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

“So, my metaphor is basically that we are imbalanced between break and gas, right? So in any given agency right now, you could talk to someone who's trying to create something new, stand up a new, okay, I'll talk about the direct file team, for instance, right? They were building something that was better, that works for people. They did it cheaper, they did it faster than how things normally go. So you've got, I'll call them, you know, the go energy. Around them, you have like 10 times as much infrastructure, people, rules that are stopping them. That's the stop energy. I don't believe we should have no stop energy. I just think that the balance between those two things is way, way off. So if you're going to come in and change, and what you want is government to be more effective, go faster, build stuff. And I mean, build things.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I could imagine cutting something quite deep, but I would do it. Far more discriminately than what's happening right now.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess I'm on record as saying that the defense department should have a shack to the system. I don't know if it's 50%, but it does need to be freed from the constraints that it seems not to be able to shake.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, that does happen. That's the, what do we call it? The bureaucratic rigidity cycle, I think it's called. We I think Ben disciplined enough about dismantling the old when we create the new? I mean, I experienced that myself, helping start USDS, the United States Digital Service. It's creating something new, but it's even up until, you know, inauguration day just had far less power than the existing infrastructures, CIOs of agencies, the procurement frameworks, all the that stuff sort of has a life of its own and a power of its own. And if you, you know, Are creating these sort of skunk works to disrupt the old stuff. It has to actually disrupt the old stuff. It can't just, you can't just add. If you're just adding new layers on.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I come at it from fundamentally a desire for government to work. And it's sometimes it's hard to see whether what's going on right now is about government working better or just being smaller. I think it could be smaller and better.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt a little awkward saying this next to this Air Force official because it sounds insulting, like I want to cut your budget. And he turned to me and he's in front of everyone. He said, you're right, except it needs to be 50%. Because when we've had 15 or 20% cuts, it doesn't shock the system enough to actually change behavior. Of course, you can have a cut like that would be a shock to the system, a hot war would be a shock to the system. And we all know we will see change when that happens. So I have in a sense been an advocate for this kind of shock to the system and that whole, I was sort of alarmed in a certain sense when Doge came and said, we're going to, or I think Vivek Romasami, when he was going to be on Doge, was saying just we get rid of half the bureaucrats based on the last number of their Social Security numbers. Wow, what he's saying, what I'm saying kind of rhyme, and yet I feel...”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Department of Defense fundamentally more agile than it was before, not meaningfully so. So we do have a real problem that isn't even just like that a lot of people are resisting change. I think most people want change, but somehow the system itself fights back against any individual who's trying to change it. And I told a story about being at an event where the person next to me is one of these events where people are off the record and this person was pretty senior official in the Air Force. And I said that I thought we would have a safer country with a smaller defense budget. And people look at me and they're like, ah, she's a hippie or something. Like she just doesn't care about her national defense. I spent four years on the defense innovation board and I learned to care a lot about our defense and to be quite worried about it.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was great. Of course, right. So, like, unbelievable talent, unbelievable support from the Secretary of Defense and actually then subsequent Secretaries of Defense and like good outcomes for sure, but is the”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so hard to say. I've had the same thought. In fact, before inauguration, I wrote about the Department of Defense, right? It's the same thing. There's a clear recognition by the people in the institution, as you saw with USAID, that this is not okay, that this is not working. And it's just strange to be in an institution that large where so many people agree that it's not working from the bottom to the top. And yet, Nobody can make really substantive change. Like you look at efforts like Unit X, there's a book out by Russia and Chris Kirchhoff about their efforts to start the defense innovation. He's”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think reinventing government happened at a time when we were just at the beginning of this digital revolution. And so it was trying with a very 20th century mindset. Fine, did well within that context, but we don't need that again. We need 21st century change. We need true digital transformation. We need something that's not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking. So I don't think we tried that. And I think the efforts have just been too respectful of old ways of working and the institutions. There was really not an appetite, I think, for I would call responsible.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know what's going to happen. I do think this is the disruption that we're getting, whether it's the disruption we wanted. The question of whether it could have been done in a more orderly manner is a tough one. I just feel sad that we didn't try.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, your question about Congress being passive in this moment, of course, I didn't really answer. I'm sort of talking more generally, I think, before the inauguration. But no, I would agree We have put far too much into the judiciary. We are having them make decisions that I think executive branch agencies should make. And one of the big problems with sort of punting everything out into the courts is that those tight feedback loops require you to act quickly and the courts do not act quickly. That's going to be a very big problem, I think, just generally for this whole era where everybody's counting on the courts to get their thing done, right? Especially on the left, where there's a desire to stop Trump. Well, you know, if the lawsuits can't get through the system in any meaningful amount of time, the harm is already done. So that's already an issue. But it's an issue even, I think, in less dire times because you can't operate iteratively if you're just wait always waiting for a court decision or always waiting to be sued.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's much more agile, iterative, and closing the feedback loop. And I do think that speaks to some of Congress's anxiety, right? They are anxious because they feel like the bureaucracy doesn't do what they told them to do. And it's not a surprise that they don't because of the structures. But the change that we're talking about, I think, is really profound. It's moving from one paradigm that is very, very ingrained in how Congress operates, how the executive branch agencies operate, but also just how everybody thinks. It's such a profound change we are going to need a fair amount of disruption to make that change happen.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very big question. I don't have any simple answers, but I do think it's a moment where you can say, look, we have been living in this essentially waterfall world, right? The waterfall process of you do this thing and then it sort of goes into this stepwise procedure, gets handed off to others. And it's really a one-way trip, right? It descends now through the hierarchy of the bureaucracy to get implemented. That's not how stuff that works well in our real lives works. It works in a much more iterative way in which you're sort of coming back to the intent, checking on how it's going. It's more of a quick feedback loop than this long waterfall that descends away from you and away from any control that you have over it. Some element of the change if it ends up being positive, I think, will be away from waterfall process into something.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm hopeful that this sort of various strands of disruption that are happening right now will push them in some direction. So I think the challenge is to shape that direction. Certainly you have something like the Loper Bright decision, which is going to disrupt a lot of the sort of way they have done work. If you really want to write a law, have it passed, and then have it have the impact in the real world that you intended, you kind of can't really do what you used to do. What that change will look like”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we turn the dial, like nothing's. Maybe not nothing is happening, but less than we thought, or something different is happening, this law of unintended consequences is really kicking in.”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So Congress is, I'm sort of new to Congress. So I spent many years really in the executive branch agency. So I see Congress through the lens of somebody, people who are downstream of their actions. And I've only recently come to any theories at all about Congress. But one observation I have, I think secretly will admit that they know that the laws that they pass don't actually work. They don't want to admit this. That is not something you'd want to run on. But I think increasingly they're aware that they are turning the steering wheel, but it's not connected to the wheels of the car. They're pressing the gas, but the car's not going anywhere. And I think that certainly contributes to is probably maybe not the only reason Congress is powerless, but I think it has really contributed to this sense of what are we even doing here. We're supposed to be steering this country and, you know,”
2025-04-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source