YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Pahlka

lines on the record: 67
first: 2025-04-09
most recent: 2025-04-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am loving working with Nisken, and they were the only think tank that had anything on state capacity when I was finishing my book. And I hope I'm helping build a team there that can do much more to articulate how any government, especially in the US, at any level, can increase its ability to achieve its policy goals. We have a wonderful team there led by Ben Bain, and we're getting a lot of interest from people that never used to pay attention to things like technical infrastructure in the agencies, even from health staffers and members of Congress. So I'm very hopeful that we'll start to make a real impact. Well, not just in Congress, but working with states and cities around the country to sort of tackle these four pillars I just talked about.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess it's the same that it would look like at a lot of different places is that your relationship between law and policymakers and those that implement those laws has to change. And you've got to sort of stop firing and forgetting as you make policy and figure out how to build the affordances for that ongoing iterative feedback.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I have a great answer for this because we just wrote a paper. If you want your government to be able to achieve its goals, and I think New York's got some good goals that they're not achieving, you need to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. So you've got to look at that civil service system. New York in particular has a very bad way of hiring. They still are stuck in this, you know, artifacts from the Moses era where you do these civil service exams and they only happen at certain times of the year and all this stuff that just makes hiring really, really hard. You got to fix that. Second, reduce procedural bloat. That's sort of my favorite one these days. These go together. The procedural bloat is what creates that ineffective hiring system. The third thing is you have to invest in digital infrastructure. Lots to say about that. And then the fourth thing is that you have to close that feedback loop between policy and implementation. So what that would look like in New York City is”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably just because it's richer. And I don't, you know, to be honest, like it was smelly. And I got mugged a couple times, but I don't regret growing up under those circumstances. I think it made me who I am, and I have a fond affection for New York in the eighties, even though it was kind of a mess.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was born in a naval base in Maryland, but very quickly moved to Austin, Texas, and then moved to New York when I was in fourth grade. So I grew up in New York City.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know enough about Utah to say that with great certainty, but yes, I think I could see some of that. I mean, there are states that I think have either tackled that procedural accretion or just not let as much procedure accrete in the first place that are going to have an easier time. California sadly is not one of those where I used to live. Tell me what you think of Virginia since we're in the state of Virginia and I live here now.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm more talking about where I see interesting change happening that others could follow, Colorado as well, I think what Poll is just. That seems to me well unstable.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really can't answer that, but I'm very interested in Pennsylvania under Shapiro. Great paper out by Don Moynihan recently about the work that they've done to just speed things like permits. You know, maybe it's boring stuff, but it matters to people.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you talk about like the federal civil service, and people are like, it's a thing, it can't change. It hasn't changed since 1978, really. I mean, little changes here and there. But we don't just have The federal civil service. We have 50 civil services in states that are wildly different. Not a lot. Some states have at-will employment. We can't imagine that in the federal civil service. And I'm not advocating for that. But I am advocating for us getting out of the trap of like, this is the only way it can be when clearly even in our own country there are 50 different models that we could pull from.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is so powerful. And the quote I chose for the book, Recoding America, is a David Graeber quote. You may need to open it to remind me exactly what it says. Sorry, I will pull it up. The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. And I think I got that from the designers of Ultima Online and my first husband was on the game Spore. It was a Will Wright game. You can have a whole different world. And once you realize that all these constraints in our daily lives, you realize they're manufactured. I think we have a little bit of that right now. That seems to sound extremely boring compared to what I just said. But since we've been touching on federalism a little bit,”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. You know I went from working in essentially little bureaucracies. So like my first job out of college, I worked in child welfare agency and then at a sort of a healthcare think tank. And then I went away for a year and I came back and I got this job in tech. And it was amazing to me how creative game developers are. They have this sort of completely unconstrained ability to just imagine entirely different worlds. And of course, you know, like the economies of those worlds and like build the systems that simulate all sorts of aspects of our lives. And then we sort of move from that into this Web 2.0 era and then kind of went back into government. And I think what I kept with me is that you can imagine fundamentally different things. This is an imagination.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many, many hours have gone into many PlayStation games and Xbox games in an earlier part of my life, and it's just not part of my life anymore.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, gaming takes up a lot of time. It's hard to be a casual gamer. I mean, like my gaming now is, like, I do the New York Times games every day, you know, wordle and yeah, yeah. But I mean, since you're referring to me working in the video game industry, running the game developers conference for many years of my life, yeah, you can't play Doom for”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm going to forget the name of this movie, but it is excellent. And I believe it's the British version of that about a civil servant near the end of his life. Yes, exactly.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've never seen the show. It just indulges in that. Banality of things like, you know, public meetings that are dominated by the loudest voice and how ultimately humor and just communities sort of get through it. But it's very funny show yet it often highlights just how mind-numbing bureaucracy can be, but also how people end up making it sort of beautiful and funny.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is all coming at us very, very fast. And I think the point's been made that this is the first time that such a transformational technology hasn't fundamentally come out of US government resources. This is not one that you can ultimately trace back to DARPA or DoD. And so our government really is at least then even if it was privatized and the value, so much of the value came out of the commercialization of DoD or DARPA investments, since that's not the case this time. They don't really even understand it. And I think even before you get to the questions about other sovereign nations, we have the question of the relationship between the companies and the US government. Of course. How we're going to sort that out.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But won't there be companies that have enough AI expertise in the That they're able to cater to the needs of a sovereign nation and say, I'll, you know, I'll do this for you in the way that fits your needs.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, question back to you is there some way in which the market fixes this because there's a market for AI that doesn't implicate their sovereignty.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I can't answer that question, but it's an excellent question. But I think it highlights the degree to which you are going to see, I think. You may see countries realize this Take just more drastic steps to maintain their sovereignty, which I don't know how they're going to do. I think they could stay back.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rumors that Doge is actually pro insourcing more tech talent in government. You're not hearing about that now, and it may just be a rumor and it may not be true. So, you know, don't quote me on this, but I certainly think that folks in Musk's world came in and looked at government and said, how do you even operate with so little technical competence in-house? That's crazy. And it is crazy. They're right about that. So AI, you know, yes, we'll either end up, I think, you know, even further privatizing not just the software, but like the whole operations as the software and the operations are increasingly melded. Again, this is not new. Or we'll be forced finally to gain the internal competence that we have always needed and start to do this a little bit better.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there is a world in which you get a government with enough technical competence to procure AI and manage AI well. The problem with our procurement today is that we buy software the way we buy pencils and cars, right? We've bought a thing. AI isn't like that. And actually software isn't like that. This is a lesson we should have learned in the internet era. Now we need to learn even better in this AI era is that you can't spend five years developing requirements and sending it out for a bid and then having it come back and then say, okay, I bought this thing. You need the internal competence to do that process far better, far faster, and then to actually own and run that software. It has to be yours. And I think we could do that. And in some ways, you know, there.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maine spent orders of magnitude less on the systems to enroll people. I mean, we had tons of money. And you think about California being tech forward, it's whistleblowing is, you would think that the online enrollment system would be great. But no, because we could put a ton of money into it, we weigh over speced it, gathered way too many requirements, gave it to expensive vendors, and we ended up with an enrollment system that had 212 questions. You know, there's put everything into this. It took far longer to fill out that form on a computer than you could spend on a computer at the library, which is where a lot of people felt food stamps. applications. So like when the computer time's out after 30 minutes, you haven't finished your application. There's a lot of these very little frictiony ways that we”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very often people, when I talk about capacity of the state to do anything and my background spans from food stamps to military readiness, people often go to resources. Capacity is money, essentially, and people. And I think very often it's in fact situations where there is less money and fewer people where you get services delivered better. And I'll give you an example of that. When we started working on food stamps in, I think it was 2012 in California, California, the second lowest participation rate in supplemental nutrition assistance in the country. The only state with a lower rate was Wyoming. Maine, on the other hand, was, I can't remember somewhere in the top five or ten.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing which I agree with is that the separation, I think, between the parts of our country that are involved in the military and the rest of the country is pretty damaging. I think that's a really big problem. I'd also, I think, somewhat agree with something behind that question, which is that when we have too much of something, we get bad at it in a certain way. I think”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not sure I agree with the definition of state capacity. I could see that being part of it, but I'd also not accept the notion that because we can Convince people to go in the military, though we're having terrible recruitment problems in the military. We're doing poorly.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just adding, adding, adding, adding. You've got literally thousands of pages of active regulations that make something that should be a very simple program, like I get some portion of my salary under some circumstances for some number of weeks. It just shouldn't be that hard. But because we have let the policy accumulate and accrete over decades, the challenge isn't digitization. You can digitize something. The challenge is creating a system that is resilient and scalable with that much policy craft. And I think both Estonia and Singapore have the advantage of just having sort of less legacy that they have. And they're small, right? And they're small.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you look at a country like Estonia, their problem is not our problem. Like they have a relatively greenfield environment in which to create the digital infrastructure, but also to implement in a policy framework. You look at something like unemployment insurance, and it doesn't really work here. It still doesn't work. Threw our hands up and screamed during the pandemic. Said we would fix it if we had not fixed it at all. It's going to be a disaster if we have another downturn, another spike in unemployment insurance claims. And part of that is because it goes back to the 1935 Social Security Act. So you have 90-something years now of”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think there are obvious benefits to the system that they've set up, the value that they've placed on civil servants. Yes, the sort of technocratic extreme competence that they display. You could also say the same thing for Estonia. There's always this desire to say the US should be like X or Y or Z. And the reality is, yes, you have a different culture, right? Would we be as orderly about it? No. We have a different culture. I think another thing people don't recognize when they're trying to make comparisons between the way we run our government and any other country is that we have policy complexity and sort of legacy that just goes back further than they do. We didn't clean up for 250 years. We've added and very rarely subtracted.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. It's not really my topic. I actually get a lot of inspiration from the UK because they started the government digital service there, which was the inspiration for USDS. And in fact, a lot of the work they did at Code for America also just picked up on their principles and their values. But I don't think that has been a solve for, yes, stagnation economically. The problems in the UK. I see a lot of that here in the US as well.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to retain that person and their, say, scientific expertise or their bureaucratic expertise and not create a situation in which the entire civil service gets wiped out every time you get a new administration. That sort of seems to be where we're headed. I don't necessarily see public sector unions succeeding in protecting against that, but to the extent that they exist to do that, I do value that. I do think we need independence.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fair. I don't know enough about unions to know how they would work if they were working properly to me. I do think that especially in government, I mean, Philip Howard's made a bunch of points about this that I've warmed to over the years. There is a different set of circumstances for public sector unions than in the private sector. And I think that's part of the problem is that it's sort of been directly translated into the public sector. Philip Howard's much more articulate on this than I am, but I would, I think, maybe slightly counter to Philip say that there is a higher need to protect civil servants from firing for a certain set of reasons. We do want an independent civil service that can say, actually, the science says X, right? Now, an administration may choose not to follow that science. But you want to”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. But the unions, if they were performing properly to actually advance the needs and interests of all of their members would take a different stance, I believe.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So something's gone wrong there that needs to go right if we're going to continue to have them. For me, one example of that is they're so protective of underperformers. And underperformers are a very small part of the civil service. I'm critical of the civil service in the sense that we just talked about where there's too many people whose jobs are to stop things, but that doesn't mean that person is an underperformer. They can be doing a fantastic job at what they were told to do, which is don't let anything happen or like, you know, make sure you're using these guardrails to the maximum extent, for instance. But there are actual underperformers too. And while they're not that many of them, they really drive the rest of the public service like crazy. And it's crazy to me that the unions don't say actually for the good of most public servants, let's make it easier to remove these underperforming”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if we should or could in the current reality, I do see that they are often, I think, advocating For policies that are actually not in the interests of their members.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is work that government doesn't do today at all, right? Like if we can do a lot of these things, we're not going to magically print money and have more safety net dollars for people. But what we care about really is addressing the needs, right? And there's going to be, I think, a long time where it's going to take us a while to figure out what are those needs that could be addressed by IGA. How do we actually get that technology to address those needs accurately? test in again with like limited risk, et cetera, not just roll stuff out willy-nilly. And then I think we get to what were we not doing that we can do?”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Referring them to other services, I get that we could go that direction too. I still think that there is higher value work that people can do. I think AGI is. Being closer than we thought it was, say, even last week is, yes, it's disrupting my thinking on this too. But I also think that.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And AJI may be able to do this as well, but I'm not talking about just adjudicating the case. I'm talking about saying things that I think our current chat bots wouldn't say, which is, you know, displaying empathy.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And maybe there won't be any difference to somebody to know that it's an AGI versus a human. Right now, I think people want to know what's a human.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand that, and I think that I'm trying to get my head around AGI as opposed to sort of the chat body that I think doesn't actually.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So imagine you're in eligibility worker for SNAP. And imagine you got to actually talk to your clients and listen to them.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know. I do see that. I mean, take social services, for example. We have a lot of people in government doing pretty low value work. It's essentially paperwork. Like all of our social safety net is paperwork. It's lots and lots of different kinds of paperwork at lots of different levels. Do paperwork and IT systems and compliance and what a social safety net is supposed to be is about actually fundamentally helping someone get through a tough time. And that requires humans, I think. So I think to the degree that it can, rather than just displace people, though it probably will displace workers, move people to higher value work that helps people more, that is what we should be trying to craft it to do.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once a measure becomes a target, it uses to be useful, and you see that everywhere in government. And I think that's part of what I mean about sort of the new public management and the reinventing government in the 90s was highly reliant on, let's set a goal and follow that goal. There can be real value in that I'm not discrediting it entirely. But you do have that kind of erosion of the value of those targets as people try to meet the target without actually meeting the outcome that was intended. And I think that a more sort of digital transformation approach that is instead able to change over time more quickly and say, wait, this target is no longer helping us get where we wanted to go. We've got to iterate on that. Let's change it can really, I think, get us out of that sort of industrial era thinking.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it collapses more into process, absolutely. I think also you have, what is it, Goodhart's Law that says once a target”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the issues, though, is that there is more accountability process in government than in the private sector, though, I believe.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a certain sense, I would agree with that. I don't think, in sort of an absolute sense, I think the way that we structure accountability is very flawed, and I think we are holding public servants essentially accountable to metrics that are not proxies for real outcomes that people care about. you have a very high focus on accountability that is really about fidelity to procedure and process instead of to the actual outcome, that's not accountability.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The chaos of all these cuts and people getting access to systems that they're losing that view we had, you know, in 2013, 2014, which is let's actually be tolerant of failure. Let's in fact intentionally do things that will help us learn what those failures are. And we're just going to have a better government then. But if we just go into full reaction mode, we're going to lose all of that.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first time, rather than be tolerant of failures, but reduce the scope of those failures. And that's what the whole lean startup movement was about. Like when I came here in 2013 to help start USDS, we were talking about lean startup methodologies, and those really are like figure out like fail, fast, fail quickly, but fail on a very small scale. So you're not hurting a lot of people. And then by the time you've rolled it out to millions and millions of people, you've worked out those bugs. But the way government does it, they try to get serve everybody on the first day. They haven't actually tested these things. And they're trying to do things at scale without having those little failures early on to make a robust, resilient, and scalable system. In some ways, I'm worried in this moment when we're talking about all this chaos and people reacting to”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's fair. And I think the other thing that we should be thinking about, so everyone is very concerned, and I think understandably so, for instance, some of the younger and less experienced members of the Doge team getting access to systems. And I think We should not measure government by the degree to which it can fail, but more by how quickly it can recover. And we haven't seen that yet. I mean, we haven't actually yet seen sort of, you know, Social Security checks stopping going out, for instance. That very well could happen. What we should be looking for is, can it recover quickly if that happens? And under what circumstances? You know, one thing I worry about is there are people with specialized knowledge that will be very hard to pull back in those times. But I think we've always had too much of a focus on get it perfect.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am somebody who would agree that you're going to have to be far more tolerant of mistakes than we have been. And I think a lot of people that I worked with agreed with that, a lot of them are now in reaction to something that is just far more chaotic than it seems to need to be. And again, where the cuts are happening in the wrong places sometimes.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government like direct file, but I also mean enable the building of housing and energy infrastructure. You have to go do that analysis, or you're just getting rid of the go energy first. Like, you know,”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source