Hi, I’m Jennifer Pahlka. I’m a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists, and a senior advisor to the Abundance Network. Previously, I served as US Deputy CTO and a member of the Defense Innovation Network. I founded Code for America and ran it for 10 years.

Why eating policy?

I wrote a book called Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. One of the concepts I describe in it is the way that the on-the-ground practical implementation of law and policy often perverts the law’s original intent, and the ways a risk-averse culture in government sometimes seem to ensure that perversion. In business, they say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. In government, culture eats policy.

If culture (or anything else) is “eating” policy intent, then we have a problem of state capacity. State capacity is simply the ability of a government (at any level) to accomplish its policy goals. Policy is words, but if we want to those words to have their intended effect, we are going to have to work on the culture inside, and outside of government.

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