Recoding America
About
Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.
Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better is a 2023 book by Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America and a former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Drawing on her experience rescuing failed government technology projects — most visibly the HealthCare.gov relaunch — Pahlka argues that the American state’s difficulty delivering digital services is not mainly a technology problem but a problem of how policy is made and implemented. Her central diagnosis is that government has come to prize procedure over outcome: layers of accumulated rules, waterfall-style planning, and a culture that rewards following the process rather than achieving the result. She contrasts ‘go energy’ (the drive to build and ship) with ‘stop energy’ (the accreted checks that block delivery), and calls for treating implementation as a first-class part of policy rather than an afterthought handed to contractors. The book has become a touchstone for the ‘state capacity’ and ‘abundance’ debates about why rich, capable governments so often fail to build.
In the wiki
- Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government — the book frames Pahlka’s conversation with Tyler Cowen. She develops the go-energy/stop-energy distinction, argues that accountability has collapsed into process-compliance, discusses the DOGE-era disruption of the federal bureaucracy, and connects the delivery problem to State Capacity — the state’s actual ability to turn money and authority into working services.
See also
- Jennifer Pahlka — the author
- State Capacity — the concept the book anatomises