NPR.

If you remember back to the early days of the pandemic, millions of people were losing

their jobs and unemployment insurance systems.

State after state were groaning under these piles of claims that they were desperately

trying to process.

California's unemployment insurance agency had a backlog that was so big, nobody even

knew how large it actually was.

Legislators were totally overwhelmed with phone calls.

Jennifer Polka is the author of the new book Recoding America.

I mean, in almost every office, every member of the office had been redirected to answer

phone calls and most were about people who didn't get their unemployment insurance.

It was really a huge mess.

It was sort of on the front pages kind of every week.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Terri Edwards.

A lot of government websites and apps and databases across the US leave a lot to be desired.

So today on the show, we're looking at how California tried to solve its unemployment

insurance fiasco and what that teaches us about how to do digital government services better.

Jennifer Polka is one of the experts in digital government services.

She's helped start two groups that try to make them better and on profit and also a government

agency.

Now, our story with Jennifer starts with California's unemployment insurance agency, which is called

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