Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

A bold call for reimagining how US governments at all levels create and use digital technology, from the founder of Code for America

As our society has hurtled into the digital age, American government has limped into it. On public websites and in internal systems alike, the quality of most government software is abysmal. The result is a growing gap between the intentions of government policy and its effects in the real world. We see this gap in our costly health care, our sluggish updates to critical infrastructure, our haphazard criminal justice system-and we saw it all the more clearly when the pandemic hit, as legislated benefits of all sorts failed to reach the people in need. This gap affects everyone, and is a big part of why we trust government less and less.

It doesn't have to be that way. As Jen Pahlka vividly shows, the problem is not a lack of money, desire, or ability: government tech workers have plenty of all of those. But they are crucially hamstrung by a rigid hierarchical culture in which lawmakers dictate policy from on high and disdain all the details of implementation. What's needed is an approach that puts users' needs first, and allows coders and designers to relay insights back up the political chain of command. Modernizing decades-old tech is not enough: government won't succeed until it modernizes its decades-old ways of thinking.