Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. This week DFD interviewed Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and an Obama-era deputy chief technology officer who helped co-found the U.S. Digital Service — now known as the U.S. DOGE Service. Pahlka, the author of Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, discussed why (and how) government needs to become more responsive to feedback, why she thinks Marc Dunkelman’s ballyhooed new book “Why Nothing Works” points a way forward through “vetocracy,” and what it would really take to integrate artificial intelligence in the government. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? Feedback loops. They’re so simple, and yet we have such trouble employing them in government. Our elected leaders are meant to get feedback, often in the form of election results, from the public, but that’s a very long loop and it’s very indirect. In between, we need feedback about whether policies or programs are working as intended, but the linear processes we employ don’t allow for the kind of mid-stream feedback that’s needed to adjust appropriately. So lawmakers might pass a law, and it gets handed down to agencies to implement, and as it descends through this complex hierarchy, a sort of game of telephone occurs, and things morph. So often, our laws and policies just don’t have the intended effect. Both policy making and policy implementation need to be renovated, and connected to each other to allow for far more frequent looping back to check that we’re doing what we originally wanted. That means a lot of different feedback loops. Agencies trying things out with the people they serve, like beta versions of websites, or early tests of rules and guidance, and then adjusting based on whether the public understood and used it. They will learn from those tests, and agency implementers will also have to loop back to regulators and lawmakers for adjustments. In this model, lawmakers can exercise a very different kind of oversight — not just outrage when things don’t work, but helping implementation stay on track while it’s happening. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’ve really never understood crypto. Maybe I’ll get it someday. What book most shaped your conception of the future? I finally read “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro just a year or two ago, and it really helped me understand how we got so stuck in our ability to do things and build things. Robert Moses got a lot built, but he did it at too great a cost, and ruined things for future builders for a long time. It’s a book about the past, but it helps you see the cycle we’re in, which points at the future. Marc Dunkelman’s new book “Why Nothing Works” picks up from there really well. We’ve got to dismantle the vetocracy we’ve created so we can do stuff again. There’s so much that needs doing. We can learn the right lessons from the past and stop overcorrecting. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Government needs far more basic technology competence. We have to have this competence inside government. We can’t just outsource everything, including our own understanding of what’s possible and what we need. Of course, we’ll still use contractors, but we’d use them a lot better if we had the right internal capacity. It’s interesting to me that many voices for this path now come from the right, in part because they see how government is going to need to adapt to and adopt AI. You can’t just let vendors tell you how to apply AI. You have to understand your own operations to know where it can help. One of the things that competence could do is put us in a position to use AI to move faster by tackling regulatory and procedural bloat. It’s exhausting trying to understand what’s actually required by law and what’s someone’s arbitrary idea of how to comply with that law that could be made far less burdensome. Getting back to the need to build and get stuff done, AI could really help us cut through these vague notions of red tape. What has surprised you the most this year? The L.A. fires really took me by surprise. They took a lot of people by surprise! I live part of the year in a high fire-risk area, but it’s rural, very remote and very overgrown after centuries of fire suppression. I’ve pretty much been expecting our area would burn for some time. I had no idea we would see that kind of devastation in an urban area. It’s been so shocking. Two branches of our family, and a dear friend, all lost everything. I only hope that L.A. can rebuild more sustainably this time. Events like these really make you consider the depth and breadth of what we need to rethink.
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