# Jennifer Pahlka's Recoding America explained: why delivery belongs at the heart of radical centrism

> Recoding America (2023), by Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka, argues that governments fail in the digital age because policy is written from the top down and handed to implementers who cannot change it, so rules pile up and services break. Her remedy is to treat delivery as part of policy: in-house digital teams, a healthy civil service, testing with real users and oversight that asks what was learned. For radical centrism this makes implementation capacity a core political commitment, and Spain's minimum income, which more than half of eligible households never claim, shows why.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/jennifer-pahlka-recoding-america-explained
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-10-15
- Topic: Democracy & institutions
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better was published by Metropolitan Books in June 2023.
- Jennifer Pahlka founded Code for America, served as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and helped found the US Digital Service.
- Her diagnosis: policy flows down like waterfall software development, each layer adds rigidity, and nobody near the user can change the rules.
- Her remedy: in-house product and digital roles, investment in the civil service, testing with users and oversight that rewards learning.
- In Spain, AIReF found that 55% of households entitled to the minimum income and child supplement do not claim it, a delivery problem as much as a policy one.

Most political arguments end when a law is passed. Jennifer Pahlka's *Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better*, published by Metropolitan Books in June 2023, starts there. Pahlka founded Code for America, served as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer under Barack Obama, helped create the US Digital Service and, at the start of the pandemic, co-founded U.S. Digital Response. Her book is a report from the place where policy meets the person trying to use it, and it is one of the reasons this programme puts implementation at the centre of radical centrism.

## What goes wrong between the law and the citizen

Pahlka's central example is California's unemployment insurance system in 2020. When the pandemic hit, the state's Employment Development Department was overwhelmed. Pahlka co-led the strike team Governor Gavin Newsom set up in July 2020; its report found that manual identity checks were the main driver of the backlog, and it recommended an online identity verification tool, a two-week reset of the queue and a daily metrics dashboard. On WBUR she recalled a backlog of more than a million claims. Hiring more staff, she told Tech Policy Press, actually slowed the system down.

The system was built in layers over decades. Each new law, regulation and court ruling added a requirement, and nobody ever removed the old ones. Kirkus lists some of the book's other cases: a Veterans Affairs form that only worked on certain computers and software versions, rules for healthcare.gov finalised shortly before launch, a food-stamp application in California with 212 questions that did not work on a phone.

Her explanation is structural. People in government are usually competent and dedicated. Pahlka compares policymaking to waterfall software development, in which requirements are fixed at the top and handed down to be built exactly as written. Rebecca Tushnet's review in JOTWELL summarises the mechanism well: as the language of a law moves down the hierarchy, each layer interprets it more rigidly, because the people at the bottom are judged on compliance and have no authority to change anything. Systems end up designed to protect dozens of internal stakeholders from risk. The user comes last.

Pahlka also thinks policymakers treat implementation as a detail for less important people. That attitude explains why so much money goes into big outsourced technology contracts and so little into the government's own capacity to know what it is buying. After decades of outsourcing, many agencies no longer have the people who understand how their own systems work.

## The remedy

The second half of the book is practical. Put product management inside government, with roles in charge of digital strategy, as Publishers Weekly notes, so that someone decides what to build in the first place and keeps the user in view. Invest in the civil service: on WBUR Pahlka told voters to ask candidates about hiring and about a healthy civil service. Start small, ship early and check that things work. Send unusual cases to human review instead of writing rules for every exception. And change oversight, so that inspectors and legislators ask what a team learned from testing with users, and stop treating any departure from the original plan as failure.

She also gives an example of what happens when the gap closes. A team implementing a US Medicare payment law found nine different definitions of a group of doctors; working with policy staff, they cut them to two and launched on time in 2018. In a line Kirkus quotes, Pahlka reminds readers that people built these systems: "In the end, we get to decide how they work."

Tushnet's main criticism is fair. Pahlka says much about culture and teams and little about which old statutes to repeal. The book is strongest as a guide to how a government should work, and leaves legislators to do their part.

## Why it matters for a radical centre in Europe

Spain has good digital front doors. The European Commission's 2025 Digital Decade report gave the country high marks for online public services. The problem appears further inside. In February 2026 AIReF reported that 55% of households entitled to the Ingreso Mínimo Vital and its child supplement do not claim it, and it recommended automatic verification of eligibility and better information. The Ombudsman's office told the Senate in 2024 that it had received about a thousand complaints about the IMV in 2023 alone, especially over delays in deciding applications. That is Pahlka's story with a Spanish accent: a well-intended law, layered requirements, manual checks, people who give up. We looked at the same benefit through [Amartya Sen's capability approach](/en/articles/spain-minimum-income-imv-capabilities-sen); Pahlka adds the machinery.

Here the three traditions meet. The left is right that a right on paper means nothing if people cannot claim it, and that a state which hollows out its own workforce and outsources its brain cannot keep its promises. The market-liberal tradition is right that government should be judged by results for the people it serves, with less process and less money thrown at large contracts. Pahlka's own contribution fits neither camp: delivery capacity is policy. A radical-centre government would write that into its institutions. Every major programme gets a small in-house product team with the authority to adapt the process. Laws carry a duty to test with real users before launch and to report what changed. Parliament's oversight committees ask for take-up, waiting times and what was learned. And the civil service hires digital and product skills on merit, which is the subject of today's [proposal on advisers and merit](/en/articles/merit-spain-administration-cut-advisers).

Democracia 21's launch speech, which we mapped in our [overview](/en/articles/democracia-21-miriam-gonzalez-proposals-radical-centre), asked for a professional administration. Pahlka shows what professional has to mean in the digital age: people inside the state who can build, test and fix the services citizens actually use.

## FAQ

### What is Recoding America about?

It is Jennifer Pahlka's account of why government technology and services fail, drawn from her years in the US government and at Code for America. She argues that the failures come from how policy is written and handed down, and that governments must build the capacity to deliver.

### Who is Jennifer Pahlka?

The founder of Code for America, a former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer under Barack Obama who helped create the US Digital Service, and co-founder of U.S. Digital Response. She chairs the board of the Recoding America Fund.

### What does Pahlka mean by waterfall policy?

In waterfall software development, requirements are fixed at the top and passed down for others to build. Pahlka says policy works the same way: laws and rules are fixed in advance, implementers must follow them to the letter, and problems only show up after launch.

### What can Spain learn from Recoding America?

That the success of a benefit or a service depends on its delivery. Spain's minimum income has strong digital front doors but low take-up and long processing delays, which points to the redesign of processes and eligibility checks Pahlka recommends.

## Sources

- [Recoding America (review)](https://kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jennifer-pahlka/recoding-america/), Kirkus Reviews (2023)
- [Recoding America author Jennifer Pahlka on how we can reshape our government to work for us](https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/06/14/recoding-america-author-jennifer-pahlka-on-how-we-can-reshape-our-government-to-work-for-us), WBUR On Point (2023)
- [Recoding America (review by Rebecca Tushnet)](https://cyber.jotwell.com/?p=2696), JOTWELL (2024)
- [Governor Newsom's EDD Strike Team releases report](https://www.govops.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2020/10/release.pdf), California Government Operations Agency (2020)
- [La AIReF constata que el ingreso mínimo llega solo al 20% de los hogares en pobreza](https://theobjective.com/economia/2026-02-04/airef-ingreso-minimo-hogares-pobreza/), The Objective (2026)
- [Comparecencia del Defensor del Pueblo en el Senado](https://www.defensordelpueblo.es/noticias/esta-comparecencia-la-camara-alta-finaliza-la-tramitacion-parlamentaria/), Defensor del Pueblo (2024)