New America, AEI, Beeck Center Partner with the Tech Talent Project to Release Nine Memos for Efficient, Tech-Supported Government
Blog Post
April 20, 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerability of America’s government technology infrastructure— an urgent issue that transcends ideology or partisan affiliation. From communicating vital health data to delivering unemployment benefits, governments at every level found it difficult to meet the public’s needs during that extraordinary period. This week, a series of memos released as a collaboration between four non-partisan organizations (New America, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Beeck Center, and the Tech Talent Project), offers new tools for state governments seeking to improve their use of technology going forward.
From overwhelmed unemployment systems to fragmented and unreliable public health data infrastructure, Americans saw firsthand during COVID how the failure to keep pace with technology can kneecap the government's ability to respond to urgent crises and provide crucial services to those who need them. The impact of this failure is especially felt by the lowest-income Americans, who are disproportionately affected by health and economic crises, yet often lack the time or resources to navigate bad technology or complex government systems.
Even so, the pandemic gave us government technology success stories. It proved surprisingly easy, for example, to use a government website to have free COVID tests sent directly to your door. In many ways, the success of covidtests.gov was notable precisely because the public’s experience with government technology has so often been a letdown. By contrast, the COVID test site offered an attractive glimpse of the kind of efficient and effective interactions that could be possible in a world where the government had a better and more reliable relationship with technology.
At the New Practice Lab, our work bridges the gap between the need to design more family-centered economic security policy and the task of improving the ways in which that policy is delivered on the ground. Too often, the government’s use of and approach to technology has been a barrier in pursuit of that dual mission—but as we have seen, it also has the capacity to become a powerful force multiplier.
The New Practice Lab has tested the use of technology to build in this feedback loop between policy design and policy delivery at the federal and local levels. Early in the pandemic, our team surfaced a series of simple fixes that the Trump Administration used to increase the number of Americans who received automatic COVID-19 stimulus payments through direct deposit. We also helped states like New Jersey identify simple technology and design changes that are now helping thousands of people get access to game changing benefits like parental leave. And we ran a series of discovery sprints with public officials, data scientists, designers and everyday Americans, resulting in a comprehensive playbook for modernizing state unemployment insurance systems. That playbook has now been used by public officials across the country as they work to implement billions in COVID-era funding set aside for this purpose.
Today, thanks to millions of dollars from the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, state governments have the opportunity to go beyond single policies or programs and adopt a comprehensive approach to an efficient, technology-enabled government. To make sure state leaders have tools to think about capacity, the New Practice Lab partnered with AEI, the Beeck Center, and the Tech Talent Project to compile steps that any new state administration can take in its first 200 days to build state digital capacity and harness the power of public interest technology to better serve local businesses, workers, and families.
Knowing that state officials have a lot on their plates, especially for new administrations that have just come into office in the last few months, we worked to make these materials as actionable as possible. As our Co-chair Cecilia Muñoz remembers from her days in government, “We got a lot of memos about what to do, but almost nothing about how to do it.” Adds Co-chair John Bailey, “It was important to us to prepare materials that would provide clear road maps for how to get things done.”
The nine memos lay out critical strategies for mounting an effective, technology enabled response to key policy areas, including unemployment insurance, education, broadband access, and safety net programs, and child welfare. The memos offer tools and frameworks on six critical technology-related issues every new administration must consider, including:
- Navigating available public funding for technology modernization
- Staffing agencies and projects with the right kind of technical knowledge and experience
- Improving procurement processes to ensure the right vendors and approaches to technology development
- Enhancing the use of data in policy design and service delivery
- Tackling cybersecurity
- Designing and delivering government services using human-centered approaches
Finally, the memos define and detail the most common and critical technology roles that states need to hire or have in place to deliver on an efficient, technology-supported government.
Along with AEI, Beeck and the Tech Talent Project, we have shared these memos with governors and public agency leaders to begin a conversation about improving technology and digital capacity within their administrations. Modernizing government technology is a commonsense, good government issue that all Americans ought to be able to agree on. That’s why we’ve been proud to work on this project with peer organizations and think tanks who approach their work from a broad array of perspectives. By working together to modernize government technology, we can build a stronger and more resilient public sector that can better serve the needs of all Americans.