Appreciate the comment! If you had a magic wand, what are the main problems you would unblock to create better/cheaper/faster government IT outcomes, based on your experience?
Bringing things in house with things like 18F is the most promising solution we've seen to those procurement problems, but has been fought tooth & nail by the same people currently dismantling the roadblocks between them & taking taxpayer money without even delivering results.
One the fundamental issues with government vs. private sector is accounting. Governments are often exempted from following GAAP, and the rules are inverse - the government’s cost to borrow is cheap and the government doesn’t pay taxes, so capex is usually smarter than opex. Capex is locked in, while opex is subject to the whims of the legislature.
The other core issue with government is separation of powers. You cannot have an efficient process to make decisions because fundamentally the system is designed to do what’s right from a legal perspective, which is often in opposition to what is efficient.
Setting expectations is important too. The government at all levels is excellent at operations. When I setup a housing authority system, that authority delivered 50,000 rent checks on the 1st of the month, every month. You know what I want the treasury to do? Pay bond coupons every month and audit clean.
Moving fast isn’t necessarily what you want. In fact, the system of government was designed to be slow. For people who attest to idol worship of the Constitution, they sure missed the boat there.
https://www.recodingamerica.us
Interview with the author:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
Recent opinion piece by the author:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/democrats-elon-mu...
(Those may be paywalled and I'm out of gift links.)