Making Government Work for the People

A conversation with Jennifer Pahlka and Robert Gordon

Among the many messages that voters across a number of states delivered on Election Day was a clear desire to see governments that are more responsive to their concerns. At The States Forum, we believe that Effective Government is essential for a healthy democracy and for realizing the American Promise. Government must work for the people to improve their lives, not make their lives more difficult or complicated.

A few weeks ago, Jennifer Pahlka, one of the foremost experts in the country on how government works along with why it so often does not, launched The Recoding America Fund. Over the next six years, the fund will raise and deploy $120 million in an effort to reform government at both the Federal and state level so that it is capable of achieving its policy goals and serving the public.

Last week, our editor-in-chief Michael Laskawy sat down with Jen and her colleague, Robert Gordon, to discuss what they intend to do with the Recoding America Fund, how they understand the challenges that government faces, and what is needed to make government more responsive and effective.

An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Jen & Robert, thank you so much for being here. Congratulations on the launch of the Recoding America Fund. Can you talk a little bit about what the project is, and what ultimately you want to accomplish?

Jen Pahlka

Thanks for having us. We’re excited about it. We believe that so many of the problems that rise to the level of attention as policy problems really derive from a core problem, which is that the operating model of government is stuck in the industrial era. There’s certainly been some work to put government online, but we haven’t fundamentally updated how government works to be appropriate for the internet era. And now, of course, we are hurtling into the AI era. Because of this sort of foundational problem, we are not able to get the outcomes that the public expects from what we call vertical policy domains—whether housing or education or public safety. We think that it’s time to turn the attention of philanthropists, of elected leaders, of the bureaucracy—of leadership generally—to this business of updating the operating model.

So then the question becomes, what does that operating model actually entail?

If you want government to be able to achieve its goals, it needs to have the right people, which means that you need civil service systems that attract and select and develop and retain the right people.

They need to be focused on the right work, which means they can’t be drowning in procedural bloat, which has accumulated over the decades in government.

They need purpose-fit systems, and we need to be able to build and buy the systems and the technology that actually will run our government appropriately.

And then lastly, they need to be able to operate in test-and-learn frameworks instead of this waterfall framework that locks us into plans that we can see aren’t working, but then have trouble actually taking action on the learnings as they come.

And so fundamentally, we are working on those things that we would call the horizontals that don’t get very much attention. They haven’t been very sexy. And yet the time has really come to invest in them in order to really have a government that can achieve the policy goals that it sets.

When people think about government not working, they often do think about the federal government and the federal bureaucracy. But you’re targeting more than just the federal government. I’m wondering, Robert, if you can talk a little bit about the applicability of all this to state governments and the problems that state governments face.

Robert Gordon

Yes. I think it all applies, but it applies in different ways because we have one federal government and we have fifty state governments and hundreds of thousands of local governments. It’s interesting because the state capacity national conversation tends to focus on the federal government, but as Nick Bagley and David Schleicher wrote recently, most of what people experience as state capacity is actually state and local government. It’s state and local governments that are delivering your public schools and your roads and your policing and your public health infrastructure. So actually, a lot of the dissatisfaction that people feel is mediated through these state and local institutions.

The same kinds of challenges that Jen is talking about federally also exist at the state level, though there’s variation, which creates this great opportunity to learn. Right now, states have different kinds of civil service systems. They vary quite a lot. And there’s a robust and interesting debate about what the lessons are from that variation.

Also, the same kinds of challenges with the way that we manage technology at the federal level exist to an enormous degree in states and are incredibly consequential for people’s lives. If you are someone who gets health care through Medicaid or through the exchanges, you may be incredibly dependent on a state system. And how good or bad that system is has a huge impact on whether you have or can keep your health care.

Over a long period of time, we have lost capacity in states to manage these systems effectively, and people pay the price for that. So a big part of my excitement and our excitement about this work is: how do you build that capacity back up?

Jen Pahlka

I want to add one point about the state issue. I worked on the unemployment insurance crisis during the pandemic, and those systems really are still actually quite fragile. They were fragile then. They just don’t scale up. And it creates a dynamic that is really corrosive to our democracy. You hear from, say, the federal government: ‘we’re going to get more relief to people quickly.’ And some people did get it. And that’s amazing. And we shouldn’t take that for granted. But for the people who hear that and then don’t get the relief, there’s really a sense of betrayal, I think, there. And that’s only going to get worse now in this moment that Robert just described.

I would love you to elaborate on that point a little more. For us at the States Forum, Effective Government is one of the four key principles that we see as foundational. And it’s related very much to how people understand and have faith in the process of democracy itself. So I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that idea, about the relationship between a government that works and people’s belief in the broader system?

Jen Pahlka

We see it in some of the literature. I’d like to see this literature updated. But for instance, Joe Soss showed years ago that if you have a negative experience applying for benefits, like means-tested benefits, you are less likely to vote. We think that the bureaucracy part of it and the political part of it are two separate things, but they are not. For the average human being, how they experience bureaucracies or service delivery profoundly affects how they think about themselves as citizens, and as voters. There’s a contract there, and too often people are concluding that government isn’t holding up its side of the bargain. And that makes them essentially not want to be involved. I think now you might guess that rather than disengaging, that sense of betrayal actually leads to supporting candidates who promise to blow the system up.

Robert Gordon

I want to build on these points about the link between confidence in government and the performance of government. We have seen in recent years growing support for public funding for private education that corresponds with an erosion in the performance of American students. And you can argue about causation and you can argue about other things going on, but those two things are true. And I think they are cause for concern for people who believe in robust and effective public schools as a key to American democracy.

The other point I make related to that is about trust as kind of a hidden factor, and the relationship between trust and performance. I saw a draft of great paper—it’s still being written by a grad student at Georgetown—about Reddit comments by people getting public benefits. It turns out you can learn a ton about people’s experience with government by reading Reddit threads. And this researcher had looked at thousands of Reddit threads and was seeing the drivers of satisfaction. They had a whole bunch of variables they were tracking. Did you have trouble getting a benefit? Did you feel confused? Did you feel that you were screwed? Those were like the explicit factors. But beneath all of that was this kind of X factor, which was trust. What was your broad attitude toward government? And the people who were most unhappy—and I bet you could correlate this with voting behavior—the people who were most unhappy just had this underlying feeling of distrust about government. And that wasa hidden driver of so much of what they were saying, even though it wasn’t even directly tracked by the researchers.

To follow on this: Jen, one of the ways you illustrate what you write and speak about is with a pyramid, a sort of Maslow’s hierarchy with your key categories at the bottom, and how people experience government at the very top. Can you talk more about this model, and why you think it’s so important?

Jen Pahlka

I wrote a whole book that people read and said was about state capacity, and I never mentioned those two words together in that order in the book, in part because it’s not a topic that attracts enormous attention. Nobody wants to read a book about state capacity. But I do talk about it as a hierarchy of needs, because I think then people get it. Nobody cares about a civil service system for the sake of a civil service system. They care if it’s what’s holding you back from getting better schools, better roads, new infrastructure, national defense. That’s what people care about.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs describes the dynamic in which you can’t have what’s at the top of that pyramid—self-fulfillment, self-actualization—if you don’t have what’s below it. At the very bottom is simply: are you fed and clothed and housed? In government, you cannot have these policy outcomes that people deeply care about if you don’t have those basics. The fit-for-purpose operating model in government is what those policy outcomes depend on in the same way that the things that we think of as human flourishing depend on the basics of security.

So now that it’s come up in our conversation too, can you define a bit what you mean when you’re talking about state capacity?

Robert Gordon

Well, Jen gets points for talking for 10 minutes without saying the word state capacity, and I talk for three seconds and I say it. I think state capacity is just the capacity of government to get things done and to achieve the goals that elected officials set forth for it. And it’s a driver of our ability to achieve results together, and the legitimacy that government holds in the eyes of the public.

Jen Pahlka

All right. I will test out a new definition that I’ve come up with right now, which is: It is the thing that electeds learn they don’t have.

Please say more about that.

They make promises. And it just doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to fulfill the promise because we have such an enormous infrastructure in government. They look around and they say: “Look, there’s all these people. There’s all these rules. We clearly have what we need if we’re going to promise better schools or better response times to 911 calls or more green infrastructure at the national level. Clearly, the enormous resources that government has at its hand will be able to deliver that.”

And state capacity is what they realize they don’t have when two or three years later, things are still being procured, people are still being hired, stuff is stuck in review. Or their initiatives get sued. It is all of that—what we have learned is critical to actually delivering on promises that we make.

If I were a lawmaker who cared about state capacity, what would you say to me I should be doing right now?

Jen Pahlka

Lawmakers think their job is to add laws, which means that they will add rules, which will contribute to procedural bloat. Anywhere you can figure out how to simplify law, policy, regulation, procedure, et cetera, and work with the executive branch to make a reasonable size framework for whatever program it is, that will be incredibly high value.

I think that lawmakers have an obligation to reinvent oversight in ways that doesn’t increase the risk aversion of the administrative agencies. If the oversight that they conduct is always outrage about something that went wrong, you will absolutely continue to make bureaucrats scared of not checking every single little box.

We need lawmakers who want to spend at least half of their oversight time actually finding the positive examples of bureaucrats doing the right thing by getting something done in a reasonable amount of time, sometimes by interpreting, law, policy and regulation in a sort of more reasonable manner, not in a completely maximalist manner. If we hold those up as emblematic of what we want more of, we will get more of it.

Robert Gordon

I would just add that I think people should look at government with common sense and expect government to operate in common sense ways and not accept that government has to operate in some unique occult manner that doesn’t correspond to just how normal people work.

North Carolina had a lot of reporting on how hard it is to hire in state government. And they did a hearing, and there was a lot of dissatisfaction. Why does it take months and months to hire for key jobs? And why can’t we pay people the amounts that we need to pay them to attract them into really key jobs? And why do we have to accept that there are people in government who’ve demonstrated they’re not able to do their jobs well? In most of the world, these would be questions that we would say: “Yeah, we don’t have to accept those things.” We shouldn’t accept those things. Our perspective should be in government—which is one of the most important things we do together—we should do what it takes to make it work.

I think a little bit of applying common sense, of applying the standards of what we expect from all kinds of institutions to government—because we believe in it, not because we don’t—would go a long way here. In North Carolina, they’re rewriting their civil service law. It’s an example of the kinds of thoughtful rethinking that we need.

To continue a bit on this thread—what is it that you want to see in state leadership, whether it’s executives or legislatures to make the transformation of government to enhance state capacity a reality?

Robert Gordon

I think it’s a willingness to push and to try new approaches that fit each state’s context. I do think things will look different in different places. Some people use the word playbook a lot. We don’t, because we see it as a set of principles and values that you’re going to have to tailor to context.

The excitement and the fun will be seeing how that looks different in different places, and then being very intentional about learning, I do think that one challenge in a lot of government innovation is that the innovation happens and then people look up a few years later and say “huh, what did we learn from that?” And I think you want to be thinking from the beginning about how you’re going to be learning and testing, and also accepting that you’re not going to bat a thousand and that’s okay.

Part of the excitement of states is the opportunity to learn and to see different contexts and to try different things. And that the old saw about laboratories of democracy is really true. And we would love to see different leaders with different governing philosophies trying to increase the velocity of government in different ways in the next few years, and then to be very intentional about learning from that, that some things are going to work better than others. And then to take that learning to scale in different ways. That’s really part of the fun and the excitement of this project.

Jen Pahlka

I want to see leaders in both branches not accept the status quo and not just on their priorities. What usually happens is that there’s a key thing that leaders have talked about to the public. And so that gets all the attention. We bird dog these things such that that program can hire quickly or procure quickly, or is protected from some of the attacks that would come at it because it has the attention of people with power.

That’s all well and good. But then the rest, 90% of government, doesn’t have that executive support and isn’t working. What I don’t want is for leaders to say: “well, because it worked, because we were babysitting it, then it kind of works.” Because it doesn’t. We need to stick with it and say: “Okay, great. We can see through these key priorities that when we do put real political power behind, we can see why it is hard, whether that’s hiring or procurement or just the volume of process and procedure. Now that we see that, let’s not just fix it for my pet project. Let’s fix it for the state. Let’s fix it globally.” That’s the commitment that is very, very hard to make and I think will honestly pay off, but in a longer timeframe.

To continue a bit on this thread—what is it that you want to see in state leadership, whether it’s executives or legislatures to make the transformation of government to enhance state capacity a reality?

Robert Gordon

I think it’s a willingness to push and to try new approaches that fit each state’s context. I do think things will look different in different places. Some people use the word playbook a lot. We don’t, because we see it as a set of principles and values that you’re going to have to tailor to context.

The excitement and the fun will be seeing how that looks different in different places, and then being very intentional about learning, I do think that one challenge in a lot of government innovation is that the innovation happens and then people look up a few years later and say “huh, what did we learn from that?” And I think you want to be thinking from the beginning about how you’re going to be learning and testing, and also accepting that you’re not going to bat a thousand and that’s okay.

Part of the excitement of states is the opportunity to learn and to see different contexts and to try different things. And that the old saw about laboratories of democracy is really true. And we would love to see different leaders with different governing philosophies trying to increase the velocity of government in different ways in the next few years, and then to be very intentional about learning from that, that some things are going to work better than others. And then to take that learning to scale in different ways. That’s really part of the fun and the excitement of this project.

Jen Pahlka

I want to see leaders in both branches not accept the status quo and not just on their priorities. What usually happens is that there’s a key thing that leaders have talked about to the public. And so that gets all the attention. We bird dog these things such that that program can hire quickly or procure quickly, or is protected from some of the attacks that would come at it because it has the attention of people with power.

That’s all well and good. But then the rest, 90% of government, doesn’t have that executive support and isn’t working. What I don’t want is for leaders to say: “well, because it worked, because we were babysitting it, then it kind of works.” Because it doesn’t. We need to stick with it and say: “Okay, great. We can see through these key priorities that when we do put real political power behind, we can see why it is hard, whether that’s hiring or procurement or just the volume of process and procedure. Now that we see that, let’s not just fix it for my pet project. Let’s fix it for the state. Let’s fix it globally.” That’s the commitment that is very, very hard to make and I think will honestly pay off, but in a longer timeframe.

I want to ask a DOGE question. There’s no defending the recklessness and cruelty of a lot of what was done in the name of DOGE. But it does seem that one of the results of DOGE has been to at least raise the question of whether there is actually a capacity to move much more quickly with regard to reforming government than people would have thought possible. Is there, for lack of a better term for the moment, a more liberal version of DOGE that we should be thinking about?

Robert Gordon

I think that in order to achieve goals like a state that is able to provide an effective safety net, provide strong public schools, provide the kinds of infrastructure that enables a strong economy and enables people to have manageable commutes from where they live, you need an effective state. I think around the country, but particularly in blue states of late, we’ve struggled with this. And we’re at a moment when baby steps are not going to get it done. I think people who believe in an affirmative vision of government have really hurt themselves, and that vision has really suffered. I think there does need to be a much more aggressive, much bolder commitment to change in the service of an effective, successful government.

Jen Pahlka

I’ll add what we’re talking about is the how, not the what.

Democrats and Republicans are going to use the how for different whats, and that is understood. It would be sad if the bolder how—the something more than baby stuff, as Robert just said—became associated with Republicans only and serving more Republican goals. Because Democrats need that boldness towards their whats too.They need that really effective how towards their whats. I think it’s really critical that we distinguish between those two things.

There are parts of what DOGE did that Democrats will absolutely not want to and should not replicate. I think a core respect for people, be they in the civil service or in the public, is really critical for Democrats to hold very dear. But the idea that after decades of adding and adding and adding to rules and procedure—all of which now have constituencies who care about them for a wide variety of reasons—that we’re going to be able to get to a government that can perform as quickly and as well as the people want it and expect it to without upsetting anybody is not right. And that is what I think Democrats are really going to need to struggle with. We do have to crack some eggs to make this omelet, but the omelet is 100% critical.

Among the many impressive things about the Recoding America Fund is that you have a broad ideological spectrum of people that are already involved. You have Democrats. You have Republicans. This does not feel like a partisan effort. Do you feel like we’ve reached a moment where there is a widespread recognition of the importance of many of these ideas and it’s really just a question of implementation?

Jen Pahlka

I think there’s two parts to that question. We had this launch party last week and the thing that multiple people said to me on the way out, in almost the same words was, “I feel more hopeful than I have in a really long time because there’s incredible diversity of people here from the left and right, various factions of the left and the right. And they all are aligned, largely aligned, about both the need for this work and the general shape of it.” Will there be differences in what folks on the left want and what folks on the right want in these particular reforms? 100%. But they both care about it now in a way that really they haven’t in the past. So I think that there is far more bipartisan interest in it. And I would not say that you can use the word consensus, but certainly a salience across the board.

But it still seems to me that these aren’t muscles that we’ve exercised very well in that we are going to have to sort of retrain the political class, essentially, to know what to actually do and to change, to lead us through this transition that needs to happen.

That seems an appropriate place to end what has been a fascinating conversation. Before I let you go, do you have any final thoughts we haven’t touched on?

Robert Gordon

I think the one thing I would say is we’re eager to learn how to reduce burdens, both on citizens as they engage with governments and within government itself, on government employees. Part of the special thing about Jen’s work in this conversation is there’s been really good work on reducing burdens on citizens in recent years through human-centered design and technology, but I think much less work on how do we enable government employees to do the work they went into government for, which is to improve those lives, not to comply with regulations or the latest policy manual.

I think figuring out how to do that is really challenging, actually, and it involves much more taking away than adding, and really understanding the process. So we’re excited to work with legislators, to work with executives, to work with civil servants to think all of that through. We’re excited about creating processes that make that happen and having this be a conversation that’s not limited to policy wonks or entrepreneurs, but that also includes and engages the people who are doing the work.

Jen Pahlka

I guess I’d just add that I think that there’s a breed of politician that we’re starting to see who finds their way into these issues through their constituents and sticks with the conversation. I think about somebody like Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, who responded to a tweet from someone who was complaining that their application for a permit for new housing in his city had been rejected because the margins on the paper were one and an eighth inch instead of one inch. The response they got to their application literally showed that —they had a ruler and they could show that it was one and an eighth inch.

And this just seems so beneath the attention of so many elected leaders. And yet really pulling that thread and saying: “Okay, why is that happening? We have said housing is a critical priority. We say that out of one side of our mouth. And on the other side of our mouth is, sorry, you can’t build this thing because there’s an eighth of an inch difference here.” He cared enough to actually go talk to the people in the permitting department and find out what was going on and trace it back to what he thinks were problems with the state more than the city.

But he showed the public the recognition that this isn’t acceptable, that this actually does matter, and the willingness to engage in a messy problem: “We’ve done all we can to solve this at the city level. Now we need to go advocate to the state that they not reject things for an eighth of an inch difference.” We don’t honor that kind of thing in our politics the way that we should. I think the public is now rewarding politicians who will pull that thread and not see that kind of detail as beneath their attention. [Mahan] recognizes that if no one with power pays attention, that we’ll continue to promise more housing and we will not deliver.

Thank you both so much.