Things did not go smoothly when, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in spring 2020, Congress turned to the unemployment system to help people who found themselves out of work. The under-resourced state agencies that carry out the day-to-day administration of the unemployment system would now have to get tens of billions of dollars into the pockets of the newly unemployed—which, by and large, they did. But they also had to avoid making payments to grifters who didn’t qualify. That proved more difficult.

Consider Michigan, the state where I live. In pre-COVID times, Michigan’s unemployment agency would wait at least 10 days before paying a claim to allow the agency to verify an applicant’s work history. During the pandemic, with claims skyrocketing, Michigan officials came under intense bipartisan pressure to “get money out the door faster.” As part of that effort, the agency decided the 10-day hold wasn’t strictly essential. Even without it, an automated system called Fraud Manager would still review every claim and flag suspicious ones.

That was the plan, at least. But, as is typical with technical matters, the agency had contracted out responsibility for running Fraud Manager. And the contractor, unbeknownst to the agency, had set Fraud Manager to run only in the evenings. That approach worked fine when the 10-day hold was in place, because Fraud Manager would inevitably run before any claim was paid. When the 10-day hold was eliminated, however, the agency started to pay claims the same day they were received—before Fraud Manager could review them.

[Read: The time tax]

It took the state unemployment agency more than two months to notice the problem, according to a subsequent audit by Deloitte. In the meantime, the agency paid out an estimated $1.5 billion—that’s billion with a b—in claims that should have been flagged for possible fraud.

What’s wild about this story isn’t the absurdity of the mistake or its outsize financial consequences. What’s wild is that it’s completely typical. Every state unemployment agency struggled with fraud claims. Notoriously, a rapper known as Nuke Bizzle bragged about scamming California for more than $1.2 million. (He is now serving a six-year prison sentence.) The inspector general at the U.S. Labor Department estimates that as much as $163 billion in pandemic-related unemployment benefits shouldn’t have been paid.

And the issue isn’t just unemployment insurance. As Jennifer Pahlka explains in her indispensable new book, Recoding America, similar tech problems plague government across nearly every program and at all levels—federal, state, and local alike. Addressing those tech problems would not only help us avoid billion-dollar mistakes in the future; it is also crucial, Pahlka argues, to the broader project—one that is starting to catch the attention of both pundits and policy makers—of improving the government’s capacity to do what we have collectively asked of it.

Pahlka is a former deputy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the founder of Code for America, a nonprofit that aims to help government agencies with their tech issues. She excels at describing in cogent, accessible prose why government is so bad at tech.

That sounds like it should be easy. It’s not. You need someone with technical expertise and an insider’s understanding of how a complex system operates at the line level. But you also need someone who can understand the policy and political forces that have shaped the system—and can see how the lessons from one program might generalize to other programs.

Pahlka has all that, and what makes her account so forceful—and what will make it ring true for anyone who has worked in government—is that it’s not a story about bumbling civil servants or venal politicians. It’s not even that the government can’t afford to hire people with the needed tech skills. Instead, it’s about the structures and incentives that make it more attractive for agencies to check bureaucratic boxes than to design usable tech.

When you apply for food stamps, for example, you have to demonstrate that you’re eligible. But some of the applications have swollen to absurd lengths—Michigan’s used to be 40 pages long—and ask detailed, confusing, ridiculous questions about applicants’ financial situation. A lot of people give up before they finish, even if they’re eligible. In the old days, that was a literal paperwork problem. Now that applications have moved online, it’s a problem with code—and the user experience is not top of mind for many government coders.

At the tail end of her time in the White House, Pahlka was trying to convince a career bureaucrat over at the Office of Management and Budget that simplicity had to be the watchword when it came to digital services. To drive her argument home, she pointed to some of these food-stamp applications, which among many other things asked if applicants owned any burial plots. “Why on earth,” she asked, “does government want to know about burial plots?”

The bureaucrat was unmoved. Yes, he knew all about the burial plots. He used to work at the agency that oversaw the food-stamp program—and had written the regulations about burial plots. Why would he call for including such an inane question on forms that were already far too long? “Congress said to assess their assets,” he said. “A burial plot is an asset.” He was going to follow his instructions to the letter, the consequences be damned.

[Deborah Pearlstein: How the government lost its mind]

For Pahlka, this check-box mentality is at the root of much government dysfunction. We have a penchant in the United States for holding civil servants accountable not for the quality of the public services they provide, but for strict compliance with programmatic requirements. When the inspector general comes knocking, that’s what’s evaluated. So, too, with courts. It’s not their job to take a holistic view of whether the agency is doing its job effectively. They ask whether the agency has jumped through the prescribed procedural hoops.

In prior work, I’ve railed about the way this “procedure fetish” in American law has hampered effective governance. Pahlka brings to vivid life how a cover-your-butt culture that prizes legalistic compliance above all else is especially pernicious for government tech. Policy makers layer requirement upon requirement without considering whether the benefits of complexity outweigh the costs. Even when policy makers give agencies some flexibility, the bureaucracy often transforms suggestions into rigid requirements, which are then slavishly followed. The public interest gets forgotten along the way.

In other words, Pahlka’s book isn’t just about tech. It’s about the American administrative state, and it’s a call for paring back the rigid rules that make it so hard to govern, and for rebuilding government’s ability to do its job effectively. In this, Pahlka joins ranks with the likes of Brink Lindsey, Misha Chellam, Alec Stapp, and Ezra Klein, who are all beating a similar drum about the need to improve the government’s ability to meet our collective aspirations.

This nascent “state capacity” movement—also known as supply-side or abundance progressivism—has arisen in response to the urgency of the housing crisis, the massive land-use changes needed to pivot to renewable energy, and the exorbitant costs of new public transit. Pahlka would add to that list the deplorable performance of government tech. We need a government that can build, whether it’s wind farms or websites.

How we get there from here is a hard question. For now, the movement’s origin in housing, renewables, and transit means that it’s associated with the political left. Its emphasis on construction and deregulation, however, means it holds some bipartisan appeal. Maybe there’s room for progress out of the limelight. For her part, Pahlka doesn’t see government capacity as an especially partisan issue. Big problems with government tech, she argues, typically arise because of implementation failures that both Republicans and Democrats would like to avoid.

That’s a departure from the conventional account on the left. Return to the story of unemployment insurance that I opened with. Part of the reason the tech worked so badly is because of decades of underinvestment in a safety-net program that Republicans dislike. In other words, the problem was not just implementation. It was also a kind of sabotage. As Jerusalem Demsas here at The Atlantic has written, “State capacity is downstream of ideological commitments: When we have political consensus, we have state capacity, and when we don’t, we don’t.”

Demsas is certainly onto something. Better tech is harder for programs that face political headwinds. Pahlka doesn’t disagree, but she suggests that we can sidestep some of the deeper challenges—for now—by focusing on the relatively low-salience domain of policy implementation. Food-stamp applications didn’t ask those in need about burial plots to harass them or to surreptitiously shrink the food-stamps program. It really was just bad implementation.

Which is another way of saying that there are some low-hanging fruits to pluck, if we care enough to try. Implementation, Pahlka writes, “can’t be beneath the attention of our most powerful institutions, and it can’t be beneath our attention as a public.” When Americans no longer see government websites as laughingstocks—when applications ask sensible questions, when submitting your taxes online is easy, when signing up for health insurance doesn’t require a Ph.D.—maybe the politics will follow. You’ve got to start somewhere.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Housing-policy experts largely agree that the solution to a housing-affordability crisis is to build more housing. Many residents support this notion in theory, until they’re faced with the possibility of new housing developments in their own backyard—in other words, NIMBYs. But Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas argues in a recent article that maybe these presumed villains of progress aren’t the problem. Instead, they’re a symptom of an approach to housing development that’s doomed to fail.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the meltdown at CNN America is headed toward collapse. Why Putin’s secret weapon failed

Local Control

Kelli María Korducki: You’ve written extensively about the national housing shortage and how it’s making housing unaffordable for many people across the country. Why do new building projects often get held up or shut down, over and over again, by residents who say they want more affordable housing in their communities?

Jerusalem Demsas: People are very unhappy with the lack of housing affordability. They’ll say in polls that they want there to be more types of housing available, that they want there to be more affordable types of housing available. They want their kids to be able to live near them. They want there to be senior housing. They want teachers to be able to afford to live in their communities; there’s concern about police officers policing communities that they’re not actually able to live in too. And yet, time and again, projects fail, because no individual development can check every single box for everyone.

In the story that I write, I’m zeroing in on Denver and Colorado. But a lot of the point that I’m trying to make is that you could replace those geographical names with basically anywhere and see the same story playing out. The promise of localism, of local control, is that you are responding to the particular needs and concerns of the people who live in that specific area. But if municipalities across the country keep reaching the same roadblocks—which ultimately lead to anti-development, anti-growth outcomes—is that actually a response to particular concerns? Or is that a structural problem?

Kelli: You make a bold assertion in your article: “Sometimes NIMBYs have a point.” What do you mean by that?

Jerusalem: A single development can’t balance all of the concerns people have about housing. If the question is “Should we allow this block to turn into duplexes?” community members who support the idea of building more housing in general might respond, “Why here?” And that response could be informed by reasonable concerns about housing that are broader than what that single development project entails. They may have concerns about gentrification, or about open space, or about the types of housing that are currently available.

If I’m representing a city, and I’m trying to convert one hotel into homeless housing, it’s not going to respond to green-space concerns. It’s not going to be able to speak to that, or to senior housing, or to teacher housing, or anything like that. Similarly, if you’re trying to build a new condo development in an area where increasing numbers of rich young people are moving for jobs, that’s not going to respond to the needs of people who have different kinds of concerns. And because no individual developments can check every single box, many projects end up falling through.

Kelli: So what you’re saying is that when hyperlocal political players are given too much power in these development plans, the bigger picture of a municipality or state’s housing needs can get lost. And this can end up sabotaging progress in actually building the new housing that people want and need.

Jerusalem: Exactly. We live in a pretty segregated society, both by class and by race, and on a variety of other different measures. When you restrict a development discussion to a very hyperlocal level, then you can’t have necessary conversations to balance the wants of various interest groups. If you’re dealing with a very rich, white area whose residents are wedded to their exclusionary zoning, they’re always going to resist giving up their space for, for example, homeless housing. And even if these people want homeless housing to exist in general, they have no power to make that occur somewhere else. The only power they have is to exclude it from happening in their own place.

When you expand the development process beyond a very hyperlocal level, then you can actually have broad conversations about what the state needs, and not just what this one locality says they want because they happen to live there right now.

Related:

Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis Housing breaks people’s brains.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden is expected to sign the debt-ceiling bill before Monday and will deliver a rare Oval Office address on the topic this evening. At least 50 people were killed after trains collided in India’s eastern state of Odisha. The Department of Justice is ending its investigation into classified documents at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence and has decided not to file charges.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize last fall for her highly personal books, Gal Beckerman writes. She’s also interested in … supermarkets.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

AI Doomerism Is a Decoy

By Matteo Wong

On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products. Hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and other tech and business figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates, signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Those 22 words were released following a multi-week tour in which executives from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies called for limited regulation of AI. They spoke before Congress, in the European Union, and elsewhere about the need for industry and governments to collaborate to curb their product’s harms—even as their companies continue to invest billions in the technology. Several prominent AI researchers and critics told me that they’re skeptical of the rhetoric, and that Big Tech’s proposed regulations appear defanged and self-serving.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The labor-shortage myth A tragically American approach to the child-care crisis Will Ted Lasso or Succession leave more of an imprint? Ed Kashi / VII / Redux

Read. Brave Men, by Ernie Pyle, a war journalist who wrote about the plight of the average frontline soldier.

Listen. The surgeon general warned about social media’s impact on teens, but there’s a problem with comparing social media to Big Tobacco. Hanna Rosin discusses the issue in a new episode of Radio Atlantic.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’re looking for a more narrative perspective on the social and economic divisions feeding America’s development deadlocks, check out Atlantic staff writer George Packer’s National Book Award–winning 2013 book, The Unwinding. In it, George traces the nation’s descent toward a modern era in which “winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.”

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.