The Government Already Knows the Fax Machines Don’t Work

Jennifer Pahlka on why fixing government isn’t a technology problem — and how AI might finally make it tractable.

By UX Magazine Staff

Nobody required the carbon copies.

That’s the punchline of a story Jennifer Pahlka tells about a state DMV. A colleague was going through a service process with a public servant that involved, among other anachronisms, actual carbon copy forms. She kept asking: why are we doing this? The answer was always the same: the other agency requires it. Someone had tried for years to change it. They’d never gotten anywhere.

So the colleague went to the other agency. She found their intake process. She worked her way to the right person and asked: why do you require the carbon copies?

“We hate this,” they said. “The other agency just keeps sending them.”

Both sides of a broken process, each convinced the other was the immovable object. Neither was. The carbon copies existed entirely in the space between two organizations that had stopped talking to each other about why they were doing what they were doing.

Jennifer Pahlka has spent fifteen years in and around government collecting these stories. She wrote Recoding America, founded Code for America, and served as Deputy CTO for Government Innovation in the Obama White House. The carbon copy story isn’t an outlier in her experience. It’s the pattern.

Jennifer is 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.

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