gas the car should go faster and in a lot of cases, it sort of doesn't. and they're going, wait, what's wrong here? and in part, i wrote the book for so that they can understand what they need to do differently if they want to have that car be responsive again. well you at one of the stories you talk about is concrete boats. yeah. and the story you tell about the where people are held to the line. well, maybe i should just ask you us the story of concrete boats i was working in white house for a year trying to stand up, became the united states did full service. and one of the things we did was to sort of started doing these projects that we would be illustrative of how usgs eventually work. so i had a team of up to technologists who'd come in for

a short time to work with me on a problem that we understood at the department. veterans affairs with the veterans benefit management system, one of the things we had heard was that there was very high latency, which means that if you're processing, you know, an application, you hit a button to go to the next screen and you have to wait a very long time and. we met this leader who i call in the book, kevin and, sort of our first day on the job or talking to him about, you know, what's, what's work. we're here to fix. and one of the first things he says to me is, i'm so glad the white house has sent somebody to verify that nothing is wrong. you know, it's all taken care. and we found out later that the way he had taken care of it was defined latency as over 2 minutes. so if you clicked, waited for one minute and 59 seconds, you

were not to latency. so he had sort of defined the problem away which was my my first clue about how he was leading. this is like how my kids you find cleaning the room exactly. it's like, no, no, no i've my performance is awesome. exactly. set the bar so much like how marina was talking to this claims processors asking a bunch of questions we were asking kevin questions about why had vrms been written this way why did they make this decision decision and he kept saying, i don't know. you're going to have to ask the program people or you're going to have to ask the the policy team or, you know, he kept deflecting. and i him why and he said, look, i have spent my entire career teaching my team to have an opinion on the requirements, which is completely contrary to

how i thought about building technology. fact, i had sort of come to washington to get people like kevin a more of a seat at the table so that we could have a better conversation. he doesn't want the seat, he doesn't want it, and he if they tell us to build a concrete boat, we'll build a concrete boat and said, why? and he said, because that way when it doesn't work, it's not our fault. and at the time, the statistic was that 18 veterans a day were committing suicide, in part because did not have access to their benefits. and i remember very well sitting in that cafe outside of the white and feeling like i had been punched in the gut and i still feel that way. but i also know that what he was saying is, in a certain sense, true. the system is set up for.

people not to have that responsibility. what was saying was, is held. he is held accountable for checking all the boxes and he was checking all the boxes. it's the system that i felt punched in the gut by in the end, this is one of the things and you bring this up also in your book which is one of the things that i learned is user research and implementation. that whole theory that we think is silicon valley phenomena was actually started by the government. the government is one that actually created that whole idea. yes. can you walk us through little bit of that? yes. i mean just as background, i mean, this is this practice that's very common in technology. well, i think it's necessary in any consumer technology, where you expect people to able to use it without reading a manual that has happened because user have understood, you know, the people who are going to use service or

this technology and watch them it and tested and done all these to make sure it's easy to use and yes we absolutely identify that now with sort of you know easy to use tech out of silicon valley and other but it affects the human centered design and essentially started in after world war two or during world war two when we were trying to get planes that would fly better and these to colonels in the air force saw that these some of these planes that had been built for incredible performance like they could fly really well had a terrible what we would now call user interface like different switches that did you know very different things were right next to each other and it easy to get them confused so they kept saying you know there's there's wrong with these planes and mechanical technically there wasn't but most of them weren't flying because they were they

were crashing, they were killing. the you know, they'd go up and then they'd crash and kill people. but they the problem wasn't with the specs. the problem was how the pilots were them. for a long time they called them pilot and they're like, this can't be pilot. all of like the best pilots are getting these things confused. and so these two colonels worked on know changing the controls and making this one red and this one green and putting them in the right places so that, you know, in a moment of you could do the right thing and. that's that was called human factors and it became human centered design. it started in the government. where did the government lose it? i think we lost it in part because. we decided to outsource everything not just technology although technology definitely got caught up in this huge enthusiasm, outsourcing, but, you know, in the sixties we to

define through memos and statutes this idea of what is inherently governmental and what is inherently a commercial, and it's called commercial. and there these two concepts and i think, you know, for a long time it was like kind of made sense right? there are these like big computers and have to buy a lot of them and processing time, you know, all this stuff. yes that's a commodity. we're going to buy it from who know how to build it. this is not something that the government should try do itself. so it became something defined as commercial. but computing changed a lot and it became something that was much more. and we missed that. we missed that boat. we said, nope, this is something that we will buy, not something we do. but anybody who has run tech enabled businesses knows that software isn't something. i mean, sure you're going to buy slack or microsoft word.

those are commodities. we get that. but you're trying to actually run your business on technology. it has to be something you do. it has be adaptable you need to be able to change it as your needs change and if you don't have that core competency in-house to do that you kind of can't meet people's needs. and we we missed the part where we needed to re re figure out what part needed to be in-house, what are the core competencies that we need to have inside of so that we can kind of outsource government we have outsourced government. we certainly outsource digital government. and i have to be clear, i'm not calling for like bring all technology development back inside of government. it's not going to work and it's impractical and it's probably not even a good idea. but we have to start asking ourselves. what are the core competency that government needs today and how do we how do we have them? how do we build them?

because we can't just keep saying, oh, sorry, that was the vendor's fault when it doesn't work, it's, it's, it's our job to deliver the service and we do it now through a lot technology. before we switch gears some solutions, you know, you talk about this in the which i thought was a really great we think of as it is and to quote you is it's policy vomited on to success and you many times i feel like that is like you get this piece of paper from the government mean it took me filling security clearances takes like close to 100 hours of work to fill out everything you get asked all these random questions some of them don't make sense you actually tell a story about that but you also talk about how much time is spent on these these things and it's and to quote you it's americans spend 10.5 billion hours a year about 42 hours per adult on paperwork just for the federal government. and that doesn't even include the state and local sectors. you know, i imagine government

people are also having to fill out paperwork and they recognize this. so where's the gap gap as as, you know, in terms of that usability and trying to make sure the government works us well, you know, it's also you mentioned earlier, i just want to call out i mean, that number many of us don't spend those hours right. many of us have a lawyer that can, you know, file the immigration papers us or we have a tax accountant or not applying for snap. and it's there's huge difference between how much we're exposed to that paperwork burden based on our privilege. and i think that's something we need to recognize is, yes, government employees are also frequently frustrated by not only the paperwork that that that they have to put out the world but the paperwork that they're required to do, i mean, a good example of that is, you know, a lot of what gets done in our country is federal grants

that go to states and local communities and, you know, don't think for a minute that governments aren't frustrated by the paperwork burden of other levels government. so the smaller that need those grants the most are the least likely to get them because they don't have people who know how to find the grant, fill out all the paperwork, you know, get it through those grants, go to the communities that already those resources, you know, what's what's the gap? i think the gap is, the empowerment to say i don't just have to and i'm sorry. well, repeat that awful word vomit the policy into the it's just a when when you see public servants get that oh wait there's a process that goes in middle that's called design says what information do we need from them now what information can we collect later. do we need to collect all information? how do we make this as as possible for them? and you know, and very often do we even need to do this at all?

i mean, i start and end the book on a that that code for america ran and is still running to clear criminal records where you know where it started you know really almost a whole of persisting through gathering information from police departments other but actually let's step back and frame this problem because i think it's such an important it's a such an important lens on the problem. so can you step back and sort of frame the big problem so? i think now far more than half of the states have marijuana in some way or form through, you know, ballot initiatives or laws passed and when we do that, we also say so the people in, our state who have a former felony record from marijuana need to have that expunged off their record. you know, having that felony means you can't get a job. you can't get public housing. there's all these things that

make it incredibly hard to from incarceration. so let's get that record off. but that process of expungement was sort of assumed to be again, because no one designed it. it just accrued over the years to be this of year long process of going and finding your rap sheets from, various places and filling out and filing them in other places, then waiting to hear back. there's no like single place you can just say delete it. well, there there needs to be an ad that's really where the team came from. like there was i would say years of us watching people to get through this process and thinking how can we streamline it? how can we streamline until we realized you don't need to streamline, it doesn't need to exist at all. what that felony record is, is a field in a database and it is not that to have software tell you who are all the people in this database who have that particular record know that

particular like a google doc or something else. it's like control. yeah, exactly. if it's it's a little bit more complicated, but not that much more complicated than that, really. but the imagine nation to say, oh, that's what we need to do is find the records, change them in the database. you know, we sometimes just, you know, don't even dare to dream. i mean, you know, and but we when we did and we started doing it sort of became became possible. and i think that's the kind of thinking that needs to spread. like do we need to streamline this paperwork or do we need to get of it? well, it's almost stunning because when you think about this in this type thing, a law gets passed and you just assume that law gets pushed out to all the people that are impacted it does in this case, it turns out everyone's got to apply. and so people don't even know about it. and so i think it was christine de soto that teamed up with and yusor said, hey, look, we should

just go tackle this. and i'm curious, like, as christine de soto was the chief of staff, the district attorney, san francisco, george. well, and then the reason i'm bringing her name up here is not only because it's amazing work, but what what got her as that person really is like. in a different way is going to help and what does that tell for how we should think about other policy out there. christine is a great example. one of those public servants who does ask that question, you know, why does it have to be that way? and there are lot of them, many more, i think, than people realize. and i think also in this room, the that i think there's this like magic that happens that i've seen happen over and over again. and there's some stories in the book of this of somebody who knows what's possible, given today's and somebody who knows

possible, given the law and policy coming together and going, oh, wait, something totally different is possible here. and yet, chris, christine is just a fantastic servant who was able to work with some members of the staff at code for america, including jasmine latimer, who i write about in the book. and they, you know, they brought their perspectives to the table and fundamentally changed how we how we do this. well, let's switch to some solutions. okay. and maybe walk us through your framework of what do we need to do to get this right, especially given that the biden-harris has gotten let's signed into law, the largest spending that is ever about to happen in, we're going to implement a whole bunch of things. we're going to try. we're going to try. and and you talk about this also in the book of the cost. yes of what happens when these things fail, just raw dollars

costs. how do how do we get this right and not just throw away this singular opportunity to build systems in a way are going to serve american public? well, let's talk for a second about what that opportunity looks like right now. so the chips science act has to work, right? we need to have more resilient supply chains. it's a matter of national security and economic development. it has to work. the inflation reduction act, the parts i'm most familiar with, are the parts that are designed electrify our country, that we can avoid a climate collapse. it's our shot. it is our shot. sure, more stuff is going have to happen later. but if we don't get this, we haven't bought the time for the rest of that stuff to happen. so you might think about the ira being not a perfect law no laws are ira being the inflation reduction act. it is literally our shot. we to implement this and that's going to mean a whole bunch of

things have to go right that often don't go right so. people need to be able to get their rebates, their heat pumps. they need to get their tax credits for electrical upgrades like all that stuff doesn't just happen right. public servants do it and they make choices about how to do it and they can choose to do in the policy vomit sort of way this is what the law says. so that's what the form will be. or they can design something. you and i and everyone else in this room will find so easy that we'll do it right. that's the whole point of these incentives. it's so i want to try to do in the book was really give examples public servants who have made the right choices sometimes you know under duress and with real risk to themselves that because they made those choices programs that they were administering worked for people and got the outcomes that the law had another person who's

like christine who i profiled pretty extensively in the book is a woman named yadira sanchez and one thing have to know about your idea is she's now been at the centers for medicare and services, which is known as cms, part of our health and human services agency for i think, 25 years. it's the only job she's ever had is her first job. so she's not somebody who's like a white knight. the tech industry, she's this is she's not some political appointee out of political get another job. she's she's in the thick of it. she's and you know the thing that she just cares so deeply about the agency's mission she understands critical it is that we improve health care in this country and medicare and medicaid are big big drivers of that you get that right. the whole rest of the industry follows in a certain way. so she's in it project manager there for many years already doing a better job than i her peers in the sense that she wanted to outside of the lines

things like user research where we were talking about earlier wasn't required i mean really never talked about but she would do it anyway she would be asked to go train people and she would say, well, i'm going to use this as opportunity to ask them what parts of this do they like? what parts of them are they going to actually use? what doesn't work for them? so she was always sort of, you know, good trouble, so to speak. then healthcare.gov has floundering of trying to give the right word for that. somebody said, i call it the troubles, but reminder that actually quite succeeded in its first enrollment period. but boy, was it rocky in the beginning. you know, the first day, i think only eight people were able to enroll in health care through healthcare.gov in 2013. and she was one of the people who are thrown this problem of fix it. you know, we are our former boss, todd parker well, because he didn't work directly. todd did you? i can't remember. well, that devoted. yes, we've worked together of many, many so so people like todd park were brought in from

the outside. but a lot of the people who fixed healthcare.gov were people like yadira, who were just there at cms and knew how to make it work. but and she she did some amazing stuff. but the thing that came out of that was she learned the word agile development and user centered design. she never heard these terms. she was doing them, but she didn't have a framework them. and so she comes out of that with this absolute passion for making cms better based on what she's learned and cms never have a disaster like this again. i mean it has it part party it it hasn't it it not only has not but she they got given their next you know implementation of a law called macra the medicare access and chip reauthorization act. and she's like this one. we're going to get right now. this was and this is way harder is way way harder than affordable care act implementation. healthcare.gov. well, yes. and it's very different. so essentially she this is a

program that will doctors better for better quality care value based care. so her users in this case are not the general public. i was trying to sign up for for health care through the exchanges. it's doctors are, by the way like already hugely frustrated with the cms. the interfaces they're asked to use to submit their quality data and they're billing already drive them nuts. they never if they've done it right, you know, they they put in this file and they're like, it's a black hole. and if i got it wrong and, i submitted my data in the wrong format. i like don't get paid. and now i had a year stress about this. so they know that this new law is going to give them a new and the only thing they hate more than. what they have is the thought of having to learn something new and equally bad. and so people are projecting that because of this, millions of doctors is going to walk away from taking medicare patients, which is to degrade the quality of care, not improve it. that that's congress wanted to

improve it. but this is going to the quality of care. so she knows that it's not about like uptime this new website it's about will it work for those doctors? will they solve the problem? will they be able to use it and not leave you know, leave leave the program and the things that she does to get that right and other people there's a ucsd's team there initially and woman named natalie cates who's pushes back on the first set of things. so the first thing that happens is they're supposed make a website that just explains this to doctors before they have the way that they have to file their quality data. and she's like okay. well, we'll write it up. first thing they have to do is decide whether tell cms whether they're an individual doctor, you know in private or a medical group and there are nine different definitions, a medical group. and she's like, well, never going to work. but i think in the past, you know, it would be kevin building the concrete. but well, what they said, that's what we're going to do and this team says we cannot do it that

way they push and push back and push back eventually get to two different definitions of a group. they don't get to one, but that starts them out on a path where they pushing back on the policy team and saying famously, i think this is a line that i will always remember. they say the then i get that it's complicated. it has to make sense to a person. and over and over again they make the choice that makes sense to a person. and when they ship that program called the quality payment program that was required by this law, macra, the call centers are braced for angry doctors calling to yell at them and instead they're calls saying something must be wrong. this is too easy. doctors love it. there is not a mass exodus from medicare and you know, more in a certain sense. more importantly. the cms team is like we, got this, we know how to do this now. and they keep going on that.

and my last story of yadira, you know, this minor thing that comes down for her to implement regulation from from congress saying you're going to give these data extracts out on pharmaceutical so that the ecosystem can use them. you know a little bit about the and she's the law says you will give these quarterly extracts and she knows that there's a nine month process to package up this data and it's not the right way to do it and that there's something an application programing interface an api that would allow those same, you know, people in the ecosystem that want to have access to data to just plug in and, use it any time they want. it's not wouldn't be a slice of data every but constant access to it she's like, well what's a we're going to do to do an api? and when i tell this story, people they're like, well, she can't do that. that's what congress said to do. but it's what congress wanted her do. all right, it's better, faster

and cheaper and gets the outcome that congress and that's kind of thing that we need to be lifting up. when we talk about congressional oversight, we always about calling up public servants and yelling at them because they did something wrong. we never call up your diaries, sanchez, and say thank you. interpreting what we said in the right way and being i don't know, slightly disobedient because you got us the outcome that we need that kind of oversight that reward grid's public servants for making the choices that makes these systems make sense to people. you're here, you dedicate the book, actually, to public. this is public servants. how many the public servants here. stand up, please. or people who've been a public servant? thank you for all done. and i see several people in the who i know have made those

choices and i know they have felt the stress of choices. and i just wish we all knew how to thank them, reward them more often and those public servants who are listening out there also, thank you for all that you have done and many of the question i have to tell you in all my time doing this, i've never gotten this many. and so this is great. and many of the questions actually are from people who have worked in public service or i want to work in public service and they're wondering how do you deal with how do you actually become one of these people that you're talking about? how how do you become one of these change agents when you're in that culture of risk averse? you have generation or change that's happening with people don't aren't familiar with some of these tech techniques or technologies. this is the question i get most often and it's the hardest one because i recognize that when

someone's asking that question they are trying their hardest and feeling frustrated by a system that feels like it's just so hostile to what want to get done. and i have just a couple of, you know, of sort of quick things that are not easy, but the first one is find community. there. there are allies around you. and when you're having a bad day, you're going to need those those friends. i think every public servant i know who's been able to be anything you or sanchez has done, because they have found like minded people and been able to go to them and and solve problems and get support. and a lot of times it's just emotional support. i mean, the the dedication, the book to public servants everywhere don't give up and that's the thing it's really hard not to give up but it's we only don't give up when we have people around us that help us to help that do that and the other thing that i that, i advise

folks to do that when you're in government and you're being blocked, it does not work very well to just go at that barrier. you have to step around and see the issue through the of the person who's blocking you and understand they don't want you to that. empathy. empathy. i have very rarely met a public servant who disagreed with me on you know what i wanted to do, who didn't have a really good reason for believing what he or she and was blocking me because they were protect. they felt like they were protecting government and protecting taxpayer dollars and protecting their fellow public servants. i is they're mostly have unbelief positive intent. so if you see where they're coming from, then you can, i think, sometimes help them see the ways in which what you doing is also trying to honor intent,

get the right outcomes for the american public. but you've got to meet on that common ground, instead of just going at each other, we were talking about you and i've talked about this a lot over the years. is that the importance of listening and just asking people where they come from? i remember even a quote for america. we used to teach the early fellows say, just ask them how they got to their job and why they're doing this job and how do they keep their resources. and it's amazing. you hear these and you talk about some of them in the this is why i think it's so important. everyone should this book is is those those that that deep convo to serve and one of the things i want in this is another question of somebody asked i think is fantastic is how do create the incentives for governments or elected officials to both lift up these kind of these practices rather than shaming the just the

bad ones? and how do we get them to to clean up the the stagnant layers of policies sediment that have built up? i think that we haven't really even tried yet and so i'm hoping we'll start trying i mean when an official asks you for your vote or your donation do you ever say what are you doing about implementation? do you ever say, what are you doing about policy clutter? no. you say, what law are you to pass that i will like. what policies do you stand for that match my values? so that's very important. i want a public servant. i want the elected officials that i vote for to have something in common with my values. but i also want those values to be in action. and that is implementation. and that's a lot of cleanup work. and they don't think it's their job because we haven't told them. it's their job. what do you advise somebody who wants to get into public interest technology

characteristics? what do they need to be prepared for as they go into into the field? well, we already covered the most important one, empathy. we also also talked about persist since, i think, the ability and willingness to go to see it, to see the problem through eyes of the people who are most affected by it. if you're not willing to do that, it will you will be challenged, be effective as a public servant. and i think just, you know, i don't think it has to be a particular but every time i have seen people try their hand, government, you know, dipped their toes in the water. what they get addicted to is the impact they see how much they can really do to help something. and so whatever that is for you, like dip your toes in and see what really what really strikes you the way you can make a big difference. because i have never seen anybody not find something. and one of the questions i get asked the most is, how does

where do how do people actually put their skills to? if somebody has skills out there and they're either here in audience or listening on the radio or watching this, what's the advice of? how they should get involved? so there are a lot of ways to involved. obviously. i think should do some working in government. i'm not just talking about tech people. i think any of us will benefit. i know i personally benefited from having a inside government where you to see how the sausage is made and you get to see the frustrations that the people who work for you, you have and you get to realize the impact that you have. you don't have to go straight that though for instance, there's lots of ways that you can work around government. with government, you can do various kinds of volunteering. i will give a shout out to the united states digital response, which is a fantastic way for people with tech and design and data skills to help if you sign

up with u.s. digital response, they will find a partner for you in government who needs your exact skills and gets you to be able to help. it started during when there were a lot of governments that needed people to, you know, fix a pipeline or stand up a forum for emergency rental assistance. and they just didn't have the capacity and people came from all over to be that capacity. and that is still needed by the governments and there are people who still want to do it. and a lot of those people i mean, to warn you, if this if you do it have ended up taking time jobs in government because of that impact they saw. so it's a little bit of of feeder but lightweight ways and full time ways but just try it out. there's a line from secretary that he used to say is once you try government, you really can't ever let because there is no higher calling mission. and the ability to scale your individual, i think that you

feel that when you go in and it's so much there, what do you when you know in the little remaining time left that we have i want to talk about the political environment is matches up with the implementation of policy and you know we've seen certain states work aggressively use technology to block people out of things there's questions for people are working on issues to implement decisions they may fundamentally disagree with like the decision or the docket database being weaponized to go. people who are legal under the law and what what advice do you have for people who are caught on policy issues that are in the middle of, this this conflict of politics? yeah, i think you're talking about people who are working a government that is by policy and

intent not actually serving its people in some cases. that's right. they're not serving the people or the elected officials change by the will of the people. yeah and that changes. so i think it's easy to focus on that. and and while it is always happened, it's not just now. right. we've always seen this. there's a wonderful book called administrative burden by dan moynihan and hurd that talks about all the ways which in which you can defeat policy after it's passed by essentially making the implementation. and that's happened. but that is the minority actually and i think there was another quite a few people that that i and that you knew who were working instance for the obama administration happened be democrats match their values and then trump came into and there was a real question whether they

should stay because might be asked to do things that were very inconsistent with their values and i think it happened very little, to be honest and mostly what people found was that there were still problems that needed to be fixed. you still had snap recipients, some stuff crazy with snaps and the public charge role, but most help is equivalent of food stamps. who decides exactly? you. we still needed to make our tax system easy to use. we you know state still needed to provision their services there was so much work that still needed to be done that really wasn't contested and in fact in some ways the trump administration because they're very sort of you know blow it all up ish were actually support of of new approaches and ways. i'm not saying that there wasn't there weren't places of conflict. but i do remember a tweet by a woman named caitlin devine when this all happened that said, you know, to say that you don't need

a government that works for people just you don't like the person in office is the height of cynicism. we still need all those functions work and by and large still not working as well as they should. you still have an opportunity to make them better. so i think just find those places where you can have a positive impact. they're going to be the cases where you're going to have to make difficult choices. but i there i would back to something we talked about at the top of the decisions are made by those who show up it's so glad you say it that way because you know, i many people don't realize i started my government time actually under president bush in a department run. rumsfeld, somebody who i disagree with many the policies. yeah, but you don't choose your commander in chief. you don't choose the secretary of defense, but you show up to work on problems and make an and difference. and i chose to stay on the defense innovation board under trump that's where i was going to bring up is you actually not only stayed on the defense

innovation trump you joined the defense innovation board at a time where was a fair amount of of pushback and concerns of technology being used in the department of defense. and so what. when you are thinking about the policy things, you try to focus on in those things, how what do you look for? how do you internally for that get that to challenge things? people don't agree with it, but you know this is what the public. i think it just goes back to the people we're trying to serve. so i became passionate. the work of the defense innovation and other change agents inside department of defense. actually, when i when i heard stanley mcchrystal and i realized that all the that i saw

in working on snap and criminal justice issues you know were the same inside the department. but the people that we were trying to protect here are, you know, men and women in uniform and that they deserve better. and so for me to go back to that, what is this really about who or what are we trying to do and are we going to act in an ethical way? i mean, and then reminding myself that is why other publics are there to that's just really i think my touchstone i do ultimately believe that and i think i think a lot of people on both all across the ideological spectrum believe this too that we can disagree about what a government policy should be gun control abortion all of these things. but ultimately, if we have a government that cannot do what it says it's going to do, if we

have so little state capacity that we can't get it done, that's a very dangerous and that's something that people of all political stripes should come together to fix. and i think there are i the people who care about this bipartisan state capacity there, people on the left who are concerned about state capacity for totally understandable reasons and don't like this idea of making government better at what it's supposed to do. and there are people on the right who i think a lot of folks on the left would say, oh, they don't that like they're you know, they'll actually care deeply about this so that the people who care most about state capacity look like a particular ideological flavor at all. but to go to the defense department, i mean, however, feel about what the military does and i had deeply conflicted feelings about america's military. i had before i won the defense innovation board.

i still have those feelings, but the idea that we are just terrible at what we do when what do sometimes involves killing people is even idea we're going to miss and hit the wrong targets. we're going to hit more innocent civilians. we're going to put our own people in greater danger. you know, better for i used is my mom teaching in the kitchen never cut with a don't knife you slip and that's when you hurt yourself when you're cutting a sharp knife you can actually cut what you intended to cut. i completely understand. do not always agree with what we decide to cut. you know, in terms of our military. but i don't want that knife slipping everywhere and just hitting random hitting. i think that's great for almost everything. you talked about. and secretary carter, the late secretary carter who appointed you to defense, a very sound board used to say security.

security is like oxygen. yeah. you only know when you need it. we lost a great man when we lost ash carter. and in particular, i think about all the serve, the public servants, everyone is out there who's building these systems. this is their oxygen. so i just want to thank you, jen, for all the work that you've in public service, all the the unbelievable amount of things that you've created to benefit the entire country. and i just want to congratulate you on your book recorded america why government is failing the digital age and how we can do better. it is so phenomenal. and i want to thank ken and, jacqueline broad family fund and the you u.s. as seed dornsife center for political future for supporting today's event and i also to thank all the public servants out there and i think it'd be appropriate to end this with but don't give up i'm d.j patel thank you and take care.

thank you again.

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