The Recoding America Fund

I thought I’d start this conversation even though FS employees are not back to work yet.   I am a big fan of both improving government operations and departisanizing pretty much anything. So I was impressed by Jennifer Pahlka’s Substack post:

That’s why we’re launching the Recoding America Fund. It’s a pooled philanthropic effort that will raise and deploy at least $120 million over the course of the next six years. We’ll build off the work of so many over the past decades who’ve seen this problem from a variety of angles: the Congressional modernization field, good government groups, the civic tech community, think tanks who see the futility of their policy recommendations when they land in a system that can’t faithfully execute them, private sector leaders and contractors who have had to grapple with unnecessary government bloat, and others. But while this work will leverage the powerful insights so many have gained from grappling with a system in disrepair, it is also discontinuous with the past in three ways. First, the frame is no longer transparency or accountability or modernization, but rather state capacity – simply, the ability of our government to achieve its policy goals. Second, we seek to build a diverse but coherent field around that frame, one in which advocates can achieve more collectively than each could alone, while maintaining their own perspective and tending to their own politics. And lastly, we are collectively committed to leveraging this moment of disruption to achieve what’s needed for the future of our country, not what’s comfortable or convenient.

We have a view on how to do this. If you want a government that can achieve its policy goals, it must be capable of four key things:

• It must be able to attract, select, develop, retain, and manage the right people, which means we need civil service systems at all levels fit for that purpose. Our civil service systems run the gamut from merely outdated to fundamentally unfit for this critical work.
• It must ask those people to do the right work, which means reducing the procedural bloat that keeps most civil servants from focusing on the substantive outcomes the public needs and expects.
• It must have purpose-fit systems, which means changing how we build and buy technology so it can adapt to changing needs and drive effective operations.
• And it must employ test-and-learn frameworks, which means being able to act on what we learn as we pursue policy goals rather than stay locked into decades-long plans even as we can see they are not working. This also means constructing feedback loops between the makers of law and policy and those who implement them or experience their consequences, intended and unintended.

If the feedback loops sound a bit like adaptive management or continuous improvement, well, so be it.

Of course, when I think of “locked into decades-long plans even as we can see they are not working.” I see.. the entire NFMA planning process. But that’s just me. What I like about this effort is dreaming the dream of making things better even as downsizing and budget reductions are going on.

So I wonder what you would put on the table, either employees, retirees, or the general public.

One thought I had is better integration of visitor info across federal lands.  This does not require moving the FS to Int, it just would help if some efforts were joint that clearly don’t need to be separate.  For example,  the NPS app worked well to show us a map of where we were, sites of interest around there, and descriptions (which got a bit didactic and climate-y, but that could be edited).  Also, the recorded sections didn’t work but the transcript did, but maybe that’s because of poor internet access (which is likely to be an issue in many places).  Maybe a “be sure to download before you go” would be helpful.

Ideas?