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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More from @donmoyn

14 Dec
Thread of threads on the new Biden EO to share some different perspectives 1/
My colleague @SebJilke who has been working directly with the federal government looking for these kinds of solutions 🧵2/
Dave from the civic tech community who has all kinds of expertise on SNAP and has been working on this issue for years 🧵3/
Read 11 tweets
14 Dec
.@AnnieLowrey's July piece is amazing (read it here: theatlantic.com/politics/archi…) and you can definitely see how it shaped the language of the new EO, but the Biden admin was already directing attention to administrative burdens as early as Feb donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-biden-ad…
Pleased my research w @pamela_herd had an impact, but the biggest credit goes to key federal government employees who have been thinking about user design issues and administrative burden for over a year. Without them the EO simply would not have happened.
Read 4 tweets
13 Dec
New executive order takes aim at administrative burdens. Have heard this was coming and looking forward to the text. If you are interested, this is part of the broader framework the Biden admin has been building: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-biden-ad…
More about the "Customer Experience and Service Delivery" Executive Order here.
Until now, a lot of the work to reduce burdens has been enabled by Biden's social equity EO. This new EO provides a second, and more durable basis for that work.
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
I don't know if this Executive Order will fix declining trust in government, but we do know that people remember bad experiences. Think of the EO as a permission/encouragement from the Biden admin to employees who want to government work better. washingtonpost.com/politics/biden…
Read 7 tweets
8 Dec
One of the big eye-openers for me in writing about administrative burdens is discovering the civic tech community. This is a great overview of the skills that they bring to the table in solving bureaucratic problems.
h/t @civilla @codeforamerica. nytimes.com/2021/12/08/us/…
There are tech horror stories to be sure, but this is a really nice example of how good tech interface can reduce psychological costs like stigma in administrative encounters. nytimes.com/2021/12/08/us/… Image
Its really nice to see great reporters like @JasonDeParle use their skills to explain this important but understudied aspect of how people interact with the state. Image
Read 5 tweets
8 Dec
This should be a bombshell story about political interference in research and teaching in Florida but it will likely get minimal attention beyond local coverage and concerned academics miamiherald.com/news/local/edu…
An investigative committee found clear evidence of chilling effects and a culture of fear at U Florida. But because political sponsors, and not students, are the ones who are silencing speech, the story doesn’t fit the woke narrative
You might recall coverage of professors who went public when they were told they could not participate in court cases involving the state about voting rights or COVID. Here, I explain why this is so dangerous. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/an-assault-o…
Read 9 tweets
7 Dec
New from me: The partisan Covid gap is worsening. Research using careful causal designs show that media messaging, in the form of Fox News, is leading Republicans to take the pandemic less seriously, resist vaccines, get sick and die. 1/
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/fox-news-is-…
Conservatives are more resistant to public health measures in general. We can see this in other countries. But the left-right gap is two-to-four times as large in the US as it is in other countries according to this Pew survey. 2/
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021…
As vaccines have become more easily accessible, Republicans have become the largest group holdout group. As a result, deaths in the Trumpiest parts of the US are more than 5 times higher than in the bluest counties (h/t @charles_gaba) 3/
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/fox-news-is-…
Read 8 tweets

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