This initiative is the recently launched Recoding America Fund, and it plans to raise and deploy $120 million over the next six years to reform government at the local, state and federal levels. Part of the goal is to reinvent the bureaucracy, altering “how governments invest in, develop and oversee digital infrastructure,” according to its website.
“We are also finally reckoning with the fact that the government we have today is no longer fit to the work we need it to do, and too often it’s an active impediment to that work getting done,” wrote Pahlka. “Whether you like it or not, disruption is here. The job now is to shape that disruption in the public interest.”
Pahlka is a prominent civic technologist with a lengthy track record in the space. She served as U.S. deputy chief technology officer for one year during the Obama administration. She is also the founder and former director of the influential civic tech group, Code for America, and she is a senior fellow with the Niskanen Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, which has attracted expertise from both the left and the right. In addition, she was one of the authors for The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond, a blueprint for government reform, peppered with pithy slogans like “Reduce procedural bloat,” “Invest in digital infrastructure,” and “Close the feedback loop between policy and implementation.”
The Recoding America Fund calls for bureaucratic shake-ups like reforming the civil service system and government procedures. The initiative will look to the work of the civic tech community, government modernization groups and other think tanks for the kinds of reforms to move 21st-century American government in a direction that’s better aligned for addressing endemic challenges.
“Today, we need to be clear-eyed about the failures of the past and leapfrog our operating model into one fit not for the past decade, but for the next one,” Pahlka wrote.
