I was catching up with some Planet Money podcasts in my feed today, and came across this gem - Why government websites and online services are so bad.

It’s pretty much what you would expect! From the transcript:

To sum up, Jennifer’s team found there were three overlapping problems that were common to a lot of government agencies - first, policy complexity built up and up over many, many years, often added to but rarely stripped back. And this led to the second problem, which was staffing. When staff need 25 years to feel like experts, you cannot hire yourself out of a mess. And thirdly, a top-down culture that was more concerned with optics and risk aversion was getting in the way. A common theme among all these issues seems to be a disconnect between the policy people and the people who are at the implementation part.

In my own lived experience, I can say that there’s no problem too intractable for someone to think a new or changed policy won’t be an effective solution. Also, the irony expressed in this episode that hiring additional staff would actually slow down the process of adjudicating claims. More people, less accomplished!

Also:

Well, there’s a really high sensitivity to fraud in every state agency that handles this. They get reamed in the press about it all the time. So we wanted to loosen the criteria by which people would get flagged, and they were not open to that because they knew that it would look bad to have loosened the criteria while there was fraud happening, even though the reality was that that criteria were not restricting the fraud.

If you hire someone to fix your problems (slow claims process), and they come back after a thorough analysis and say “here’s what to fix”, and the reply is that implementing that solution would make them look bad…wow.

Huge pro-tip is to always own your mistakes, learn from them, and become more excellent because you have had that experience. Playing politics will only get you ahead in, well, politics. (And this is a government program, so not surprising the level of politics we see.)

The whole episode is fascinating, entertaining, and highly worth a listen.