Recoding America

Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America and a former deputy chief technology officer under President Obama, argues that American government is faltering just when tasks such as decarbonization and pandemic relief demand it most. Government at every level has entered the digital age with online services that can be clumsier than the paperwork they replaced, widening the gap between intended policies and actual results. The problem, she contends, is not a shortage of money or technology but a rigid culture inherited from the industrial era, in which elites set policy from above, cut off from implementation and often disdainful of it. Pahlka calls for recoding how government works rather than moving it onto new technology.

Seth Godin, in a 2025 book list, called it important, timely and worth reading.