This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2023
⏱️ 65 minutes
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Summary
There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky.
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| 1:10.2 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adlots podcast. I'm Jill Wyzenthal |
| 1:15.6 | and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, you know what I thought was a really interesting thing in a recent |
| 1:20.3 | debt ceiling episode that we did was about all the coding it would take if the treasury were to |
| 1:25.6 | introduce a new kind of a bill. Yes, that that was interesting to me too because I think there's |
| 1:31.6 | a perception out there that if treasury wakes up tomorrow and decides to sell a new type of bond, |
| 1:38.4 | they could just do it. But actually, there are all these back end changes that would need to be made |
| 1:43.7 | and as you and I know from multiple conversations at this point, it feels like government |
| 1:49.5 | technology can be a little bit clunky sometimes. Is that a fair way of putting it? |
| 1:54.4 | It is. I would say, you know, in defense, I mean, get into this, yes. You know, corporate technology |
| 1:59.9 | can be clunky, but that point reminded me that like we've done software is like a fascinating thing. |
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