The Book I Wish Every Policymaker Would Read

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My pitch for this episode is simple: Jennifer Pahlka has written one of the best policy books I’ve ever read. Pahlka served as deputy chief technology officer in the Obama White House, and she’s the founder and a former executive director of Code for America, a nonprofit that works to enhance government digital services. Over the course of her career, Pahlka has become obsessed with an area of policy that is too often ignored by policymakers: implementation. She was part of the effort to rescue HealthCare.gov in 2013 and was tapped by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 to help fix California’s unemployment insurance system as it buckled under the weight of the Covid response. It has become a common refrain that the U.S. government is often terrible at delivering even basic services. But Pahlka’s new book — “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better” — puts forward a deeper theory of why government services are so awful, how policy implementation so often goes awry and what it would take to fix those systems so that government could better live up to its promises. It’s an argument that anyone who cares about government in the 21st century needs to take seriously. Book Recommendations: Implementation by Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky Radical Help by Hilary Cottam “Mandate for Leadership” (chapter 3), edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Our production team is Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Isaac Jones and Kristina Samulewski.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2009, Genpaco founded Code for America, and the IBM Code for America was to get the
0:28.1	best technologist working on the public's problems, not just private websites and e-commerce
0:33.4	platforms and social networks. Even then, it was clear that public digital infrastructure was
0:38.4	going to be really important and it was lagging far behind the private sector. And Code for America
0:43.3	was built to bridge that gap. Then in 2013, Puck became Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the
0:48.9	Obama administration, which is very deeply involved in the effort to rescue healthcare.gov and
0:54.0	helping create the United States Digital Service. Then she went back to go to America,
0:58.3	and then in 2020 was tapped by California Governor Gavin Newsom to help untangle the mess of
1:03.7	California's unemployment insurance program as it buckled under the weight of the COVID response.
1:09.1	I mentioned all that because Puck has worked directly on and then helped oversee and advise
1:13.9	teams working on the digital delivery of government services really at every level of government
1:19.2	across much of the US. So she's someone who badly wants government to do good in the lives of people
1:25.2	and has spent years now confronting the reasons it so often falls so short of its goals.
1:32.0	One of her big points, one I've come to appreciate a lot more in recent years,
1:36.2	is it even liberals who care a lot about government don't care enough or track closely enough
1:41.8	how implementation actually happens. Delivery often happens at a site, except for the people who
1:47.5	need that delivery. In our media, I mean we're part of this, I'm part of this problem too,
1:53.6	there's a ton of focus on politics, on elections, on big policy questions and fights and theories,
2:00.9	but then it will pass us. And the nitty-gritty of how that policy actually shows up in people's
2:05.4	lives is left up to someone somewhere. And when it doesn't show up in people's lives or even
2:11.6	makes people's lives worse because of how it is implemented, there's often no outcry because if
2:16.5	there's no attention and so there are no fixes. Now, Paul Kuh has written this book, Recoding America.
	...

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