by Jennifer Pahlka
Metropolitan Books
1/1/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781250342737
A bold call to reexamine how our government operates--and sometimes fails to -- from President Obama's former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America
Just when we most need our government to work--to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats--it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.
But it's not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today's world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.
Reviews:
"Government policy makers get promoted by crafting Big Ideas. But what American citizens need from their leaders today is smarter delivery of policies--and in particular, better digital delivery. Jen Pahlka, America's former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and a Silicon Valley insider, chronicles her years spent working to create a stronger, better, faster technology for the public sector, and what it taught her about how government works, when it doesn't, and how our leaders could hack their way to a better, more efficient, and more trustworthy democracy." --Rana Foroohar, author of Makers and Takers, Homecoming
"A remarkably compelling, inspiring, and entertaining read about government technology...A valuable and enlightening book." --Science
About the Author:
Jennifer Pahlka is the former deputy chief technology officer of the United States and the founder of Code for America, a nonprofit that believes government can work for people in the digital age. Pahlka is the winner of a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, among others, and has been selected by Wired magazine as one of the people who have most shaped technology and society in the past twenty-five years.