Building better bureaucracy

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COVID-19 brought the problems with government technology into sharp focus. The systems responsible for delivering unemployment benefits and healthcare were not prepared to mange the influx of requests they received, and the government employees who run those systems were often hobbled by a culture that focuses on regulation and oversight, not innovation and acting quickly.

Beyond the day-to-day impacts of these systems not working, the long-term consequences include the erosion of trust in the institutions that comprise our democracy. So, what can we do? Jennifer Pahlka has a few ideas and she joins us this week to talk about them.

Pahlka is the author of Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. She is the former deputy chief technology officer of the United States and the founder of Code for America, a nonprofit that believes government can work for people in the digital age.

Recoding America website

More information on Schedule F/Project 2025

‍Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.

Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Jennifer Pahlka, who is the former Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the US and the founder of Code for America, which is an organization that helps connect governments and people within government with technology professionals. She's also the author of the book recoating America, why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better. So this is a show that's going to be a lot about bureaucracy, something we've talked about certainly before. But Jennifer's perspective, I think is interesting, because you know, she really zeroes in on what happens after a bill is passed, right. And so if somebody actually has to implement it and make it happen, whether that's unemployment, or veterans benefits, or services, or health care, or other types of government services, they often in this day and age involve technology, and that can create a whole host of problems. So, you know, Jennifer's book both presents, how some of those things can go wrong. But I think also, she has some ideas for how people both inside and outside of government can help make things better for everyone.

Candis Watts Smith
What I appreciate about this book is and this project, generally speaking, is that it speaks to recoding on to frequencies. So yes, there's the question about technology. And you alluded Jenna that things can go wrong. But also she's asking a kind of wider question about how we rethink the way that we just a lot of common sense things that we do, you know, many of the students that I interact with, want to understand why things don't go as smoothly as one anticipates. And policy, we often kind of think about how there are many problems that we all kind of know the solutions to, and yet, there seems to be a hiccup between if a policy is actually implemented. And, you know, excuse me if a if a bill is actually passed into a law, and then you know, what happens next. And what I another thing that I appreciate about this project is that it really takes a moment to look at what happens between the passing of a bill and the implementation of the law and essentially kind of looking at the difference between the good policy intentions and the harsh reality of implementation. Yeah.

Michael Berkman
And in doing that, she's really highlighting something very important about how people relate to and interact with our government. Because it's, it's in this implementation phase of policy, which is not necessarily the focus of the media, it's not necessarily the mote the focus within a sort of horse race frame of what's going on in the political world, but it's their interaction with who we often refer to as street level bureaucrats, or the administrators at the lower level, or the forms that somebody has to fill out to, to access benefits of, of certain kinds. It's at that level, where people really I know come to, I think, or form a lot of their field opinions about what what government our government is doing, and how well it's acting in their benefit or whether it's acting in their benefit or not, you know, I think about how, because we're in the midst of one natural disaster after another, you know, things FEMA does is send people down to help people fill out the forms and make sure they know what it is that they need to fill out in order to access the benefits that might be available to them.

Candis Watts Smith
But I think what is really important about Jen's work is that she helps us to understand how we got to these you know how we got to that point where you're filling your you're filling out a form and you didn't fill it out, right and now you got to go to the back of the line because you can't use blue pen and wide out or whatever. You know, somebody made up that little glitch, and then we have to deal with it or and kind of bigger, bigger higher stakes issue. is an example that she gives is when California changes its marijuana laws and allows people to expunge their records. Except it's really hard to expunge your record. And so, you know, what messages are sent by? What messages are sent to citizens, when they can't live out the ideals that a policy suggests that they should be able to live out?

Michael Berkman
Yeah, yeah. And she speaks to we know from some political science work that studies, feedback from public policies that this matters, you know, that people's experiences with government, in terms of completing forms, trying to gain benefits that they might be entitled to being denied the benefits that they might be entitled to then affects their political participation there, whether or not they feel alienated from the system or not, or feel engaged, engaged within it. So it's an important part of democracy. And one that doesn't really get very much attention. And one, I also think she doesn't really speak to this that much. But But I was also thinking that, you know, in the American political system, bureaucracy is a highly decentralized thing. And so sometimes, you know, who are you dealing with? You're dealing with your local government, are you dealing with your state government, your county government? Are you dealing with the state are dealing with the national government and, and the capacity of some of those bureaucracies is going to vary widely. The investment in them is going to vary widely. And it's also not always clear to people who is responsible for this experience that I'm that I'm having.

Jenna Spinelle
I think you're right, that, you know, this is an often underlooked part of of political systems and coverage about political systems for the reasons that you all have described, I think that touch the table well, so let's go now to the interview with Jen Pahlka.

Jenna Spinelle
Jennifer Pahlka, welcome to Democracy Works. Thank you for joining us today.

Jennifer Pahlka
Thanks so much for having me.

Jenna Spinelle
So before we dive in to your book, recoding America, I just have to tell you that this book really resonated for me on a personal level, I spent several years before I had this job working in the admissions office at Penn State. And we did much of our work on a mainframe system, powered by keyboard macros, and some of the the other things that you write about. We also had many of the same bureaucratic cultural issues that you talked about in the book. So if nothing else, I'm going to recommend it to my former colleagues, many of whom are still there to let them know that they are not alone in in the types of issues that we face working there.

Jennifer Pahlka
I've had other folks from higher ed say the same thing. So having not worked in higher ed, I had no idea. Yeah.

Jenna Spinelle
But I want to start us off, going back in time a little bit, you write in the book a little bit about the era that a lot of these systems came online, in the, you know, 60s or into into the 70s, kind of the mid 20th century. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what the kind of attitude was about the government's relationship to technology and about the government's capacity to do hard, technical things kind of set the stage for what things were like when a lot of these systems you write about first came online?

Jennifer Pahlka
Yeah, I It's funny, because I had worked in the White House and had felt this resistance to dealing with, you know, what I would call digital, they would call tech. But really, in the end, I've sort of come to the realization that it's about it just implementation. And we happen to do a lot of implementation of law and policy through digital means through technology. Now, but, you know, when I went back and sort of looked at these points in history, when we made decisions about where technology would sit within federal government in particular, and I think that's trickled down to states and municipalities, you know, there were times when, you know, when we when we said, oh, yeah, that what this is, is a tool, right? It is, you know, back in, in the 60s, with the Brooks Act. At that time, it was really, you know, data processing on giant mainframes. And yes, indeed, that was something that you had to go buy from these very specialized vendors and getting the right price for it was was relatively important, sort of bundling it across agencies. And so you know, in the 60s, there was this decision that it was, you know, something that you you would you would have people purchasing people be most totally in charge of them to kind of check in again in the 90s, when we have two things going on. One is the federal workforce restructuring Act, which is just, you know, I guess stand in for a whole slew of things that were very pro outsourcing. It didn't really have anything to do with digital, it was just this desire to get stuff out of government at that time. And digital happened to be on the rise. If you think about the early to mid 90s, this is when Amazon is becoming a real thing, Google, etc. And it technology is moving from this thing that you go buy time on a mainframe to the way we're going to shop the way we're going to get information, full transformation of our society. And once again, in the 90s. There's a relook at whether it belongs as a strategic focus of the White House or just something that people buy. And these two members of Congress cleaner and Cohen introduced the clinger Cohen act and say, maybe the White House should really have responsibility for this. Maybe, you know, maybe we should be really looking at this as a as a key strategic consideration the government needs to really grapple with and the White House being asked to take this on says no, thank you. It's not for us, that is in the words of the Deputy Director for Management in the time, operational in nature, and therefore inconsistent with the policy role of this institution. And once again, it because they come something that we want to buy and get the right price for the same way we buy pencils or fleets of cars, instead of something that key people in the most powerful parts of government are really thinking about and I, you know, I really come down to Okay, that is indicative not just sort of have a, you know, general fear that technology might make important people look stupid, which certainly comes up all the time, and is a very understandable human response, but also this very, very deep seated distance between policy and its implementation. And in fact, I think, at times disdain for implementation by people who consider themselves policy folks. And you know, if there's one thing like a change, really, I think it would be that it would be a way of thinking about implementation as separate from policy, and not just separate, but less important. And if we can change that, I think, really, everything follows from that in a certain way.

Jenna Spinelle
And then when things go wrong, as you as you started to mention before there, you know, people, you know, no one wants to be embarrassed, no one wants to be that person, especially called in front of Congress for a public hearing about why this, this technology, this process went wrong. I know you were involved in the the aftermath of the healthcare.gov rollout. Can you talk more about how those failures like how the the kind of ramifications that that has down the line? And perhaps is it a chilling effect, or the extent to which there is a chilling effect on, you know, innovation, or taking chances or thinking outside the box doing things differently? Moving forward?

Jennifer Pahlka
Oh, I think there's 100% a chilling effect. And I'll give an example also, not from the book. But in California. Over the past couple of years, the California Department of Technology has been trying to sort of think outside the box, make some changes to how it approaches technology delivery, or digital service delivery to people of California. And they're stuck in a very legacy approach huge waterfall projects, it's really not uncommon for something to be close to or over a billion dollars, you know, for a modernization effort, in fact, they have 1.1 billion out on the street for UI modernization now, which which I don't think is a good idea. But they the continued problems, which are should frankly be expected in those billion dollar technology projects, are garnering, you know, lots of criticism, and these good government groups have asked for an audit and this audit comes out and you know, first thing that they point out is a strategic plan that the CDT did a couple of years ago, that was non standard, you know, why was it done this way? It didn't look like a traditional plan. It was trying to get to outcomes instead of process. It was trying to think about service delivery instead of requirements. It was doing all the things, I think if you really examine it you want them to be doing but when you call the auditors up, they don't know what good service delivery looks like. They just know whether you've checked this box. Do you have a procedure in place? Did you follow it if you didn't have a procedure? Let's add one. And this is actually the opposite of you want what you want? You are then done. doubling down on a culture of, you know, fulfilling requirements, making sure you're compliant, but not making sure you're getting the outcome, not making sure that the software works for the people it's supposed to work for not making sure that, you know, you're actually meeting people's needs. So, you know, I'm talking about an audit, of course, you're mentioning like many, many hearings, we can also bring in reports from inspectors general and the GAO, there's this entire oversight structure that really doubles down and makes much worse, this concept I call the accountability trap, which is that, you know, public servants are simultaneously held accountable to getting the outcome everybody expects, and also demonstrating huge fidelity to a large number of policies and procedures, without recognizing that those policies and procedures are often in huge tension with getting the outcome. So they're in a total double bind. And at the end of the day, when, you know, the oversight apparatus, you know, spins up, to go get somebody you know, for something that's gone wrong, like healthcare.gov, or during the pandemic, the unemployment insurance problems, you know, any of these things, which, by the way, let me Asterix that, that they were, in fact, both successes and a lot of ways like UI pay a lot of claims. Yeah, the backlog was unacceptable. I agree. But a lot of claims were paid out healthcare.gov, in fact, by the end of the first unenroll enrollment period, had enrolled more people than we thought, even when possible before the failure. So you know, there's very little focus on the ways these programs succeed, huge focus on the way that they fail. And when we focus on that failure, we focus on fidelity to process in a way that, you know, that is how the public servants need to protect their careers, their ability to advance, we are creating a system that causes greater risk aversion, and we we make that system worse when we call for the kinds of oversight that we have today.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. So I want to come back to the idea of of career incentives for public servants or perhaps lack thereof. But on this point about the accountability trap, like, where does that come from? I know, you're obviously oversight has been part of the government for a long time. But is there a particular point or period of time, you can point to when things kind of spiraled out of control or got to this this point, this sort of double bind you you described? Or was it something that just kind of happens, you know, slowly over time,

Jennifer Pahlka
I think our addiction to oversight has always been there, I think that the ways in which oversight can be damaging instead of helpful, increase very much correlated with the ways that we separate policy and implementation, I think they really go hand in hand. And we have increasingly separated policy and implementation as we've gone into a digital world, because we've decided to put a whole bunch of processes around the creation of that technology. So you've inserted an entire truly gigantic apparatus between the people who've made the policy and the people who have to implement it. I mean, like frontline people operating that technology like that, that procurement apparatus and all the compliance around procurement is just created miles and miles of distance. So the further they're separated, the worse we're going to have those failures and the worst the oversight sort of double down is going to be.

Jenna Spinelle
The other thing that gets in the way here, I think is the waterfall mentality methodology that you describe. Can you say more about what that is? For folks who might not be familiar with that, that term or, or that philosophy? And yeah, how it gets in the way of this this progress that you've been talking about?

Jennifer Pahlka
The waterfall is a metaphor, and it's also known as a software development methodology. But and in waterfall, software methodology is used in government and I think, mostly to the detriment of the outcomes we intend, but I'm not talking about it specifically as a shift the government needs to make off of waterfall software development, but the in but as a larger metaphor for how government operates. So in software, which is sort of the micro level of it, you start With gathering requirements for something, and then when that's done, that stage is complete, you move on to, you know, developing the thing, then you move on to testing it. And at each, vastly simplifying at each step, you don't go back. That's why like water, water never flows off a waterfall. That's the key part of the metaphor. And that's really how we, you know, come up with law and policy and then hand it down to regulators, and then hand it down to implementers. And there's no return trip. There's no way for those people at the lower tiers of that waterfall to tell the people above them. Hey, actually, what if we, the way you dear Sanchez said, hey, what if we made it API instead of did this data extract? Or there's, you know, a million other examples? And that, that the fact that information insights, and in fact, I think power, only flow one way, creates an environment that isn't serving anybody in that waterfall, I think mostly people think, Oh, well, it has to be that way. Because the people at the top of it, like the power of handing things down, they may, but they also hate the outcomes that they get, when nobody has really had meaningful conversations and collaborations, as these things get handed down. I mean, the best example I think of that in the book is in, I believe, it's chapter four, where I talk about this requirement for this very outdated piece of software that's in the this software that's needs to update the satellites that run G, the GPS system, or Global Positioning System, like really, really important. And the Air Force has somehow decided that this piece of software doesn't matter what it's called, but it's called an enterprise service bus is required by the federal enterprise architecture, which, you know, then landed it in the Department of Defense enterprise architecture, and therefore, in the Air Force, enterprise architecture. And because that federal enterprise architecture was, you know, essentially conceived up to be mandated by Congress, the people writing the contract at the Air Force will tell you, Congress requires this, we can't take it out. But it literally is stopping the software from working. And, sadly, it is absolutely not required by Congress. And if you know, if you go back to Congress and say, Well, you guys, you know, created that requirement, and we can't take it out, they'll go, What are you talking about, right? Because there's no conversation, there's this miscommunication all the way down the line. And Congress is then of course, furious about the gigantic, like billions and billions of dollars of cost overruns, on this program for the software for the satellites. And there's just a huge game of miscommunication in telephone. And that is all due to the essential waterfall nature, not of the software development process, or the process of handing down what you know, are thought to be requirements or direction from the highest levels of government to the actual implementers. So, so far down on the ground.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. But so in, in that example, you were just talking about, and in the, you know, lots of others, I'm sure are out there throughout the varying layers of government and agencies like, how, what are the first steps to get out of something like that is just someone has to blink first and say, Oh, we you know, we were mistaken about this, or we were in, you know, there? Yes. Like we were interpreting this the wrong way, or just kind of owning up to it? Is that the first step here? Or, you know, how do you begin to move forward from something like that?

Jennifer Pahlka
You know, it's a great example again, and I don't want to harp too much on the oversight thing, but in that particular story, they never get rid of this ESB mandate, and it's in part because it's gone too far down the road, now a failure. And, you know, once you've had some cost overruns and some delays, there's more and more attention on it. And the more attention is that more people are touching it or who say, you know, we've got to make sure they're compliant with everything. And you know, we can't remove this mandate instead of, hey, you know, this thing is going great. We have some flexibility to do what we want. I also interview in the book, a guy who does software for the Air Force, who's like, yeah, occasionally I come up against this requirement that I'm supposed to have an ESP and I just add it to the chart and resend the chart and no one ever asks any questions and he gets around that mandate, and he says plenty of people do all the time. When you're not under enormous scrutiny. You know, I think the way to solve it is you've got to have somebody like a Yadira at CMS very early on saying, Look, we're going to do it the right way, we're going to not be so literal and so maximalist about the policy and regulation, and you know, whatever that's being handed down to us from the start, because then you have a more successful project, and then you have less oversight. But it's really hard to get up. Once you're in that, you know, in that, you know, once you've sort of sparked the oversight, you know, animal once you post that beast, I suppose.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. So you know, we've we've talked on this show before about the idea of administrative burden, we've had done one a hand on who I know, you cite his work in, in your book, as well. But you you tell a story that I just thought exemplify this so well, and it's the veteran who was trying to get enrolled in the VA. And you, you and your team, worked with him and eventually got him enrolled. But I wonder if you could just tell us that that story, and you know, what it took to finally get the people at the VA with, you know, the the power over the systems to see what was happening from their the customer's perspective?

Jennifer Pahlka
Sure, let me start by saying I did not do that. That was wonderful team of Marina NITSA. And Emily Tavares, and Maryanne Brody, they were faced with trying to put some of the forms that veterans need to use to apply for benefits online, this was back in 2013, or maybe 25 years, early 2014. The VA has come a long way, since then I just want to say that up front. And as any good user researcher would do, they started with using these forms themselves and found that, in fact, if you tried to apply for healthcare benefits, anywhere, but inside the building, the form just wouldn't load at all. It wasn't like, you know, when we complain about something being hard to use, or not working on mobile, it just didn't load into a browser. And they would go to folks inside the building and say, this is a problem. And everybody in the building had a computer that was configured with a certain combination of Internet Explorer, and Adobe Reader. And both versions were outdated, it was like a very specific combination. And like, almost no computer in the world was configured that way outside. But of course, the requirement that went into the contract that the vendor fulfilled, specified that particular combination of Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader. And when they said like, this doesn't work outside the building, they, you know, pulled up the paperwork and said, I'm sorry, but because the paperwork says that the vendor fulfilled the requirements on an IV and V independent vennett, you know, verification and validation vendor signed off on this, we've paid them, there's no way for us to open this up. Because on paper, it works. And this team went out. And, in fact, they went to the presidential correspondents office and asked for letters that had been sent to the President, by veterans having trouble getting their benefits, reached out to one of them, met him at a Starbucks, and recorded him trying to use the application. While I'm talking to him about how many dozens, maybe hundreds of times he had tried in the past how many years he'd spent trying to get on veterans benefits. The incredible, you know, pain, this was causing him in his life having not seen a doctor. And they, you know, they did a sort of screen capture and audio of him doing this and brought it to a meeting with Sloan Gibson, then Deputy Secretary of the VA, and it was so powerful, and I think, you know, this guy, but Dominique was very colorful in his language, but also very charming and very forgiving, given what we put him through. And that moment really changed the frame. I mean, it was just it's a three or four minute clip, I think. And, you know, by the time it's over, you have salaam Gibson saying, We've got to fix this. Let's start by getting Dominic his benefits number one, which is exactly the right response. And secondly, I don't care what the paperwork says, This doesn't work. But it is, I think, a testament to government's addiction to requirements and how the whole notion of requirements goes terribly, terribly wrong, because people will tell you, you know, you can't write a requirement that just says the software works that's not independently verifiable and yet that means you will continually They have things like that old vo ha veterans, a cameraman stands for healthcare application that meet requirements and do not work. And that and they can not work in a wide wide variety of ways. But it is not because government is bad at technology. It's not because we have bad programmers. It's because we have a system that relies on requirements instead of meeting user needs. And I can't tell you, the number of people have told me Well, we'll never get rid of the idea of requirements and government. It's fine. But we really have to start interrogating this addiction to requirements and understanding where that comes from and how we might change it.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and you know, you and I were chatting before today's recording about the you know how this kind of connects back to democracy and trust and institutions and faith in our democracy. It can seem, as you know, as I was reading your book, if you're kind of sort of stuck in the mud on some of these things, like the the big picture of trust in government and faith and democratic institutions can feel very far away. But I wonder, I guess, two questions, one, how much do those big picture things weigh on the minds of the, you know, public servants that that you spoke with? And, you know, how much impetus Do you think there is to make some of these changes for these reasons of the overall health in and of and faith in our democracy?

Jennifer Pahlka
I think that the connection between the public's experience with government services, and the public's willingness to engage in democracy, as we think of it on sort of the electoral side, like do they vote? Are they engaged in public dialogue? You know, do they believe that government can be even if they don't feel it is today a force for good, those things are much more deeply connected than we tend to talk about. I'm not a political scientist, or an academic of any sort. But I did take some inspiration from Joe sauces, papers several years ago, that shows that people who have negative experiences with means tested benefits vote at lower rates. And I think you you mentioned, you know, how to the public servants feel about this. Every public servant has many, many experiences in their life, where when someone finds out, they work for the government at any level, the, you know, somebody they know will complain to them about being at the DMV, or trying to get their SNAP benefits, or they have a cousin who's on probation. And these just terrible things are happening to people as they get stuck in the bureaucracy. And they hear from them, that that experience, even if it's second hand, makes them believe that our democracy isn't working. And they the public, who has these experiences don't tend to distinguish between the bureaucracy and electoral politics. And I think that when we fail to make that connection, we are inviting greater populism. I think also, you know, since we were just talking about the health and well being of the civil service, you know, when we don't have a bold plan for supporting the civil service better, and making hiring and I suppose to some degree, I would put it second firing, you know, more reasonable, we are inviting the kinds of civil service reform that the Heritage Foundation is promoting, which includes Schedule A Schedule F, which to me is like, I want civil service reform. And I don't necessarily mean legislative reform, I want practice and practice reform. But that's the nightmare version of it. But if we don't have another version of it, that's equally bald, but more respectful of the civil service, and more respectful of our democratic norms than we are inviting that nightmare version

Jenna Spinelle
And for our listeners who don't work in government, what are some things that they can do to help, you know, work through some of these problems? Or are there ways that people who are not inside the government can contribute to some of these shifts we've been talking about?

Jennifer Pahlka
Absolutely, they have to be a big part of this. So just as a regular citizen, this applies to anybody who works inside or outside of government, we've got to start holding our elected leaders accountable differently. We never asked our elected leaders about implementation, we only ask them about their policy positions and their values, but your values are just words until they're put into practice. So exactly what I said earlier about their gardeners and they have To take care of the soil as well as the seeds, they have to care about the soil as well as what the soil, you know, can can grow for them, they are not going to do that at all until voters and donors start asking them questions about it, I'd love to see that happening in mass. Secondly, I'd love to see people that don't work in government do work in government that don't, then I'm not saying they have to abandon their careers entirely, though, they may want to, I've seen many, many people say, I'm just going to do this for a three month stint, you know, helping out and they go, Oh, my God, I'm so needed here. This is such meaningful work, they go on and stay forever. But one way to get involved, you know, at a very lightweight way that this is more for people with technology skills, not exclusively, is to volunteer with an organization like United States Digital response, I happen to be one of the cofounders and on the board of that organization. So I am biased, but they give people a pretty fantastic experience helping government with a short term project where they need, you know, a skill set that they just don't have access to. And many of those people have decided to go on and try a little longer stint and end up in government, not all of them. But they all report just being really delighted the opportunity to learn more how government works, and to really help the American people.

Jenna Spinelle
Well, I know you you link to that, that organization and those other resources you mentioned on the books website. So we will certainly point our listeners to that for people who want to learn more, or maybe, yeah, throw their hat into the proverbial ring and get involved. But Jen, thank you so much for this book, and for joining us today to talk about it.

Jennifer Pahlka
It was a delight to be here. Thank you so much.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, so interesting interview, she mentioned that the end, that she supports various kinds of Civil Service reforms doesn't go into them that much. In the interview, she does go into much more detail in the book. But one thing she does mention as a bad idea, is, is something having to do with what's called Schedule F. Also, sometimes referred to as Project 2025. And, and this, this is reference to an idea that's increasingly taking hold within conservative policy circles, started with the Trump administration right near the end, where they changed the Schedule F to, in effect, open up or turn 20,000 civil service jobs into political appoint. It's now been picked up by the Heritage Foundation, and something called 2025. Several of the Republican candidates have endorsed it. So it's something I think we're going to hear a lot more about. And something that I think is probably worth talking about. Because one thing that strikes me about it, Qantas is it feels like it takes us back to a time before the civil service, and had me thinking about why we started a civil service in the first place.

Candis Watts Smith
So the idea is to appoint people who are serving at the pleasure of the President, and to move a particular set of kind of policy ideas that, you know, in this case, if it were a Republican president, which which is the idea, then that those goals would be made first and foremost, and people could be hired and fired for living up to the expectations of the executive, rather than living up to the expectations of professionalism, meritocracy. And I would go maybe far enough to say the rule of law, right, which is what professional bureaucrats do, we often don't like bureaucrats because they do their we doing their jobs. Right, which is sometimes inconvenient to us, but it's a matter of principle, right? That there are rules, regulations and processes, good, bad or indifferent. But the the the way that we typically do it, or the way that we do it now, is that these people who are appointed or hired are, are on the basis of professionalism and meritocracy.

Michael Berkman
Right. I mean, it might be useful to just remember that before we really had a civil service, we had a bureaucracy or government administrators based entirely upon political spoils. So whoever won got to a point everybody and then somebody else one got to a point everybody And the appointments were basically in exchange for political favoritism for loyal for political favors for loyalty, for whatever that might be. And that was replaced in the progressive era with a civil service that was intended to be based upon a more scientific and a political form of administration, where the people that are carrying out policy implementing, as we were talking about in the first part of the show, are there because of, because of their expertise in a certain area because of their professional accomplishments because of some sort of merit based system. And so what we're seeing here is an effort to enhance political control. And it potentially putting people in who really had no business being put in to positions that were previously largely seen as, as merit based positions.

Candis Watts Smith
I think one of the things about this business of Project 2025, and Schedule F is that the argument for it can rest not on executive control, but on our focus on failure. So we do tend to talk about the bureaucracy and a very negative way. And Jen points this out that when we, when we focus on failure, on some level, the next logical step is to dismantle or to do something entirely different, rather than to kind of rethink what is what is it that's gone wrong, that makes us see this gap between good policy ideals and sometimes, you know, policy implementation, that doesn't just seem to be quite right. And so I really appreciate her kind of noting that that there are successes, that people do get the things that they need from government, that technology has been leveraged in ways by bureau bureaucracies. And, and so I just wanted to highlight that that I think that some of what we're going to hear around this kind of campaign towards this, this this project 2025, is going to be rooted in Hey, when was the last time you did XY and Z and it didn't go right. But so many things do go well, could they be better? I think she she highlights some of the reasons that underlie inefficiencies. But to just full on swing towards complete, dismantling, or moving toward this political appointments, doesn't is not going to answer the questions that we have. Right now. It's not answering the concerns that people have right now.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, I don't know if it struck you this way. But in her discussion about the focus on failures, as opposed to successes, I had me thinking about just the old metaphor of fire alarms versus police patrols and, and that it's a, it's a congressional thing. Like, like for Congress, for congressional committees, the way to get the way to get attention. Which is basically is to bring in the failures, right? To look for the things that go wrong, bring them in, pull them on the mat, you know, ask hard questions. You really ate them, if necessary, whenever that might take. But the politics aren't really there to be looking at things on an ongoing basis and say, oh, you know, you guys are doing a really good job at this. I mean, there are there are ways of there are ways in which that goes on, right? There's these, there are these continuous auditing procedures that go on within Congress. And they go on within the bureaucracy as well. But they don't receive Particular attention, because it's not really news when something works.

Candis Watts Smith
And so one of the things that she talks about is that there are people who believe themselves to be too good for implementation. And so if you believe yourself to be too good to be a public servant in that way, then I can't imagine that you would be willing to welcome feedback from someone below.

Michael Berkman
Right? And the rewards are also not there for not keeping your head down.

Candis Watts Smith
Right? Yeah.

Michael Berkman
Well, there's been interesting discussion, I always enjoy talking about bureaucracy with Qantas. I feel like we always get the bureaucracy shows.

Candis Watts Smith
We love bureaucracy. it's good. It's good for us.

Michael Berkman
It is my favorite part of teaching in Intro to American politics, so always have a good time around bureaucracy. And it was fun to do this today. So for Democracy Works on Michael Berkman.

Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith. Thanks for listening

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