Is Gov. Keeping Up? The Digital Lag w/ Jennifer Pahlka & Lloyd Levine (Technology vs. Government Ep. 1)

(upbeat music) - Hi, my name's Lloyd Levine. - And my name is Rachel Straussman. And this is-- - Policy Chats. - Policy Chats is the official podcast of the School of Public Policy at the University of California Riverside. Policy Chats is our student-produced podcast series where we bring in guests to discuss potential solutions to today's biggest societal challenges through the lens of public policy. While my classmates and I are the usual hosts. - For the next 11 weeks, I will be guest hosting a special series on the intersection of technology and government. This podcast series, sponsored by the Wall Street Journal Higher Education Fund, is based on my recent book, Technology vs. Government, the irresistible force meets the immovable object. This series explores different aspects of the challenges facing governments as they try to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technology landscape. We will explore the problems resulting from that technology lag and try to understand the future implications if government does not change its approach to technology integration. The episodes track with the sections and chapters in the book with a focus on the problems, the people, and the future. Welcome to episode one of our 11-part special series focusing on the intersection of technology and government. This episode coincides with the preface and introduction of my recent book, Technology vs. Government, the irresistible force meets the immovable object. Joining me on this episode is a very special guest, Jennifer Polka, the author of the excellent book, Recoding America, why government gets it wrong in the digital age. For those of you who don't know Jennifer Polka, she's the founder and executive director of Code for America. She ran Code for America for 10 years and then went into the Obama White House to found and run US digital government services. She is one of the foremost experts in the government technology ecosystem with inside knowledge of the challenges facing governments as it pertains to technology. While the chapters of this book are the product of a collaborative effort, the preface and introduction were not. As a result, I struggled to figure out the guest or the format for this first episode. That was until I read Recoding America. As I was reading Jen's book, I was struck by the similarities between what she was writing about and what I wrote about in my preface and introduction. I couldn't think of a better way to start this podcast series than to have a conversation with Jen about those overlaps as we discuss our books, both covering similar subject matters but written from different perspectives. Also joining us today is Rachel Strassman. Rachel is the chair of the Policy Chats podcast committee, the Dean's chief ambassador. And in her spare time, she's a master student at the University of California Riverside School of Public Policy. Rachel is also a member of what, in my book, I call Generation T, the technology generation. That concept is a theme running throughout my book and will be a frequent topic in this series. Jen T is the generation of Americans born in 2002 and later and called Generation T because they are digital natives. The first generation to grow up completely surrounded by technology. Broadband to the home wasn't deployed first until 2000 and it reached 70% penetration in 2010. The iPhone came out in 2007 and other smartphones soon followed. Those born in 2002 and later won't remember a time before technology was a ubiquitous presence in their daily lives and surroundings. They will reflexively reach for technology in a way we haven't seen before. Their expectations and tolerance for government technology will be dramatically different from the generations before them. The issues and challenges Jen and I identify in our books are the problems that directly affect Generation T as both employees and consumers of government. So let's start, Jen. As I said, I really loved your book. And I genuinely sincerely mean that I am first and foremost a government wonk and want government to succeed. And this is the blueprint for how to succeed in the technology era. Why did you begin describing what inspired you to write the book and give a little description of the book? And we'll use that as a starting point. Yeah, thanks for having me here. Thanks for the very warm intro. You said you wanted a lot of policymakers to read it. I think what they get out of it really is seeing what happens after they make policy and seeing the challenges that that policy ends up and countering kind of from the ground level up. Do often it's just hard to see it. But I think policymakers are increasingly frustrated that the words that they write don't really make the difference that they'd hoped. I talk about speaking of generations. I think you and I are both of the generation that grew up on schoolhouse rock, where there's the I'm just a bill. And that's how we learn that change happens because we write new laws. And of course, that's true. But we stop really watching once the bill has passed. When, in fact, that's when the action begins. That's when it goes into this very long and very complicated process of implementation. And the implementation is-- the processes that we use to implement laws today are still very grounded in sort of industrial era, ways of thinking, ways of doing, in very hierarchical structures. And ultimately, as you say, it's not so much about the technology. It's about government succeeding. And for government to be able to have the impact that those laws are supposed to have, we have to shift to an internet era way of thinking and acting, not just adopting new technologies, but really changing the whole mode in which we think about government success. Yeah, one of the things you mentioned in the book that I thought was really-- it was a very subtle but distinct difference that I thought was very insightful was the difference between a project manager and a product manager. And I hadn't ever considered that perspective until you wrote it. I thought, OK, that's really interesting. Would you like to elaborate on that a little bit more? Yeah, product management is a term from tech. And I run the risk of making people think I'm just trying to get people to adopt tech practices. But it is a useful concept. And project management is the art of getting things done. So important in government, because there is so much to get done, right? Especially when you think about all of the compliance apparatus that you have to go through all the stakeholders that have to sign off, it can really be a lot. But product management is the art of deciding what to do. And I think a lot of government technology projects have failed because no one's really said, here's what's important, here's what the product vision is. Yes, there's maybe about, you know, much of other things that are just going to have to happen. We have to go through an ATO process before it can go live. We have to run through some security checks, et cetera. But while there aren't a set of things you can't not do a requirements-based process, which says, collect all the possible requirements where success is the more the better, right? The more requirements will have the more thorough you've been, and we really prize thoroughness, right? Well, if we do it that way, and then we say to a vendor, OK, go fulfill all those requirements, nobody has said, here's what's important, here's what we should do first. We'll learn X by doing Y, and then we'll know what to do next. And when I have people from the tech world look at how government does tech projects, they go, I don't understand, how can they possibly do this? They don't practice product management. They don't decide what's important to actually do, and especially what to do first. And once you see it that way, you can never see requirements the same way. Yeah, it's lawsuit prevention. It's what I call my cousin's gardener problem. Something happened one time to my brother's neighbor's cousin's gardener, so therefore we need legislation. You know, I mean, you know, California, I guess we introduced something like 3,000 bills per session. That's just the assembly. The Senate introduced about $15,000. Yeah. I need you to put no name for it. 3,000 bills is crazy. And you know, you'll read these. These are not all substantive bills. A lot of them are duplicative. A lot of them are restating things. A lot of them are messaging bills. And some of them are going to do what that bill you were talking about just now does, which is actually complicate things. Like, it's a good thing because it doesn't understand what went before. It creates these layers of overlapping law that put agencies in the position of having to go, well, if we look at this one, it says this. And if we look at this one, it's a slightly different thing. And it kind of just stops everything. It stops forward motion because it's not clear. And what we really need is for legislatures to legislate less or to have a lot of the bills actually focused on cleanup, essentially. Like regulatory legislative cleanup. And like, we the people and the media need to create the incentives for them to do that. Because that's what will actually get what the people want. The people want delivery. They want those unemployment insurance benefits delivered on time. But there are, you know, 8,000 pages of regulation that cover unemployment insurance. I don't actually know the number for the state of California for New Jersey at 7,119 pages. This is for a program that's basically is supposed to give you some portion of your income for some number of weeks under a certain set of eligibility rules. Yes, I can get that that gets a little complicated. It should not be 8,000 pages complicated. And that is the fault of the legislature, the courts, and of course to some degree, the complexity of the executive branch piles on itself. But every head of like an EDD or equivalent that I've talked to since this has been, please reduce that volume of regulation. I talk in the book about it taking 17 years for the new guy at EDD to be even minimally competent in processing a claim. I talked to head of a, well, I guess it was a labor commissioner for a different state a couple weeks ago. We were talking to him about maybe trying to use large language models to do some like regulatory simplification essentially. Not things that have big political agenda is attached to them. Not changing the benefit amounts, nothing like that. But could we just take some of what's on the books that's de minimis, conflicting, confusing, overlapping, vestigial, there's this whole set of stuff in there that you could really kind of just get rid of and make it easier for someone to understand. And he was like, if that will reduce the amount of time, it takes me to train my staff to work here, I want to do it. Now, of course, he's not in the legislature, but he wants to tee this stuff up to the legislature and say just get rid of all this, it's not needed. And we just really have to create the incentives for that kind of work to take precedence over the bill mill. - Well, and right now, the incentive, I mean, there's multiple incentives. There's the avoid the front page incentive, which is why we have to write everything. In case this happens, in case that happens, nobody wants to be hauled in front of a committee, nobody wants to be on the front page of the paper, so the risk of version. We legislate and we govern based on risk of version, instead of trying to, what can we do? It's how do we avoid all these bad outcomes? And you're never gonna avoid a bad outcome. And as you said in your book, like part of the process of trying to avoid bad outcomes creates other bad outcomes. Well, which bad outcome do you want? The one thing I would advise that labor commissioner and I get asked this as I go around the country and participate in conferences. A lot of what I'm doing, I have a unique perspective as you do when you're in the room. And one of the things that I've challenged people, and I thought it was really effective when I was in the legislature, the administration shouldn't just sit back. The administration needs to send people, and so I was chair of the Utilities and Commerce Committee. I had jurisdiction over energy policy as well as telecommunications, broadband, and a lot of other technologies. So the state's CIO would meet with me somehow regularly. We'd compare notes, we'd talk about things. The public utilities commissioners and president met with me regularly. And there needs to be more of that interaction. And part of that also is legislators need to be more welcoming of that. They shouldn't be, I think too many of them are a little bit too-- I don't want to disparage anybody, but they need to be more welcoming, more collegial, more collaborative with the executive branch than just legislating. And I think you avoid those bad outcomes. You've also got those 8,000 pages. They didn't all happen at once, and I know you know that. But those 8,000 pages started in 1950, something. And then nobody ever removes anything. They add to it. I'm going to do this. And you always campaign on the things you're going to do. And when you're campaigning, when you're looking for media, then those are the incentives. Solving a crisis or a problem that nobody knows about, maybe amazing to insiders, water in California. If you can solve water policy in California, it's a herculean effort. Most people turn on the tap water, it comes out. It's not terribly expensive. It's clean. Nobody understands the politics of water and the complications behind it. They may soon, as climate change continues to get worse. And so the person who solves that doesn't get any headlines. The person who reforms education, they're going to attract more attention. So I would turn to Rachel for a second. My book was written and literally dedicated in my dedication, in part, not to you specifically, though if I had met you when I was writing it, I might have. But it was to your generation. As I said earlier, Generation T. I grew up in a household that has generations going back of government involvement, government activity. I'm the first elected official in my family. But people recognize that is their civic duty to be involved. Your generation is very much civically minded. We see it in all sorts of research studies that this current generation is much more civic-minded than the generations that went before. They want to be involved in government. How important to you is technology in the job that you envision having, working with government in government when you're done with your master's program? I'll kind of quote you a little bit in saying this. How you define Generation T. But I think technology is important in the sense that as a member of Generation T, my first thing to think when I encounter a problem-- and like I said, you said this before-- is to turn to technology. I think especially with the development of AI, and as technology is constantly advancing, it's just such an instinct that when you're put in a workplace that doesn't allow you to use your resources in that sense, it becomes limiting and almost diminishing. And so I think as someone in Generation T, keeping workplace and also government services in general, having them keep pace with the advancements of technology is such a crucial part to continuing to work for the government and to utilize government services. Yeah, I agree, which is partly why I wrote the book. And so to follow up on that. And by the way, thank you for quoting me. Always good when you're on a show to quote the host back to them, Nathan. But from the other side, as a consumer of government services, at the risk of putting too much on the spot, one of the things that I've argued is that government requires the consent of the government. And we tacitly give our consent in myriad ways every single day. Stopping at red lights is tacitly giving consent. Getting a driver's license is getting a fishing license, getting all of these things that we do. Filing taxes is maybe more extreme, but every time we do something, we're giving consent to be governed. And we don't have a one-to-one enforcement mechanism. We don't all have our personal government nor will we ever nor should we. But I've also questioned, if you make it too hard to engage with government as a customer of government, does your generation-- I won't ask you specifically. I'll just ask you to speak generally for your classmates-- do you guys say, you know what, screw it. I'm just going to go fishing without a license. I'm going to go whatever. And if millions of people do that, then-- and I'm just using some extreme minor examples. The more extreme examples are not you and I, and the mundane tasks that we do. And I've told before the story on this of trying to get the carpool ain't sticker for my wife's car, because we bought an EV out of state, and we registered in California. And the registration process was a bit cumbersome as well. I'm not going to bash anybody, but it was antiquated, outdated. The people were great. The process was terrible. There was a few times where technology could have certainly improved it, but then trying to get the carpool sticker. I had to go to the DMV website, which immediately then referred me to the EPA website for the rules. Well, why don't I just put the rules here on the DMV website? Why do you have to send me away? Did they have me come back? And then I had to fill out a sort of PDF form. But then to get the permit, I had to print it out, then sign it, then send off a check. And six weeks later, I would get my carpool permits. Certainly not Amazon Prime Speed, where I can order it tonight and get it in the morning. And I understand there's a difference between ordering a book or something on Amazon Prime. But just the huge gulf between those two processes. And as you said in your book, it's policy makers view government from a consumer standpoint. Policy makers, by and large, don't engage with the coders who are running the EDD systems. They're engaged with technology from their phones and from whatever they see in the world around them, and they don't understand why government doesn't work. So it's a long, long question, but I guess going back to where I was kind of worse than our DMV examples are the people who forego benefits, because the process of obtaining them. And we talk about that in chapters four and five in my book, and I know that's going to come up when we do those episodes. The people who engage with government the most are the ones who are the neediest. They're the ones who are trying to obtain all of the benefits that government has bestowed upon more vulnerable populations. And when the process is so cumbersome and so challenging that they can't navigate it, that's where I'm concerned. And so when your generation becomes there, there will be vulnerable people. How do you see your generation kind of engaging with the government that isn't technology forward? I mean, I think that's a great question. I think we've started to experience that in a sense, this past year with everything happening with the FAFSA. For my generation, we discussed challenges the policy encounters. The FAFSA was delayed by multiple months. There was a miscalculation issue. I believe they forgot to factor an inflation. And then there was a certain point where you could fill in a certain demographic answer and they would completely mess up your entire application. And this was, as someone who built up the FAFSA myself, months of monthly issues. And I can attest to firsthand. You would go ahead and submit a request saying, there's an error, you can't do anything. And you don't get a response. And you call the line. And ironically enough, they tell you to go leave a message on their website, which doesn't give you a response, anything. And I think for a lot of people, I was fortunate that my FAFSA ended up working out. But I know for a lot of people who rely more heavily on this aid that they receive. And it also more heavily affects their college decisions. By the time a lot of the FAFSA issues got sorted out, a lot of college admissions decision deadlines had already passed. And so while I think my generation was doing a lot to spread awareness on this. And I think there was, now that we have the ability to use social media, there was a lot more connectedness in people communicating the issue. But we were still losing the response to the issue. And there was still months upon months of, I think a lack of government responds that actually produced an effect. So I think we're starting to get there where we have this great benefit that we can communicate with each other way faster and way more efficiently. But we're still trying to get government to keep up with our needs. And it's having real effects like financial aid for a student who maybe because of the FAFSA issues might not be able to go to a school they previously could have been able to go to. [MUSIC PLAYING] Truth, accuracy, fairness, curiosity. These are the pillars of journalism and of higher education. At the Wall Street Journal, we pride ourselves on being a trusted and essential resource. The Wall Street Journal is partnered with the University of California Riverside to provide your campus an unparalleled access to essentials to be prepared academically, professionally, and personally. Students get full access to WSJ news, curated newsletters, challenges, podcasts, and documentary series to help stay up to date. Activate your school-sponsored subscription today, at WSJ.com/UCPriverside. Yeah, and that's what the carpool sticker for an EV is just an easy, low-hanging fruit example. The example of the FAFSA. Those are the impactful ones. That's where I start to worry about what is the future of government look like. And then the other one, and General, I ask your take on this, is are we creating a two-class system of government, an in-person and an online system? Again, in chapters four and five in the center of my book, as I said at the beginning, they're divided into sections. The middle section is called the people. And I was very specific, and I talk about this in the introduction, that this book is not about technology. It's about people. And the problem, people will encounter particularly vulnerable populations who utilize government service the most, and are also likely, according to the data, to be the least technologically sophisticated. And yet, our government technology is quite complicated. Are we creating a two-party system, and how do we avoid that? What is it that we can do beyond what you've already said to make those changes, to get government where it needs to be? I think, in fact, what we have is a two-class system in which some people hire people to deal with government for them and others. Don't, right? That's taxes. That's increasingly DMV functions. If it's at all complicated, you go through a third party if it's dream lines, it's for you. Immigration lawyers, I talk in the book about getting former felonies cleared off your record if you have a former marijuana. If it's really, really complicated, as we saw in the book, I think, turned out that there were 10,000 people in San Francisco eligible to have their marijuana record expunged a year after the law had passed. You'll have to remind you, but it's something like 32 people or something had started the process and none of them had gotten through it. The only people that get through that process are the people who have lawyers to deal with it for them. And so, you know, I have a line in the book, paperwork favors the powerful. I say that just because, like, we should be saying that all the time. The more complex it is, the more likely that people with resources will make their way through that process because they'll pay someone to do it. That's the tears that we have, I think. Yes, online and offline. But I don't think that's always bad, right? Like, you take healthcare.gov, for example. If they had done the site such that it's served, say, 75% of people, but actually worked. And 75% of people could have gotten through the application for health insurance. In your 25% of the people who had to use a call center or go to an in-person service center. And we could have set up those two live channels to actually succeed and everybody would have been fine. Like, and the people who are going to go to the service centers, yes, it may be that they're not as digitally competent, they're not as fast with digital technology. But it also may be they have a lot of edge cases. They really, you know, they really need someone to help them do it because they're just not the straightforward answer, right? But to use another really current example that I think also affects a lot of young people, the FAFSA has been so heartbreaking to watch. At the same time, I have a 21-year-old when we tried to do her taxes when she was 19, I was so embarrassed, like, on behalf of government. Like, you know, we sat there. It was a lot like Rachel is describing. You're like, okay, it's throwing an error. But I don't know what the error means. I don't know which field is the error. And like, now it's like throwing a warning. Like, you're just like, I'm supposed to be the one who, I tell my child, like, you must vote. You must pay taxes. Being a citizen is so important. This is the thing our family car is about. And then we go to like vote in the, where in California, so the, you know, the ballots initiatives are like 90 of them. It's like very hard to vote. We go to do taxes. And it's like, I'm like, on principle, I don't want to have her like, use an account when she's 19, right? It was so hard to get through. Fast forward to this year. At the same time you had this debacle around FAFSA, you had the amazing rollout of direct file from the IRS. Really great product. Really simple to use. Got enormously high ratings from its users, targeted particularly low income people. Many young people have lower incomes. And, you know, they just did, followed all the best practices of government technology and they hit it out of the park. One of those practices, of course, was what we started here talking about, was they had a product vision, which was we're not going to try to be all things to all people on day one. We're going to do a staged rollout with only certain use cases in only certain states. And we're going to make sure that that experience is amazing before we scale it. It's an incredible success story. And it's really sad that we have success stories, that we should be celebrating, but right alongside them are these tragic events that really have such a negative impact on people's lives. Yeah, it's great that we've got the success stories. I think that that's important because now we're at least starting to see them. And I think there's, you know, one of the things that I've called for is procurement reform also. That's one of the bugaboo's that I see is the procurement process itself is just broken. It's, as I've said many times, it's antiquated and it's antithetical to the way technology is developed. And, you know, and to a degree, it's also part of that risk aversion process. You know, somebody in one state did something wrong so we need to write a regulation to prevent that from happening. And that's, I mean, honestly, that's the paperwork process. It's funny because, you know, on the political side, I've long said this, every time a scandal happens, we write legislation to make more regulation to prevent corruption and, you know, all of that, and don't get me wrong, not defending corruption here. But the, you know, it's the form of politician in me, I gotta put the caveat out there. But the upshot of that also is it's impossible for anybody to run for office without hiring a cadre of experts from fundraisers and treasures who know every nuance of campaign finance. You know, when I ran for office and it's Googleable, so I don't mind sharing here. You know, I got fined by the FPPC for taking an illegal loan. The illegal loan was for my parents and the only way that anybody knew about it is because when I was asked about, like, well, where did this come from? I said, oh, it came from my parents. If I had lied and said, oh, yeah, it's my savings. Nobody would have said boo about it. But I got fined because I took a loan from my parents. My perspective is if my parents are willing to loan me money like that, then they're probably having influence on my life anyway. And, you know, it's not the corruption there. And then I was fined some ungodly amount for every violation. And what I mean by that is every day that went by where there was a violation that wasn't corrected in online and paper was an additional X. And then I had to hire an attorney to negotiate. And then I still had to pay that fine. And I'm not saying I shouldn't have because certainly if I did take an unproper loan, which I did, I understand that. You know, but the point being, you know, you've got to hire all of these experts. And the idea of just your average citizen, if like, I want to make a difference, you're going to accidentally violate some law. I mean, you know, I was running for the legislature in California and I had the experts and I still accidentally violated the law. And nobody's really very sympathetic because once you run for office, you know, you're a politician. You're like, you could be your next door neighbor, but as soon as you run for office, you're just a politician and nobody cuts you any, and I'm not asking for slack, but it's the same problem. You just create this field where paperwork, what was it you said, hashtag paperwork, what? - Paperwork favors the powerful. - Paperwork favors the powerful. I like the paper. - It's the more moral areas you have, the better. But, you know, to this point about procurement reform, what we do is create exceptions. Rather than making the core thing simpler, we just say, okay, so procurements to confusing and complicated, you over there have an exception. You can use an other transaction authority. You can do that. We make all of these little-- - Yes. - That they're like ways that you don't have to do the whole tamale, right? But that just makes the system more complicated, right? It's like, then you don't know when you can use it and when you can, and you're always afraid that someone's gonna come say, no, that was an improper use of another transaction authority, you're in trouble now. And, you know, but to bring it back to the FAFSA, here's this great example of this. I found out that FSA, which manages the FAFSA, is a part of the Department of Education that is something called a PBO, a performance-based organization. So, Congress knows that we have these problems, and their way of dealing is saying like, well, that thing's important, so let's give them special powers. PBOs have all these exceptions to procurement rules. They don't use them. Same way that the DOD, the DOD is like thousands of exceptions that they've been granted. I don't mean like, they create these things that say, you can use this under these circumstances, and they never get used under any circumstance. Of at least they very rarely get used. Which just goes to show, like, it is it ultimately, if you haven't solved the complexity problem and the risk of version problem, you haven't solved the problem. Like, giving someone a special authority does not actually work. You know, you look at how FSA contracted for the new FAFSA, it did not use any of those authorities, and it's a terrible waterfall project that ended up with the kind of heartbreak that Rachel's talking about. Yep, and I love that example, your waterfall example, and the building a cement boat. I've used building a cement boat more times than I can count since I read the book. It's a great example. I mean, and it's a version of a story that I've kind of told for years is the incentives in government are to, you know, you don't get fired for a bad outcome. You get fired for not adhering to process. You know, your defense against discipline is, here's the boxes that I was supposed to check. Here's the boxes that I checked. It wasn't my job to determine whether it made sense or not. It was just my job to adhere to the process. And I did, and part of that also is, you know, very little innovation. To a degree, it stifles innovation, because there's no incentive to stick your hand up and be like, "Hey, I've got an idea." You know, it just adherence to process. My challenge for me is, like, how do we get there? And yeah, I agree with you're, you know, what you said about changing the incentives for policymakers and the legislature. But, you know, I just don't know how we get where we need to be outside of a massive advocacy effort by code for America or somebody like them where a neutral, a neutral third party convener comes in and says, "Okay, look, guys, the way we're doing this is, like, here's the problem." So it's not the bureaucracy itself saying, "Here's the problem." And it's not a technology company saying, "Here's the problem." It's some sort of neutral, credible third party that's just got to be a better way of doing this than the way you're doing it now. And here is that way, and here's how you get to that way. And I mean, I will not depound myself on the back. One of my proudest accomplishments when I was in the legislature was the telecommunications regulatory reform in California, which was, I think, successful in large part because I didn't build upon what went before I replaced it. When I was in the legislature, which by the way is a phrase, I tried to limit the number of times I utter on any given day. And so, I had a triple double in my last high school basketball game if anybody wants to talk about that, we can discuss that too. But the telecommunication companies, cable companies, they were all providing the same services, but they were all regulated based on 100 years of history. AT&T was regulated one way in Verizon and Comcast and Charter and where you came from, determined singular, because singular was a cell company back then. And there's this disparate level of regulations, but they were all essentially providing, or on the verge of providing voice video and data. And so we just said, okay, we need to start over again. Not like Tinker here, Tinker there, just start over again. And that law actually provided, you know, was pretty successful. It also tried to create not an exception for every, you know, I didn't sit there with a group of people and try to come up with every possible case study. It was essentially, it was principles for the administration to follow. It changed it from a discretionary process at the local level to a ministerial process. Submit your application. If you've done it correctly, you get your permit. It took away what, you know, a lot of the problems. Instead of, in California, we had at the time, I think 475 cities, plus 58 counties and a few special districts. And all of the companies had to go negotiate individually with every one of them that was hampering the deployment of high speed communications infrastructure, internet deployment. And so I think the idea of don't Tinker at the margins, you know, you need to, but nobody wants to tackle that. There's that lack of willingness to tackle that. So, you know, how do you see implementation from your standpoint, partway through your program at Riverside and, you know, and being obviously very active student in so many ways outside of the program? What are your thoughts on that? I think a lot of the case studies we look at in classes I take and in research I read are you have this policy that may be a bit idealistic and, you know, a bit optimistic about what it can accomplish. And then one thing leads to another. And there's almost a domino effect where someone leaves their job and so when you process to get trained, they don't fully understand the policy. And it just slowly, I completely forgot what the case study was I had read, but it was, I think, hopefully, or somewhere. I'm gonna have to look it up after this and clarify. - Yeah, I would be interested in what that case was. Case to, I mean, and essentially that's to a degree what my book is, you know, we wrote about the same topic from a different perspective. And I've said, you know, Jen wrote the book that I wish I wrote. I wrote the book I was giving the opportunity to write. And so I think they work really well together. And, you know, I hope they, you know, they become, you know, more required reading, at least in policy schools. But mine is essentially case studies where the idea is to look at the failures of the technology. For example, you know, in chapter two, there was a huge technology failure with the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority. And to understand from that, what went wrong? Let's triage that. And I think to a degree, Jen, you talk in your book about some of those things, same things from a slightly different perspective, which is why I think they potentially could work well together and be like, okay, so how do we get there? It's the challenge I still see is the whole sale change is necessary. I can see piecemeal changes. And I do see some of those, the, I don't know, how familiar you are with technology procurement, but the NASBO National Association of procurement officers contracting process is actually a better contracting process because it's more of an ongoing process. A lot of the individual state contracts, not to disparage them, but the way they have their contracts set up is essentially what I've said in speeches is we buy technology in 2023, like we bought pencils in 1950, but the way technology is rolled out is very different. The yellow number two pencil available in 1950 is substantially the similar to the yellow number two pencil available today. The cell phone from 1950 is not in any way, shape, or form, similar to the cell phones available today. And so we have these contracts that don't allow, more, a more ministerial act ongoing rolling technology rollouts, they allow for several of them without naming names, they sign the multi-party contract, so they are open to multi-parties. But if you're not on it, you have to wait until they have another opportunity. So for example, and this is a bug-a-boo of mine, if you are a technology company that has some amazing technology that's going to solve a real problem, but you're not quite ready and you won't be ready for six months and the contract closes in four months, then you've got to wait and government has to wait or go through our geos exemption processes to buy your whiz-bang technology. Because well, we did the RFP and we did the RFI and we issued the contract and the openers usually are for existing contract holders to add new products along that same line. And it's like, well, that's not how people roll out. Technology companies roll out products on an ongoing basis, so there's so many ways that I think the procurement process alone could be improved to allow technologies to be bought while still preventing the nepotism issues that a lot of the procurement law was built to prevent the bribery scandals and all that. I don't think it's an either or. I just think somebody has to start looking at it in a more, I guess, holistic way to get there. If you had a magic wand, Jen, I'm going to give you a magic wand. Thank you. What would you do? How would you-- where would you start? Maybe the secondary question to that is what do you think are the most important lessons from your book? 3, 4, 5-- I don't know. I thought there was a number of really interesting principles in your book, some of which I've already talked about. That's the thing that I'm stumped on. You've got 50 state legislators, legislatures. You've got federal government. You've got all of these cities. Where do you start? And how do you get where you're going? And if you could, you ubiquitously inform all policy makers. What are the three to five things from your book that you think they must know? I'm going to pop that up a level a little bit. I do think that educating policy makers and lawmakers is key to this, because we've been fighting this. It's a technology level, and we've just got to go upstream. It is not fixable at the level that we've learned a lot, and that learning is really important. But to change the conditions under which technology is procured and rolled out in government, we have to go upstream. So I completely agree with that. And I think we need to help lawmakers understand the impacts of the laws that they write and just think about it very, very differently. But I think to get there, the thing that I would actually change is with the public. So my magic wand, if I really only got one wave, would be to reeducate everybody who votes or could vote, every voter, and say, you have a broken model of what it is your elected representatives are supposed to do. You think that they're supposed to plant seeds, and those seeds are the bills that they pass. And their hope is that when those seeds grow into something it provides shade or fruit or flowers for the public, and that's how they get reelected. But the problem is, A, we know those seeds are not growing into anything very often, right? They don't have impact, they have the opposite impact, right? They do the exact opposite of thing, what we hoped, instead of making it safer on the roads, maybe we made it less safe, right? So, or like with unemployment insurance, we wanted to give it to a lot more people, we gave it to some more people, and it gave way a lot in front, right? Like that's not what the policy intended during COVID. So some things wrong with the metaphor. And if you've ever gardened, you know exactly what this is, is that planting seeds is something like 0.1% of the work. The work is tending the soil, right? It's making sure that those seeds are falling into soil that is fertilized, regularly watered, has sun, and isn't choked with weeds. The weeds are all of the bills that you passed the last legislature and the one before, and the one before going back over many years, your state has been alive or, you know, how long our country has been around. We don't weed, we don't tend to the soil, really, are those civil servants, and the way they think about it, their risk aversion is usually a sign of treating them poorly, making them feel that they're constantly in danger, not appreciating them, not investing in them. And if you think about the world right now, I mean, particularly the federal government where we've got chips, IRA, infrastructure, you know, RRA care, it's like all of these huge bills that are asking all of these agencies to do so much more. We're just extracting more and more out of our public servants without actually the caring about them and investing in them. But if we had this model of our elected leaders, our soil tenders, not seed planters, like, yes, it's still a garden, but the work that needs to be valued is that of creating the conditions under which those seeds can turn into plants or flowers or trees. That's the work we need to value. And that is the magic wand I would wave on every person in this country and others is hold your elected leaders accountable to something different than what you have been, tell them what you want to see out of them and elect, you know, elect those who actually do that. Social injustice, health disparities, climate change. Are you interested in solving pressing challenges like these currently facing our region and the world? Then consider joining the next cohort of future policy leaders like me by applying for the UCR Master of Public Policy program. Learn more at mpp.ucr.edu. You can also find the link in our show notes. So I can't tell you how right you are. - Oh, come on, you're going to tell me how I'm wrong. - No, you're very right. You know, I use kind of slightly different metaphors than the gardening, but you know, you're sailing on a ship and the crew of that ship changes over, but the ship shouldn't be doing this, you know, and you shouldn't act like when you leave that ship, the ship is going to stop sailing. You know, the legislature existed before I got there and it existed after I left. And, you know, I never took the view that I was the greatest legislator ever. I never took the view that when I'm gone, the legislature was going to fail. And I've heard so many people have that viewpoint, former legislators talking about it, all of those sorts of things. And I think that's the same kind of concept. You have to have the view that you're tending. And the thing that, and I don't know if you know to the degree that this happens in California, your success as, and it's not how I viewed it, but your success as a legislator is in some ways internally and externally viewed as how many bills did you pass? What percentage did you pass? I will tell you, I contributed to those 3,000 plus. We had a 30 bill limit and I introduced 30 bills every year. But I didn't view them as I have to pass 30 bills every year. In fact, that was held against me when I ran for Senate was my low percentage of passage rate. I viewed them as chess pieces. If I get to start the chess game with 16 pieces, why would I start the chess game with 10 pieces? I viewed my success as the size of, you know, not literal, but figurative size of the accomplishment that I could do. I wanted, I said when I was running for office, I don't want to tinker at the margins. I don't want to add another line to a real estate disclosure form. And so, you know, I talked about what we call Divka, the digital infrastructure video competition act and acronym only government could love. But that completely redid the telecommunications landscape in California. You know, I did the, I'm not going to make this a, you know, history book of Lloyd's legislation. But the first in the nation plastic bag, you know, an attempt to address plastic bag litter. But sometimes I fail. I failed, you know, a number of times. But, you know, I tried to accomplish something significant. But so much of it is, oh, well, you know, Lloyd only passed, you know, 10% of his bills. I'm like, yeah, I could pass 100% of my bills if that were my goal. I mean, I actually had a legislator who shall remain nameless, come to me one time on the floor and tell me how my bills are always so complicated. And hers always pass out with no no votes. And I didn't say anything because you can't. But I'm like, yeah, that's because yours don't do anything. Like, that's not my goal. So, I mean, that's why I say, I can't tell you how right you are because you have to live it and breathe it to really, truly understand how much, particularly the state legislative level, Congress where they pass legislation differently. It's not quite the same, you know, it's more collaborative process. But at the state legislative level, you know, you are so judged on, well, how many bills did you pass? It's not what you accomplished. So with that, it's not just the culture of the legislature because voters don't care. And they don't know. So what is the incentive structure there? So I don't know that the voters don't care. I don't know that they care in a way that we just articulated it. But they care that their legislator is effective. And right now, and there's a question coming here to you. Right now, the way you judge effectiveness is how many bills did you pass? Because there's no way to judge the merits of a bill, you know. And so as I said, you know, towards the beginning of the conversation, if you and I got to the legislature together, and I said, I'm going to spend my first two to three years learning everything there is to learn about water policy in California, who are the players, water the laws, let me learn the history, et cetera, et cetera. And then I'm going to spend a couple of years solving it. And you decided you're going to be an education champion. And you passed 25 pieces or whatever of legislation that had no hope of performing, you know, education, because they tinker at the margins, but you're the education champion. Now, I've done one really big important thing. The voters are going to go with you, not me, because, you know, you're going to tout the 25 bills and all of that. And that's how you're going to position it. To a degree you judge what you can quantify, right? Like, you know, that's how we operate in society in general. We quantify everything. Top 10 this, top 20 that, top 100 this. We try to quantify the unquantifiable. And so I don't know how to quantify it in a way that gives a different incentive, but I can tell you the reason is that's the incentive. And the LA times, when they did their editorial guide for the elections, they actually talked about how I didn't have very many bills passed. So, you know, and they went with my opponent. And that's fine. I mean, I lost an election. That's not the first time that that's happened. But that's just in terms of as you're analyzing things, you know, the incentive is bills passed. How many bills did you have passed this year? What, and I don't know how to change that incentive. I have other things that I think are around the edges. Like I said earlier, I think having a system and this has to go to a governor as well, where the executive branch is more free to talk to the legislative branch, changing the attitude of a legislative branch that realizes that according to the Constitution and the framers, they are a co-equal branch of government. And so that they are more receptive to working. Those, I think, are keys. But I just, you know, so going back to what you were saying. Yeah, you're right where the incentives are. I just don't know how to measure. You know, I can tell you everything I accomplished. And like the biggest compliment, one of the biggest compliments was, I was out for a bike ride. I'm a runner, I'm an insurance athlete. I was out for a bike ride with a senator. Good guy, really liked him. And he's looking at me goes, man, you're involved in every big issue. And I hadn't actually realized it and stopped him like, yeah, I am. Well, why be here if I'm not? I mean, what's the point of taking up the oxygen in the room if you're not wanting to do something? So that's how I judge it. Personally, I just don't know how you measure that. The one thing that strikes me is that, you know, if you go on the street and ask anybody who, like, even who their representative is, they don't know much less like how many bills they passed. But what I understand as a thesis is that introducing a bill A, of course, it gives you credibility with your peers and your peers matter, I think, in terms of the party and resources that you get. Though I do think that's just a mistake. Like, I don't think party should care. But the process of introducing a bill and getting it through the legislative process gets you media. And media does impact whether people vote for you because they're basically doing it on name recognition. And so if we created opportunities for legislators to be in the same media cycle, but for activities that reduced the policy clutter instead of added to it that got them, either the bureaucracy to focus on the right things instead of sending them in 7,000 different directions. And if we got them to think about their roles as garden tenders instead of seed planters, like, and we kind of need to bring the media along because they create those incentives. So maybe it's, they're still pat, you know, you're still passing bills, but you get the media to really focus on those that are doing cleanup bills that are not about some new policy. They were cleaning up old stuff. There's got to be a lot of ways in which we find the real incentive, not the imagined ones, because honestly, the number of bills is imagined as it's like, it really doesn't matter to anybody. I'm not defending it. I'm just explaining it. No, no, I know, I know you're not. I'm just saying, like, it's just so funny that I go to Sacramento now. And that's like, do they talk about it? And I'm like, nobody knows that or cares, but they do know your name. And you're getting your name out through the press coverage of the bill that you introduced. That seems to be to be a lever for changing incentives. If we get people attention for the things that we're actually going to improve people's lives, not just get headlines, you know, not just get headlines for headlines sake, we might see how to see some progress here. >> Okay, so I am going to ask you a question. We're getting towards the end of our time here. I'm going to challenge you on that with it sounds all well and good if you were talking about 25 years ago. And we'll talk about this more in an upcoming episode on, you know, one of the chapters in my book. When we look at media's impact on politics and policy. But in an era where the paper of record in Sacramento is and was the Sacramento B. But the Sacramento B is a shadow of itself as most newspapers are these days. People have the ability to no longer tune into a few sources of media to hear what's going on. They can shop at the outlet that tells them what they want to hear. In addition to that, we now have the ability for policymakers to directly communicate with constituents in numerous ways. From YouTube videos instead of the nightly news, from email blasts instead of the Sacramento B. Social media, I as a policy maker can bypass the media if I choose to. And the media that does exist is fractured and not what it used to be. So how do you accomplish what you just said when we clearly have people watching two very different sets of media in this country. And so you don't have, you know, was it centered or anyway, one said, you know, you're not entitled to your own facts, your entitled to your own opinion or something close to that, you know, we now have two different sets of parallel facts. If not interpretations of those facts, sometimes just outright different. So how do you do that when there isn't those papers of record when, you know, some people may not be reading those things? I don't disagree with your idea. It's just how to get there. Right, right. I mean, as somebody lives in Oakland where, you know, we kind of don't have papers anymore. We have Oakland side, which is great and it's community supported and like where you have that opportunity to think everybody ought to support local media. The, I think that the fragmentation of the media landscape makes this both harder and easier in a certain way, right? You don't have to convince the editor of the B, right? You, you, maybe you get, you know, a reporter there, but you can also get influential people on social media to talk about it. There's a bunch of bloggers that have outsized influence and you can get them to pay attention. And you can start your own blog on this topic as I have, right? So I have a sad stack eating policy dot com that refers to the phrase in the book culture eats policy. So we were eating our policy. It doesn't, it's not about policy around eating, which is also fun. Like, and I do need to have a food blog, but there are a lot of ways that now to get your message out. So it's both harder and easier, I think to influence these things, but not a lot has been tried yet on this front. So I'm hopeful because, you know, the bar is low, like even a little bit of effort may have some impact or at least have some learning that shows us where to go next. But since we haven't really tried to change these incentives very much from shifting from the focus on legislation to the focus on implementation and outcomes, and actual impact on people's lives, I think we should just try it. Let's just try it. It's worth trying. I completely agree because, you know, we're really, you know, we're on a slow decline and we need to try something. So we've got a few minutes left. I'm going to do, I've got about like two or three questions or really one question, but what I want to do, Rachel, I've asked you a bunch of questions, do you have anything that you want to ask Jen or I before we kind of wrap this thing up? I'm putting you on the spot, I know, but, you know, fire away if you've got anything based on either of our books or the conversation or anything at all. Nothing else I want to ask, but I do want to, I did, of course, the second I stopped, I can't remember that Oakland case. I want to clarify what I was trying to talk about. In the 60s, Oakland had this idea that they were going to help like stimulate their economy and create jobs specifically for Oakland residents of color. And there's a hilarious paper written by the title of it hilarious by pressman and. Well, the basket, I believe the names were yep, there you go, my God, why it's amazing federal programs work at all is I remember that was one of my favorite lines on the title. But they have to read it out loud the whole thing. Okay, this is this book is titled implementation, how great expectations in Washington are dashed in Oakland or why it's amazing that federal programs work at all. This being a saga of the economic development administration as told by two sympathetic observers who seek to build morals on a foundation of ruined hopes by Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron B will dobsky. This is the book, you know, when you do the Ezra Client Show, you get to recommend three books. This is my first one. Well, if I ever I'm so excited that Rachel knows that there's going to be what I'm a mate. So for those of you who are listening and not watching. Rachel cited that case study earlier that and then had to go find the details. And as soon as she started Jen held up the book that that case study came from because she had it literally right there on her desk. So that that that's fantastic. Rachel to explain this amazing case study. Thank you, I'm glad that you know what I'm talking about, but basically they had this huge idea and they were going to like build this airport, anger and the terminal and road and industrial park and then in the process of building all these huge projects. These days they contracted we're going to have all these rules about only hiring lower income people from predominantly in these of color to try to help boost the economy and make it more equitable. But I mean, they go into much more detail. I would recommend actually reading the book to get more detail than my brief description, but there were so many issues they were cost delays. They kept by time they got to the actual implementation. They had to redo all the estimates and then the primary head of the project resigned and one thing led to another. The project fell apart and they do an deep dive into all the many reasons that this project did, but some of the ones that stood out to me were that there were so many goals in this project. And that there were so many decisions that needed approval and they said that there's this direct correlation where the more decisions you create that are going to need approval, the less likely your policy is going to be effective. But their book goes into a lot more detail and I highly recommend it. Talking about implementation and over complicating things and that's where policy can fully fail, maybe you think of that Oakland case study. I cannot I cannot endorse this recommendation of like here is a chart, for instance, in which they show you how quickly the chances of success drive to zero, depending on how many agreements have to happen at one time. There's like they scientifically approve, like prove the difficulty of coordination and I actually have a couple of blog posts that are going to come out referencing this book. So I'm going to buy a book. I'm very excited that you brought it up. It's a great read. I'm going to buy that book. I I sound like something I have to read. So thank you both for that. Jen, you know, before we just kind of wrap up here, any questions that you wanted to ask me or Rachel, I've done most of the question asking anything you're anything I didn't ask you that you'd like to talk about anything we missed here. No, I've just been delighted to do this with both of you and hearing that things like implementation around the radar of folks in policy programs makes me very happy. So thanks, thanks so much for having me. Oh, no, my pleasure. And now we've got to get recoding America, you know, on the radar of people in policy programs. Jen, it's been my absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you. I can't thank you enough not just for coming on and talking to you for writing your book. It's as somebody who has spent, I don't know how 20 plus years in, you know, technology and government and policy. It's a book that absolutely 100% needed to be written and not only did you do it, you did it incredibly well. It's an easy read. It's just it was it was it was it was a, you know, it was a page turner. And I know that sounds crazy to say about something that isn't a murder mystery. But for somebody like me, it was a page turner. I really just I thought you did an amazing job. And so I this is my as one of my as recline books as well. So thank you for that. And I will just extend the offer. Let me know what I can do to help. You know, I shared your passion and your mission. And so if there's anything I can do to help you with your book or anything else, you know, as we work to try and accomplish the same mission. I'm I'm here. I'm I'm all in, you know, as I've said in my book, you know, my kids are going to grow up in this world. My mind, you know, we may be of the same generation. I just started having kids a little bit later. So my youngest is 10 years old. And you know, they're going to grow up and inherit some form of this government. And I'm concerned about what they inherit if we don't make the changes to, you know, not just the planet and all to this government. What what are what are they inherit? You know, as I as I've said, and I'll kind of end with this, you know, people ask me all the time, kind of some version of what is your government philosophy. Nobody comes out and asks you directly what it is. And I've said, you know, in America in 2020, you know, whatever, you know, for me, as I think about government, when I was there now, it's to provide every individual in America the maximum amount of liberty possible while competing, you know, mediating between competing liberties. And we don't live in 1776 America. We don't live where, you know, it's a horse journey away from one town to the next. We live in cities of hundreds of thousands of people, abouting other cities of hundreds of thousands of people. There's a need for government of some variety of some level. There's a need for government. And I'm concerned that government's vision of technology as society is becoming more and more technologically dependent. Governments, vision and version and implementations of technology are making government obsolete. And so, you know, that's why I wrote my book and why I love your book so much as well. So again, thank you very much. This has been an amazing first episode. If every other episode is like this, I think we're going to have a great special technology and government series. So join us next week as we delve into chapter one in the book, a discussion with myself and John Thomas Flynn, John Thomas Flynn was the first CIO for the state of Massachusetts and the first CIO for the state of California. He's a legend in government technology as he and I look at why is it that so often government gets technology wrong? You know, one of the things that we look at, Jen, is the structure of technology decision making within government. And I know that doesn't sound very sexy and interesting, but it actually is quite interesting. How some fundamental changes in the structure of government on the way technology is within government decision making the way purchasing happens within government, the way planning happens with the government actually dovetails nicely with what you're talking about. John and I wrote that chapter together from our different perspectives and we'll talk about that coming up in the next episode. So thank you all for sticking with us. Appreciate it. Thank you again to Jen. Thank you, Rachel and join us next time. Thank you so much. For this episode and the entire technology versus government podcast series, special thank you to the UC Riverside School of Public Policy for their support. Thank you to Dean Mark Long who's support of this entire project was essential to its success. A special thank you to the executive producer and the usual host of policy chats, Rachel Strassman, without her diligent hard work. None of this would be possible. Thank you to the Wall Street Journal Higher Education Initiative for supporting the podcast and their effort to spread the word on higher education and technology in government. Thank you to the policy chats team of committee members who volunteer to support and produce the policy chat series. Divya Bharadwaj, Dinara Godage, Derek Petigo, Andrew Shannon, and Veer Sinha. Also thank you to the team at the Hear Me Now recording studio for their excellent recordings of these podcasts. Jeff Holden, founder and principal and Sawyer Malam, the technical director. And finally thank you to Emerald Publishing for allowing me to publish this book that gave rise to the podcast series. Without those individuals, none of this would be possible and they have my sincerest gratitude. This podcast is a production of the UC Riverside School of Public Policy and our theme music was produced by Veer Sinha. For the latest updates on the School of Public Policy, be sure to check us out at UCR_SPP on Instagram or for more episodes and content, visit our YouTube channel. I'm Rachel Strassman. Till next time.