About this episode

Jennifer Pahlka discusses the challenges of outdated government processes and the need for innovation in public service.

The IRS has roughly 60,000 fax machines, and nobody can get rid of them. Not because there’s a law that says you have to use them (there almost certainly isn’t), but because likely decades ago a memo got written, somebody interpreted fax machines as the most secure transmission method, and that memo calcified into what Jennifer Pahlka calls "folk law," a perceived rule that nobody can locate, nobody can challenge, and everybody treats as immutable. Folk law looms large in the American government right now. Cascades of rigidity built from outdated interpretations of rules that were flexible to begin with, administered by people who were never asked whether any of it was working. Jennifer Pahlka, who wrote Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better , is the founder and former executive director of Code for America, and was Deputy CTO for Government Innovation in the Obama White House. She’s working on the gap between what government is supposed to do and what it actually does. In this conversation, Robb, Josh, and Jennifer go deep on what’s actually broken and what it would take to fix it. The folk law problem is real, but it's not the…

People in this episode

Guest: Jennifer Pahlka

Topics covered

• government
• technology
• innovation
• process
• outcomes

Keywords

• folk law
• IRS
• fax machines
• government innovation
• Recoding America

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Invisible Machines S7E5, GSX

Books & works: Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age, Age of Invisible Machines

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