That doesn’t mean that what it’s working on is at all useful.
Listened to this Monday.
My response to Reason was as follows:
I absolutely appreciate the mention of USDS and what Musk wants to do with it.
One of my friends from college worked for USDS’s predecessor, 18F, after he’d decided he didn’t want to go back to Google following an extraordinary amount of work on what’d become G+.
One of the movers behind USDS is Jennifer Pahlka. She wrote a pretty good book about what she did there. Her Substack is “Eating Policy.
Consuming that recently has been frustrating. She, and the sort of people who work at USDS, believe government’s inability to deliver services or fix problems is government service delivery problems.
I worry that Elon thinks that that’s the problem, too. (Jennifer also is big on thinking that government can solve the coming climate apocalypse…)
I mentioned my college friend who worked there; I was the awkward guy on campus campaigning for Harry Browne.
Government Doesn’t Work.
Elon’s reinforces that with his space efforts. So, too, has Space Cowboy Jeff (Bezos).
Agree with Vivek’s concerns about debt and spending, but I’m not sure, like SS/Medicare, that anybody has any real idea what to do about it.
A significant part of what 18F/USDS was doing was in reaction to the failed rollout of healthcare.gov.
The botched rollout of healthcare.gov was really just a point of mild interest when it was going on.
I’m not going to fully revisit my travails with healthcare from 2013-2017ish, but I will say that the big issues with healthcare.gov was that the Exchange plans I paid for with after-tax dollars were very expensive, and would have to be better to suck.
The private plan I had in 2014 was okay, but couldn’t be sold for 2014. The most-expensive Exchange plant we had for 2015, and it would have had to improve to suck. None of the specialists I’d been seeing accepted it, with a few asking if it was a Medicaid plan. Uh, no, I’m paying something like $750/mo. for this.
I do credit Biogen in helping me find plans for 2015-2017 that covered a lot of my care, but it didn’t change the fact that I was still paying north of $500/mo for myself and my undergrad wife. After about my fourth Tysabri dose of year, I’d met all my deductibles for the year.
But I was still paying something north of $500/mo..
So, while the rollout for healthcare.gov wasn’t done well, the fact that the service it was providing sucked doesn’t change.
I don’t know that there’s a good way to fix any of that.
Part of what they were discussing during the Reason show was that there’s a lot of emphasis on really extending work from USDS, but it doesn’t change the fact that government just doesn’t work. You can do an incredible amount of work expanding service delivery, but if the service isn’t good, does it matter?