Biden just signed a new executive order aimed at improving people's experience of government. It includes a lot of significant changes for different agencies and programs.
@pamela_herd and I break it all down. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/understandin…
There are some big themes, and some specific policy changes. The most obvious starting point is that this is the most substantive governmentwide effort that is centrally focused on administrative burdens for members of the public. 2/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/understandin…
The EO green lights a wide array of research that agencies should pursue to better understand people's experience of government.
Evidence-based and people-centered is a good formula for governing. 3/
There have been multiple federal customer service efforts at least since the Clinton administration. The new EO builds on those but is different in some important ways. It is more focused on reaching those who don't receive help, and on searching for root causes to burdens. 4/
The customer experience EO creates some specific governmentwide routines where agencies coordinate with OMB to identify areas for improvement. The model for this looks like federal performance reporting, which IMO, works pretty well. 5/
A key insight from our research, and the civic tech community, is that improving the experience of government requires not just better technology but also data-sharing, which is an area the US government lags in. Biden's EO addresses this. 6/
The Biden EO also makes 36 specific and demanding asks of 17 agencies to remove administrative burdens. Won't go through all of them, but some of them very much build on existing research about how to help people. Take USDA, SNAP and WIC. 7/
What happens next? Its implementation time. Some agencies will take this EO and run with it, some might be laggards. Here are some key factors that will shape implementation, but the long-run goal has to be to institutionalize these citizen-focused values into govt culture. 8/
Shout out to the policy wonks, civic tech folks, and federal employees who have been pushing these ideas (some for years) and to journalists who explained why they matter: @mattyglesias @nataliesurely @emilymbadger @AnnieLowrey @crampell @sangerkatz
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