How do procedures that are not required by law or policy become required in practice? It happens because as soon as one person in a risk averse bureaucracy says “well, it may not technically be required, but someone else might make a case that it was, so it’s safer just…

I need to start writing again. I used to write pretty often, and then I went and wrote a book, which weirdly means I didn’t write for a long time. It turns out — news flash — that writing a book involves a lot more researching, interviewing, structuring, revising, editing…

Unlike prior initiatives to simply digitize the bureaucracy, this one could actually improve access to government services — I hang out in a little corner of the Internet where people obsess about things like administrative burden and government program rule reconciliation. People here love to point out the myriad of ways in which what looks like bad technology design in government is more meaningfully attributed to the mind-boggling…

The people in sleeping compartments on the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles see each other mostly in the dining car, which feels pretty fancy as far as American middle class travel goes. White tablecloths with coordinating blue napkins, real flatware, stemless glasses holding decent wine. There are…

How Marc Andreessen’s criticism of governmental responses to Covid misses the mark — Last week, in an interview with Noah Smith, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen casually referred to the “chronic collapse of state capacity virtually everywhere in our time,” noting that the good news was that “the private sector can and does deliver even under considerable duress, and even when much of our…

Our ‘Kill It With Fire’ moment — The amount of money that is about to be thrown at modernizing government legacy systems is staggering. The rescue package alone allocates several billion dollars to it, and that’s on top of what’s been spent over the past year trying to make systems at the federal, state, and local levels…

A stunning announcement about how federal government hires recently passed largely unnoticed. Only in the age of vaccine rollout drama, impeachment, and Gamestop would this not qualify as headline news. …

Tens of millions of people are suddenly out of work. Your Lyft driver, your hairdresser, your barista, the waiters at your favorite restaurant, and countless others have lost their sources of income because of the COVID-19 crisis. In moments like this, government must act, and it has, at least, taken…

AKA Help me with my book! — Digital was supposed to make things better. Platforms for peer-to-peer communication like Facebook and Twitter were supposed to connect and unite us and help us understand each other, ultimately ushering in an era of world peace, love, and understanding. They have done some wonderful things, but if peace, love, and…