Jennifer Pahlka: evaluation

Transcript context

…Take Singapore. I’ve been to Singapore many times. It’s arguably the best functioning government in the world. When you look at Singapore, does that in any way give you pause? You just think, “We should be more like Singapore.” Or you see what has been required to make Singapore work, and it puts you off a bit. I’m not talking about how democratic is it or not. I know that’s one set of issues, but just the talent drain from the private sector. There’s a certain conformity in Singapore. Some of that comes from size. But when you have the super cooperative, well-disciplined civil service, that does come with some costs. How well have they really done when you consider all possible factors? Look, I think there are obvious benefits to the system that they’ve set up, the value that they’ve placed on civil servants, the 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. The reality is, yes, you have a different culture. 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 legacy that just goes back further than they do. We didn’t clean up [laughs] for 250 years. We’ve added and very rarely subtracted. If you look at a country like Estonia, their problem is not our problem. 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. We threw our hands up and screamed during the pandemic and said we would fix it, and we have not fixed it at all. It’s going to be a disaster if we have another spike in unemployment insurance claims. Part of that is because it goes back to the 1935 Social Security Act. You have 90-something years now of 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. I think both Estonia and Singapore have the advantage of just having less legacy that — And they’re small, right?…

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