How to Actually Implement a Policy - by Santi Ruiz

At Statecraft, we’re interested in what happens to policies after they get passed as a bill, executive order, or regulation. Take the failure of healthcare.gov, or America’s broken environmental review process, or decades-long waiting lists at Veterans Affairs. As today’s guest understands, sometimes policymaking isn’t done when the policy is made; often, it’s just getting started. Jen Pahlka has been obsessed with policy implementation for a long time. She founded Code for America (modeled on the Peace Corp and Teach for America), served as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the Obama administration, helped found the United States Digital Service, an elite federal government tech unit, and co-founded US Digital Response in 2020. These days, she’s a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists. I was joined by my IFP colleague Alec Stapp to interview Pahlka (Alec wrote a great review of Pahlka’s new book, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failin

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