As Democrats brace ourselves in disbelief for the second inauguration of Donald Trump as President, it is important we face an uncomfortable truth: too many people feel that their government is failing them. Indeed, in too many cases it is.
American opinion surveys suggest that public trust in government is near historic lows. Trump’s election on a promise to “drain the swamp” aided by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is further proof. Democrats must consider the possibility that reversing this anti-government MAGA momentum is less about improving our messaging (which many pundits focus on), and more about fixing our government’s ability to actually deliver on the outcomes people want.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Twenty years ago, I first heard the alluring concept of “government as a platform” from Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America. She implored us to imagine a world where “we love government as much as we love our smartphones,” because government services can and should operate like our best technology—intuitive, responsive, and always handy. The key: improving the user experience of our government.
Why our government feels outdated
As a former big city mayor, I have experienced first-hand our government’s potential to harness our collective power for good, as well as its frustrating ineffectiveness. One reason for our collective frustration is that government programs still mimic the outdated assembly line, which uses identical parts (inflexible regulations) to mass produce an identical product (a social outcome). Government’s outdated systems are dehumanizing and ineffective in a world where citizens and communities cherish their uniqueness and expect their various needs to be met “on-demand” à la Netflix or Amazon.
When I was Mayor of Oakland, California I felt the frustration of outdated systems first-hand. Take addressing homelessness. Nearly all homeless program funding came with strict restrictions—this pot of money could only be used for veterans, this only for families with children, this only for severely disabled, this for social services at shelters but not for operational costs like food, etc. Piecing together these restricted funds to get an encampment of people off the streets and into safe shelter felt like solving a Rubik’s Cube with tweezers. In this way, regulations often delayed and thwarted us in achieving our desired outcomes.
We have developed a crushingly complex mountain of regulations trying—presumably with good intentions—to meet our diverse constituents’ needs. However, what we need are fewer, simpler programs with the adaptive flexibility to enable customization and personalization. It’s time for our governments to restructure so that they can meet each unique citizen where they are—not with an overwhelming number of rigid programs, but rather with more simple and agile systems which are relentlessly adjusted for usability and outcomes.
What user-friendly government looks like
Today, I have hope that a growing movement is fighting to move public systems into a more human-centered 21st century that is focused on results. Several policy ideas exemplify this transition.
First, is an expanded concept of personalization in education called “success planning.” National organizations that promote place-based cross-sector collaborations, including models like the Harlem Children’s Zone, recognize that we will never achieve educational equity by only focusing on the 20% of time that children are in school. Instead, these new systems ensure that students receive personalized care in all aspects of their lives.
Success planning provides each student with a navigator who co-creates a unique plan of action with each child, their family, educators, and other caring adults. Implemented and adjusted over the years, this relationship-based approach ensures children get what they need, both in and out of school, to achieve the desired end result: successful futures.
Second, guaranteed income and other cash transfer programs recognize that flexible unconditional cash can be the most efficient way to move people out of poverty and into self-sufficiency. Families and political leaders alike are frustrated with the plethora of specialized social programs whose cumulative requirements have made claiming public benefits its own full-time job. A poor family must go through each program’s arduous process to receive each initiative’s specialized assistance. For example, there is one program that helps with baby food (WIC), another for adult food (SNAP), another for child care, another for housing, etc. The concept of a guaranteed income is old, but the growing movement is new—with lessons available from 150 cash-provision initiatives like Magnolia Mothers and 72 local government-sponsored pilots like Stockton SEED. . These flexible cash programs have been found to not only reduce economic hardship, but also show unexpected benefits, including improved mental wellbeing, increased housing mobility, better access to child care and elder care, more up-skilling among workers, and higher grades for children.
Efforts to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit work similarly, because they give people the agency to meet their unique needs, which change over time, and chart their own path to self-sufficiency. The temporary expansion of these tax credits during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic are credited with profound reductions in child poverty. It was, in effect, a customizable public benefit able to meet each individual family’s unique needs.
Finally, the abundance movement is a growing community led by Democrats who believe we must remove the bureaucratic obstacles that limit people’s access to the things government should be accountable for creating, like affordable housing, well-paying jobs, and quality education. These leaders recognize that our government’s complex and numerous programs may have each been well-intentioned, but that the cumulative impact over time has created unnecessarily complicated services, which disadvantage those without the resources or time to navigate them. They fear we have created a political and public sector culture that values procedural compliance over outcomes. And one of the abundance movement’s most prominent leaders is none other than Jennifer Pahlka, the same one who inspired me twenty years ago with her vision of a government so user-friendly that we’d love it as much as we love our smartphones.
Success planning, guaranteed income, and the abundance movement all seek to create user-focused, responsive public systems that deliver meaningful results for each unique person they serve, not just the ones who fit into rigid regulatory boxes or who have the time and money to navigate complex programs. They are evidence of progress and hope at a time when many of us need it.
We must urgently improve the capacity of our government before others destroy it. It is how we start rebuilding trust in government, and perhaps even come to love it.
Leave a comment
