A conversation with Jen Pahlka

On Abundance, DOGE and fixing state capacity

Recently, the Better Government Lab and the New Practice Lab hosted an event at Georgetown University that asked “what is the future for CX (customer experience) work?” The event brought together people who think of themselves as focused on service delivery and civic tech, and the moment seemed ripe for a discussion because DOGE has largely evicted these communities from the federal government. (And in the conversation that follows “we” or “this community” refers to the civic tech/CX/service delivery community).

As part of that event, I had a conversation with Jennifer Pahlka. Regular readers will know I connect to her work a lot. If you don’t know her, she is the author of Recoding America, the founding CEO of the civic tech nonprofit Code for America, and the co-founder of the US Digital Service.

I wanted to talk to Jen because she is also a figure in the Abundance movement, and her work is featured heavily in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book on the topic. Part of my interest was whether “abundance” as a framework would enable what I saw as the broader goals of the people at the event: to modernize government services in a way that made it more simple, accessible and respectful.

Excerpts of our conversation are below, edited a bit for clarity and flow.

On “Abundance”

Don: What does abundance mean to you at this moment?

Jen: Abundance takes seriously the ways in which we've created scarcity and the impacts of that scarcity. It’s saying, look, there have been good reasons for the things that restricted our supply of things, like regulations that make it harder to build housing or energy infrastructure, but we need to be more intentional about the tradeoffs. We’ve made the parts of the country with the most opportunity unaffordable for most people, and some of these artificial constraints are no longer worth the enormous costs they impose.

We know that administrative burden means that people with greater means will persist through that burden, and those without will not. As I said in my book, paperwork favors the powerful. This is true not just with things like taking advantage of the tax code, where low income people fail to get the credits intended for them while highly resourced people and companies leverage it to their advantage, but also with laws and regulations designed to ensure community input before housing is built, for instance.

It’s the people who already have resources who tend to leverage that input process towards protecting the status quo. When we mostly get the input of those who already have power and resources, we fail to build what’s in the broader public interest — housing, transportation, infrastructure for clean energy. Voters are fed up with the world that status quo process has given us.

Right now we're having this national conversation about the ways in which the processes of our bureaucracy are creating this scarcity. I certainly don't think there should be no process! But we are asking, what are we getting for that process? Who is it really benefiting, and what are the costs of that process? What is the right size and shape of that process to get to the outcomes this moment demands?

In this particular moment in time, the sort of technocratic view of abundance is going to get really blurred with a political agenda, because Ezra and Derek wrote the book and they're the ones with the megaphone on abundance right now.

Abundance is in conversation, I think, with progressivism, saying, look, if you care about the people who are most trying to persist through administrative burdens, and most hurt by it, you can't just care about government's role in redistribution. You have to care about the supply of those things.

I think back to 2015, when a former Code for America colleague went to work for the City of San Francisco on digitizing and streamlining the process that people would go through the housing lottery.

And it was a terrible process. It absolutely needed digitizing and streamlining. But you had nearly 10,000 people showing up for affordable housing and something like five or ten homes available for them. After all this work to digitize the process, the chances of any given applicant getting anything out of it was shockingly low. We were helping so few people relative to the need. It makes me ask myself: Why aren't we working on the problem of there being so little housing in San Francisco? It had at that time already become an incredibly unaffordable city. You can’t redistribute what doesn’t exist. If we really wanted to help low-income people in San Francisco, we needed some fundamentally new strategies that would increase the supply and lower prices.

That was a decade ago. Now Ezra Klein gave a name to this viewpoint. He originally called it “supply side progressivism.” Now it’s been rebranded Abundance, but it’s essentially the same thing.

Don: What is the value of the community that has been focused on burden reduction and CX to the abundance community. Should we be hitching our wagons to broader political movements? Is it abundance? Is it capacity? Is it something else that we haven't named or couldn't predict right now? My view is, strive for relevance, strive for visibility, even though that comes with a bunch of risks, such as selling out or not being pure enough.

Jen: It's a great question. I think that there is so much more desire to bring the skills of citizen experience or streamlining into a whole bunch of fields like permitting for housing, green energy infrastructure, transportation.

The people I know in the abundance world feel like there are seats at the table that are open, and they want this community (CX/civic tech) there. It is the political movement that most wants state capacity and wants that state capacity in the service of a more just and equitable society.

Civic tech has traditionally worked on touchpoints to individuals, like SNAP users or low income tax filers. Or at least that was my experience at Code for America. But a lot of the things that we need to streamline now involve not just an end user but companies and other institutions. In energy, transportation, or housing, for example, you’re going to need to ease the burden for developers. That’s a less comfortable place for progressives, making life easier for for-profit entities. But we’re going to be stuck in this affordability crisis if we don’t. And good service designers can implement regulations with a lower burden while maintaining the protections we get from that regulation. It’s not always a zero sum game. There are ways in which the skills of civic tech can get the best of the intention behind a regulation while making it easy for a developer, say, to comply with that regulation without undue cost that gets passed onto consumers.

It does get uncomfortable for people because it touches on this idea of deregulation. And I think it's important to tease a couple things out there. One, there is a difference between deregulating government itself versus a private sector actor who we might feel needs that sort of constraint.

I think we actually need to do both, but we can start with the easy stuff, which is when we constrain government so that it has so many steps before it can do anything, we are creating that burden, not just for the individuals who are supposed to benefit from it, but also for the people administering it.

We should be comfortable with the idea of deregulating government itself, and then thoughtful about the kinds of deregulation that allow for building and providing the things that we need.

Abundance is not perfect. I don't think abundance is a magic pill that you can take in any situation and somehow it magically fixes things. To start with, a lot of people do not like the name! I've never loved the name. It sounds like, oh, people should just be rich and have things, which is exactly the opposite of what it means. It means we actually need to have more things for the people who have the least.

Pivoting to state government

Don: If the federal level becomes an unpromising venue for people interested in improving government, and obvious strategy is to pivot to state and local governments. One of the lessons for civic tech in government over the last decade was there was no big champion, no Elon Musk figure who was lifting up that movement and allowing it to change every aspect of government. But this is potentially an opportunity for the abundance movement to build such momentum. I see governors of different states, more likely blue state governors, articulating some of the values and terminology from this book or framework, and framing that as something they'd buy into.

I'm curious: if you were talking to state governors and they said, “how should we change things in ways that will help people and help me politically,” what would your advice be?

Jen: I think most governors realize sort of two years into their term that they've not spent enough time on what I would call state capacity.

So I draw a sort of Maslow's hierarchy of government needs. Maslow's hierarchy tells us that you can’t have self-fulfillment and self-actualization if you’re not clothed, fed, and housed. Government has a similar hierarchy of needs, the top of which is the promises that you would make to your electorate. “I'm going to improve the quality of education or healthcare housing” or whatever it is. Below that are those domain specific policies that should drive better outcomes.

And then below that are things like the digital infrastructure that you have. Do you have any digital services team? Do you have designers? Below that is, you know, do you have the ability to test and learn?

And at the very bottom, something that I think every single civil servant would agree with is, can you hire the right people and fire the wrong ones? And how much are the people in your bureaucracy burdened by paperwork that is not fundamentally about the outcome that you care about?

And I think they're realizing that, you know, we're churning at the top of that pyramid because we're not doing the work at the bottom.

No governor comes in and says, we're going to work on civil service reform or right sizing procedures so that we are focused more on the outcome than on the process.

And so my advice would be to work on those from day one, have a state capacity agenda. You don't have to talk about it to the public. No one wants to hear this. That's okay. But have an agenda from day one that says, I recognize I cannot meet those needs at the top because I haven't satisfied the needs at the bottom. Set some clear goals about increasing the capacity of my state. Put your best people on that and be set up to run at that from day one.

Don: At the state level, are there low-hanging fruit where a governor could say, “I can get some quick wins here and get better really fast, and demonstrate to the public this is how you govern”?

Jen: I'm not sure I know anything that's super easy. There are more models for benefit delivery, for instance, where you can just say, this other state is already doing that, let's just do this. I think you have to marry it with their priorities: What do they actually care about? So, if they care about getting housing built, bring the same tools that we've all brought to, benefits process and apply it to a permitting process.

You hit up against capture - both parties are captured by special interests in lots of ways. And I'll give you a silly example from the healthcare abundance world. There's a lot of professional licensing that is probably unnecessary. It creates a lot of administrative burden, and functions as a barrier for entry to that profession. Once you're in the profession, you like those barriers. There's a lot that you could do in healthcare to just make healthcare more available by saying nurses can do this instead of doctors. And guess who needs that? Low-income communities who don't have access?

Where is Congress?

Don: What is the role of Congress? You've been talking to Congress quite a bit. How are they a stakeholder in the state capacity movement?

Jen: If you spent time on the Hill, you know that there is increasingly an appetite for understanding what's going on in this community. But I think that the civic tech or better government world has increasingly recognized that to do the work that we need to do, we have to go upstream.

They are eager. I've heard congressional staffers say “We know that the laws that we write are fundamentally not implementable. It's not just that agencies aren't implementing them well. It's just almost impossible to do it.”

And the basic framework I give them is: You have been placing mandates and constraints on agencies for how many decades now. It’s not working. They say “but that's what we do.” But you can write legislation in a capacity building and enabling framework. Instead of adding constraints, remove them. Ask agencies what is in your way? What can we take out? How are you going to get the capacity in your agency to deliver on this?

I think there's a lot more openness to it than you would think. It's really hard, though. I think the members struggle with it more than the staff sometimes. Because there are so many incentives to be outraged at an agency's poor performance.

What about DOGE?

Don: What is the alternative vision to DOGE that people might find compelling? Have you thought about whether we [reminder: this means civic tech/CX/delivery community] should be defining ourselves in relation to DOGE or is that just a waste of time?

Jen: I think we could define ourselves in relation to what DOGE could have and should have been. DOGE as it exists today is not dismantling unnecessary and unhelpful process and procedure. It's simply ignoring them. It ignores process. It ignores law. DOGE is cutting the workforce and leaving all the unproductive work in place.

We still need to have a very difficult and hard conversation about whether these policies and processes in government that we have taken as Gospel are actually serving the purposes that we say they are. My fear is that we will believe that line that DOGE has dismantled government and decide to just go build back when in fact, the work of dismantling still needs to happen. Actually, I would change that verb to rethinking, rightsizing, and thoughtfully creating a government that is more focused on getting to the outcomes than getting through the process.

The thing that we should take from Doge is the boldness. We can be much more bold, and I think that we can be responsibly bold. We could take all of that ambition and in some sense, slightly less respect for the status quo and wield that with far greater responsibility and empathy for people.

What I don't want is to say that we should be the opposite of DOGE. We should not say that because they were overly ambitious and reckless, we will be very cautious and move slowly. It is not the time to move slowly.

Don: I want to follow up with that, because I'm curious about what the political dynamics that make that possible. With Trump, he doesn't really care about the niceties of governing. And he brings in the richest man in the world who also owns his own social media platform. And so there's a bunch of really powerful vectors that are enabling them to take a hammer and hit stuff. I'm trying to imagine what is the progressive version of that and I just have such a hard time. I genuinely struggle to imagine what the progressive version of that boldness looks like in two years or four years from now.

Jen: So either folks will get that this is a crisis or they won't. It is a crisis of blue state governance that people are leaving blue states for red districts. Democrats will have a harder and harder time winning the more people leave blue districts for red ones. That alone should be considered a crisis, right?

Take this as the warning sign, that we have to get way better really fast.

Lessons from civic tech

Don: At the federal government level the civic tech movement lasted from 2014 to the early months of 2025. Now I think that movement no longer exists in that space. You can agree or disagree with me. You played such a foundational role in that movement. Looking back, what were the lessons? What were the things that you do instead?

Jen: I don't think there was another way for me to do it, because I think I'm kind of a slow learner. It just took me a long time to recognize how much we need to go upstream. You can’t solve the problem at the level it was created. You need to create better conditions under which the work could happen. And I still think that's the work. It’s getting out there and telling the story. We just needed to get out there further.

And people may not like this answer, but… I think it should have been more ideologically diverse. I found, in fact, that a lot of Republicans totally got it. They're like, yeah, we shouldn't make people jump through those hoops to get food stamps.

Don: We need to get better at storytelling. I think we should draw a sharp, sharp contrast with DOGE, because I think people like conflict. DOGE made state capacity more salient. By framing work as the opposite of DOGE, it grabs attention. More people heard about 18F, and the U.S. Digital Service with their demise at the hands of DOGE than any time previously.

Jen: So I will challenge you on that, and not the way you think I'm going to. I largely agree, and yet think that the ambition and speed should be actually retained. There is certainly a contrast to be drawn. My question to you would be, if in 3 months, DOGE is just gone, what are we drawing a contrast with?

Don: I think the argument was that DOGE was a smash and grab of the federal government. So the contrast is first, you need people who are there to serve and give, not grab. And second, that you need people who can build, not just smash. We need to get back to being the builders. Or maybe, the rebuilders.