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

A bold call to reexamine how our government operates, and sometimes fails to, from President Obama’s deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America

Just when we most need our government to work—to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to prepare our workforce for a disruptive future, to defend ourselves against global threats—it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.

But it’s not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, Industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today’s world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.

About the Author

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America, a nonprofit that works to bring the values of the digital era to the public sector, and the former Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States. While at the Obama White House, she founded the United States Digital Service, an elite corps of technologists devoted to improving government operations. Pahlka is the winner of a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, a David Packard Award, and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Technology and Society Award, and has been selected by Wired magazine as one of the people who have most shaped technology and society in the past twenty-five years.