First published 2025
American government is struggling. It has moved forms online without rethinking how services actually reach people. It has passed ambitious laws without tracking whether they produce the results those laws promised. Jennifer Pahlka spent years inside this system, first as founder of Code for America and then as President Obama's deputy chief technology officer, watching well-intentioned policy dissolve somewhere between the legislation and the lived experience of the people it was meant to help. Her argument is not that government needs more money or newer software. The problem runs deeper. An industrial-era culture still shapes how government works, with policymakers setting broad goals from a distance and leaving implementation as an afterthought. That gap between intent and outcome is where things fall apart, whether the task is delivering pandemic relief, building clean energy infrastructure, or defending against digital threats. Pahlka shows what a different approach looks like, one grounded in the details of how services are actually built and used. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2023 and highlighted by Ezra Klein in The New York Times, this book gives readers a clear-eyed account of what is broken and a practical framework for fixing it.
Genres: business, american, non-fiction, technology, 21st-century, government
Vibes: analytical, hopeful, practical, thought-provoking, urgent
Tropes: insider-perspective, problem-solution-framework, systems-thinking
Setting: United States, America
Period: 21st century, Obama administration
336 pages · Paperback · Metropolitan Books