The bigger obstacle to modernizing Washington and making government more efficient is politics, not bureaucratic red tape.
Apparently the swamp in Washington, D.C., is not a political but a bureaucratic mire. As Jennifer Pahlka writes in “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better,” bureaucracy “bogs down our systems,” creating a chasm “between policy intentions and actual outcomes.” She believes we “desperately need to simplify and rationalize” it all because the bureaucratic “implementation crisis threatens our democracy.”
Given the allusion to computer code in her book’s title, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “Recoding America” is about algorithms and artificial intelligence put in the service of taming, not draining, the swamp. But the term “artificial intelligence” appears only twice here, both times to dismiss its relevance. While that omission may be refreshing in the wake of all the ChatGPT hype, it’s also puzzling given how Ms. Pahlka asserts that our “digital age is different from previous eras.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.
Photo by Richard Stephen/iStock