Innovative State
Innovative State
How New Technologies Can Transform Government
Aneesh Chopra
With Ethan Skolnick
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2014 by Aneesh Chopra
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Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8021-2133-2
eISBN 978-0-8021-9346-9
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
The Next Paradigm
CHAPTER 2
The Boy on the Chair
CHAPTER 3
The Virginia Model
CHAPTER 4
Opening the Playbook
CHAPTER 5
Open Data
CHAPTER 6
Standards and Convening
CHAPTER 7
Prizes and Challenges
CHAPTER 8
Lean (Government) Startups
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Prologue
Government doesn’t work. Many in the United States have come to that conclusion, convinced that our government is too big, slow, inefficient, and incompetent. Congressional approval ratings have sunk to shocking lows, even before the October 2013 federal shutdown, which caused Senator John McCain to quip that, in terms of supporters, “We’re down to blood relatives and paid staffers now.”1 That was followed by the clunky immediate rollout of Healthcare.gov, which seemed to only reinforce the notion that government was inept, incapable of effectively launching such an important, highly visible website.
During my time as Assistant to the President and our nation’s first Chief Technology Officer, I saw something that seemed to confirm the most cynical beliefs. This wasn’t a problem at some peripheral agency, on the outskirts of government. This mess, in the fall of 2009, was at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Since America’s inception, we have pledged to honor and support veterans in appreciation for their service. Over the years, we have largely upheld that promise through acknowledgment and accommodation. Veterans of the Revolutionary War received pensions as well as local and state-provided medical care, and more than ten thousand of them also were given grants of public land, anywhere from one hundred acres for a noncommissioned officer to 1,100 acres for a major general. These grants continued after the War of 1812, and matched the profile of our country at the time—independent, rural, and expanding westward.
The long and bloody Civil War created an overwhelming demand for health services. After Abraham Lincoln used his second inauguration to call upon Congress “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan,” legislators sent him a bill for what was then called the National Asylum of Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, which he signed just weeks prior to his assassination.2 The end of World War I and then the onset of the Great Depression brought about years of contentious debates regarding soldiers’ pay and benefits. In 1930, President Hoover created the Veterans Administration via executive order, and after the Bonus Army marched on Washington two years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal settled much of that conflict.3 Veterans continued making progress, through World War II’s GI Bill and the expansion of the VA health care system.
A new century brought about a new sort of war, one that began with terrorists crashing planes into the World Trade Center, and continued in Afghanistan and—more controversially—Iraq. For those who served since September 11, 2011, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and former Secretary of the Navy, conceived and sponsored the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008. The bill offered those servicemen and women the most comprehensive educational benefits since World War II—including full funding for a public four-year undergraduate education to veterans who had served three years of active duty since that date.
Yet, like so many endeavors that arose from noble intent, this one had been fraught from the start with errors in execution, which played out in operational delays. And, as is also often the case, the press had taken notice. The headlines came fast and furious. In the New York Times, one read “Veterans Report G.I. Bill Fund Delays.”4 In the Washington Post, another read “Even with Check in Hand, G.I. Benefits Elusive.”5 The corresponding articles shared the frustrations of young veterans who had made significant life decisions based on these promised services, and then found, after they had made apartment deposits, purchased textbooks, and enrolled in classes, that they didn’t know exactly how much of those expenses would be covered by the promised benefits. These delays were forcing some to take out loans to continue their coursework, keep their apartments and homes, or even eat their next meals.
As these anecdotes wormed their way to Washington, they began eating at Rahm Emanuel, the high-intensity White House Chief of Staff. I witnessed this firsthand, as I participated in the senior staff meetings every weekday morning in the Roosevelt Room.6 I was part of a trio, with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients, that Emanuel jokingly called the “McKinsey Kids,” although none of us had ever worked at the consulting firm.7 We all held new positions created by President Obama upon taking office with a pledge to run a “government that works.”8
Yet, for too many veterans of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, government wasn’t working. Emanuel set a baseline goal—stop the bleeding. So we awoke in the wee hours on October 9, 2009, and, digital tourniquets in tow, confidently boarded a military plane from Andrews Air Force Base, out of the hangar where the President’s plane resides. Upon landing in St. Louis, our contingent, which also included top Veterans Affairs officials, headed off to a VA document-processing center9 to identify the root causes of the problem. That understanding didn’t come through the morning’s briefings behind conference room doors; it happened when we ventured out to the main floor to witness the processors at work. They had access to the information they needed to determine whether an applicant was entitled to a benefit, and how much. But the agent’s support software required too many steps, and screens, to view, combine, and process the necessary information. In order to answer two basic questions, the government processing agent needed to draw from roughly a dozen different databases, none of which talked to the other, requiring a great deal of back-and-forth manual checking for each application. No wonder there was a breakdown and a backlog, when nearly 280,000 veterans were applying for benefits in a tight time fr
ame.
There was no easy, permanent fix, at least none that could be formulated quickly enough to immediately address all of those veterans’ needs. Yet, on the flight home, and in the days that followed, we settled on an intervention to alleviate the backlog. The agency added hundreds of temporary contractors from the private sector to confront the current crisis. Together, the White House and VA established a daily reporting cycle aimed at holding the agency accountable, with results forwarded to Emanuel’s office. We also approved emergency advance payments so that veterans could continue with classes while the agency sifted through their paperwork and sorted out their claims.
We simply did the best we could, and the results, in that sense, were reasonably satisfying—in the spring of 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the VA had reduced the average national processing time for original Post-9/11 GI Bill claims by 19 days and supplemental claims by 23 days. After fully implementing a new automated process called a Long Term Solution, the processing time would be cut to an average of six days for students renewing the benefit in the spring semester of 2013.10
That represented significant progress in one corner of the U.S. government. Still, it was the product of patchwork, manpower thrown at an inefficient process, more than a manifestation of reliable, nimble, working government. Truth be told, for too long, that’s how the American public sector has set out to solve lots of problems, often not so successfully or sustainably.
Is this the best that our government can do?
The nation’s leading CEOs certainly didn’t think so. That’s why more than 50 of them11 accepted President Obama’s invitation to the opening session of the Forum on Modernizing Government in January 2010. There, he asked for their input, in an effort toward imitation. “I know that many of you have felt these challenges in your industries and in your businesses—some of you have felt them quite acutely,” the President told the assembled experts. “But I also know how you’ve managed to meet them, and managed through them—experimenting and innovating and finding new ways to increase productivity and better serve your customers. We’re here today because I believe your government should be doing exactly the same thing.”12
Few would disagree with that sentiment. Certainly, many citizens don’t feel well served.
But how? How should, and can, government change? How can we, the people, play a part?
It starts with collectively changing the conversation. That means leaving behind the tired arguments about government scope and size, arguments between those who enthusiastically espouse bigger and those who staunchly support smaller, arguments that create adversaries and animosity but little advancement.
This isn’t about bigger. This isn’t about smaller. This is about smarter.
This is about creating an “innovative state,” a government for the twenty-first century, one that engages its diverse society, encourages participation, and creates a partnership toward problem solving.13 It also means fostering a state of innovation, searching for the roads not yet traveled, applying new tools and technologies that may allow for the achievement of more with less.
An innovative state focuses on the public/private interface, with emphasis on opening government data to the public and encouraging its use; convening the private sector to adopt standards that allow greater competition, especially in regulated sectors of the economy; paying for results through prizes and challenges, rather than paying for promises through procurement processes; and injecting an entrepreneurial mindset in the government by attracting and retaining top talent.
Making America again an innovative state, a smarter state, is what this book is about.
This book is for government employees who feel stifled by budget bickering and political posturing, yet still believe in the spirit of public service and the possibility of bettering people’s lives. It is for entrepreneurs who have shied away from assisting the government on account of bureaucratic hassle, but still believe they can contribute something significant to the search for solutions. Above all, it is for concerned citizens of different political affiliations who have lost some confidence in government, but still believe it can be a force for good.
Chapter 1
The Next Paradigm
This may not seem plausible to those who are disillusioned by government, who view the institution as the perpetual problem, hopelessly dysfunctional, intractable, and ineffective.
At many times throughout our history, government has gotten it.
There have been robust periods during which government-sparked innovations informed private sector actions and energized private sector growth, not the other way around. There are numerous stories of an American public sector, from its perch of leadership, successfully applying new technologies and new organizational techniques to carry out its core public missions—such as establishing and maintaining the country’s infrastructure, providing for the nation’s defense, and delivering needed services and benefits to veterans and the poor.
Or, even, delivering the mail. This may come as a surprise while you wait and wait and wait on line to ship some socks to Saginaw, but the U.S. Postal Service has shown considerable innovation and creativity at some stages—repeatedly refreshing its methods, from steamboat to locomotive to airplane, in order to continue year-round universal mail service.1 In the middle of the nineteenth century, it even used its buying power to repurpose the horse as a delivery vehicle—subcontracting for the Pony Express, which circulated mail to the western states via land routes in half the time.2 That flourished for about 18 months, or until people gravitated toward another means of communication: the telegraph.
The telegraph itself was a by-product of government leadership. Federal, state, and local government support for waterways, highways, and runways has traditionally been critical to the takeoff of new transportation technologies, with vehicles ultimately emerging to exploit the new transportation grids. But investing in infrastructure has meant more than paving a road or digging a canal—the government has been an active player in the research and development (R&D) sphere, enabling or designing new forms of infrastructure, notably those related to communications. In 1843, Congress provided Samuel Finley Breese Morse with $30,000 in seed money for an experimental 38-mile telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The experiment succeeded on May 1, 1844, when the first message was sent by Morse code—news that the Whig Party convention in Baltimore had nominated Henry Clay for president.3
Throughout the nineteenth century, the U.S. Army pioneered in two areas of manufacturing—interchangeable parts and mechanization —as it made guns and weapons in its factories as well as ordered them from those of contractors. These innovative techniques came to be known as the “arsenal system,” spreading from military factories to revolutionize old industries like sewing and create new ones like bicycle and automobile manufacturing.4 The military was ahead of the private sector curve in other matters. Consider the pension program for Union veterans of the Civil War, which has been called the first national welfare state program. An early case of “information overload” inspired the federal government to build a massive Pension Building in Washington, D.C., between 1882 and 1887, to be inhabited by clerks processing pension claims. The building’s architect, Montgomery C. Meigs, also invented an ingenious labor-saving device—a metal track on each floor along which office boys moved more than a ton of documents each day by using poles to shove baskets of paper that were suspended by rods.
Understandably, this history is of little consolation if you are still waiting on line at the post office—or airport security or the Department of Motor Vehicles—or worse, as we chronicled earlier, if you are waiting for word about your veteran benefits. There’s no disputing that American government, while accomplishing much that has gone unnoticed, has also rightly earned a good share of the cynicism and criticism that has come its way.
Its
failures and foibles have given rise and fuel to the unyielding ideologues who loudly assert that smaller—and less engaged—governance is invariably the ideal. And when those cynics cite the Framers for support, that’s not empty rhetoric. The truth is that our founders did focus on limiting the power of the federal government in the lives of Americans—and no one complained. For most of America’s first century, government played a tiny role in daily life. A diffuse country where most Americans lived on farms disconnected from one another had little use—and little desire—for an activist, big federal government. When the distance your horse could take you was the circumference of most of your life, decisions in state capitals and Washington, D.C., had little impact on ordinary people. In the years just before and especially after the Civil War, that began to change.
First, Americans moved west in earnest, and we became a continental nation with a larger set of concerns. New lands needed to be managed, and a country with grand ambitions needed infrastructure that only the government could help bring about such as the transcontinental railroad and the aforementioned telegraph. Second, the country was undergoing a rapid period of industrialization, with millions of American moving from farms to cities, from the fields to factory floors, and from mom-and-pop farms and shops to large corporations, very similar to what China is experiencing today. The rise of companies like Standard Oil in the last third of the nineteenth century, followed by U.S. Steel and others in the early twentieth century, began to concern many Americans. Those Americans saw those companies’ apparently unlimited economic power, and saw a society rapidly changing—and not always for the better. The independence, imagined or romanticized, of the yeoman farmer toiling in his fields gave way to millions of Americans working for companies built on the management principles of the day—hierarchical, top-down, and large—or losing out to those large entities in the marketplace. Crowded slums, oppressive sweatshops, dangerous factories and mines, forced child labor, companies exercising monopoly power, and harmful products being churned out by these factories were exposed by the crusading muckraking journalists of their day.
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