Making Government Work From Within

As we think about what a new reconstruction may look like, one of the major points of tension will be the rules and regulations that bind the actions of the government machinery. One the one hand, the rules cause friction in the gears that get things done. Procurement is slow. Hiring is slow. Policy changes are slow. It will be immensely frustrating to those coming in to fix the government to be told to be patient after so much damage has been done.

However, those rules are there for good reason. After all, hiring your buddy in a no-bid contract is how you get a reflecting pool full of algae. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is there to make sure the bidding process is fair and that the government doesn’t get swindled. The Authority to Operate (ATO) is there to make sure the government doesn’t get hacked or leak sensitive data. The rules around hiring are meant to ensure that government hiring is fair and that only qualified people get hired. For every rule that’s out there, there is likely a story where something bad happened and the government corrected for it. 

Throwing these rules into the wood chipper like DOGE has done causes harm while an effort to modernize these rules would take legislation and feels too slow. We have to strike a balance between moving carefully and fixing things. 

The key role for this will be bureaucracy hackers. Originally a term coined by civic technologist Andrew Greenway of the UK Government Digital Service, Greenway defines a bureaucracy hacker as “people who clear the path for digital service teams and ensure digital delivery teams offer the best possible services for users and avoid traps,” (Digital Transformation at Scale p. 69). 

In digital services like the United States Digital Service, the bureaucracy hacker's role is two-fold. The first is to be a subject matter expert on government rules and regulations to assist the digital service teams when they need procurement, budget, or to navigate the bureaucracy. The vast majority of the time, there is no actual hacking or rule-bending involved. On digital service teams, the work is being an explainer (No, you don’t need to go through the Paperwork Reduction Act to do user testing on a new website) and getting hands-on with the procurement process. They’re also helpful in challenging misconceptions on what the real policy is. A common question among bureaucracy hackers working through a problem is “Can you show me in the rules where it says that exactly?” 

A good example of this is technology procurement. Most government technology projects result in failure. 18F, an internal technology consulting firm under the General Services Administration produced guides on how to derisk procurement. This included the use of performance-based contracting, having an in-house product owner leading the project, and breaking down the contract into small chunks to avoid the trap of sunk costs. The legal risk of implementing the changes recommended by 18F was minimal. (After all, all the recommendations were already aligned with the FAR.) The key to bureaucracy hacking is to reduce friction while addressing the risk the regulation or policy was attempting to address. (Ignoring the rules outright doesn’t count.) By using authorities already available, this approach helped save the government millions of dollars without needing to adjust the FAR. Naturally, an organization that made the government more efficient was quickly cut by DOGE. 

The second aspect of bureaucracy hacking is to look for a legal and practical path to solving problems that the regulations were never meant to account for. An example of this is Project Rabbit, an effort to break the bottleneck of Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applications in the run-up to the evacuation of Afghanistan. 

The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 program was designed to provide a way for Afghans who had worked on behalf of the United States or the ISAF to come to the United States. The challenges with this program were rooted in the administrative burden for ASIV applicants being too high to be administered effectively. ASIV applicants must obtain a letter from their employer, a letter from their direct supervisor and a letter of recommendation in order to be considered for the program. Due to the rotations of military members, it’s difficult to locate a direct supervisor, particularly if time has passed since the applicant served. This documentation was necessary to prove the applicant had served at least one year of “good and faithful service”—a vague definition required for Chief of Mission (COM) approval. With COM approval, applicants could then apply for visas for themselves and their families to come to the U.S. 

In August 2021, the Defense Digital Service (DDS), a rapid response technology team within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, was asked to assist with breaking the bottleneck. This effort and the accompanying tool was named Project Rabbit. Working between agencies, DDS proposed a way of gathering data from employers,  matching them with ASIV applications, and using that information to enable the DoD to vouch for the applicant’s employment records. This bureaucracy hack significantly decreased the burden on applications and enabled the applicants to get COM approval. Project Rabbit began reaching out to employers three days before the Taliban reached Kabul. By the end of September, Project Rabbit had reviewed over 7,800 employment records and matched them to 3,400 pre-COM applicants helping move them through the process. 

Project Rabbit was a good example of an action that reduced friction while still addressing the concerns the rules were meant to mitigate. Project Rabbit’s scope only focused on moving an applicant past COM approval. Applicants still required an extensive background check before being approved to come to the United States. Additionally, Project Rabbit used the reason for termination as a proxy for ‘faithful service’ by removing any applicant that was terminated for misconduct or a security concern. To be fair, there was legal risk incurred by this plan, but balanced against the life or death consequences of failure, the legal risk was acceptable. The ideal state would have been to reform the ASIV program to reduce administrative burden before the withdrawal of American forces. Barring that, Project Rabbit was the next best thing. 

Too often, bureaucratic rules are written off as red tape that must be cut. Having rules in place prevents harm, corruption, and green reflecting pools. A better analogy would be to describe the rules as terrain that needs to be navigated safely. For those wanting to reconstruct an American government that works for the people, we should think about ways to both reduce administrative burden and to foster bold, creative thinking when we need to work past it. 

Featured image is from Government Digital Strategy, by Dafydd Vaughan