Jennifer Pahlka: belief

Transcript context

…We’re in a remarkably orderly time, even with you-know-who as president. No, that’s fair. I think the other thing that we should be thinking about . . . Everyone is very concerned — I think understandably so — about, for instance, some of the younger and less experienced members of the DOGE team getting access to systems. 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. We haven’t actually yet seen 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. One thing I worry about is, there are people with specialized knowledge that will be very hard to pull back in those times. I think we’ve always had too much of a focus on get it perfect the first time rather than be tolerant of failures, but reduce the scope of those failures. That’s what the whole lean startup movement was about. When I came here in 2013 to help start USDS, we were talking about lean startup methodologies, and those really are fail fast, fail quickly, but fail on a very small scale so you’re not hurting a lot of people. 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 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 the chaos of all these cuts and people getting access to systems, that they’re losing that view we had 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. If someone says, when it comes to regulatory reform, accountability is not the solution, it’s the problem, do you agree?…

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