Announcing the Recoding America Fund

A bipartisan reckoning with the administrative state

I haven’t been writing much lately. But I haven’t been slacking. Some colleagues and I have been working on a new effort I want to tell you about today.

If you’ve followed my work, you know that I spent about ten years working on what was first government technology, and then became about government service delivery, and ultimately became just about reforming government. Each shift took me upstream of the problem I’d been previously focused on, and taken together, they revealed two fundamental challenges. The first was that it is incredibly difficult to shift how government builds and buys technology without shifting the other aspects of its operating model. The second was that the conditions for transformational change were fundamentally not there. A lot of good and valuable change has happened over the past decade and a half, but reform efforts had to swim upstream, leaving most of government still wildly over-proceduralized, expensive, and ultimately struggling to achieve the goals it sets – and getting in the way of worthy aspirations of non-government actors in the private and non-profit sectors. The time was not right for those big, systemic changes to take root.

Today, I believe it is. Not only are we facing shocks from all sides — budget and workforce cuts at all levels of government (most visible in the federal government but also for states, counties and cities), the impact of AI adoption in both the public and private sectors, DOGE moving the Overton window for the speed and scale of change — we are also finally reckoning with the fact that the government we have today is no longer fit to the work we need it to do, and too often it’s an active impediment to that work getting done. Whether you like it or not, disruption is here. The job now is to shape that disruption in the public interest.

That’s why we’re launching the Recoding America Fund. It’s a pooled philanthropic effort that will raise and deploy at least $120 million over the course of the next six years. We’ll build off the work of so many over the past decades who’ve seen this problem from a variety of angles: the Congressional modernization field, good government groups, the civic tech community, think tanks who see the futility of their policy recommendations when they land in a system that can’t faithfully execute them, private sector leaders and contractors who have had to grapple with unnecessary government bloat, and others. But while this work will leverage the powerful insights so many have gained from grappling with a system in disrepair, it is also discontinuous with the past in three ways. First, the frame is no longer transparency or accountability or modernization, but rather state capacity – simply, the ability of our government to achieve its policy goals. Second, we seek to build a diverse but coherent field around that frame, one in which advocates can achieve more collectively than each could alone, while maintaining their own perspective and tending to their own politics. And lastly, we are collectively committed to leveraging this moment of disruption to achieve what’s needed for the future of our country, not what’s comfortable or convenient.

To quote my mentor Mike Bracken, our task isn’t complicated, it’s just hard. We need to update the operating model of government. We inherited a system built in the industrial era to win a world war and recover from an economic depression, and then lawyered up starting in the sixties to correct for abuses of power. We still have to be ready for conflict, build an economy that works for everyone, and protect our most vulnerable, but the world around us has changed. We dealt with the advent of the information age by buying some computers, but left many processes paper-based. In the Internet era, we put up some websites, but retained the basic assumptions of industrial era management. Now we are hurtling into the AI era with an aging operating model onto which we’ve tacked some trappings of modernity. Today, we need to be clear-eyed about the failures of the past and leapfrog our operating model into one fit not for the past decade, but for the next one.

We have a view on how to do this. If you want a government that can achieve its policy goals, it must be capable of four key things:

• It must be able to attract, select, develop, retain, and manage the right people, which means we need civil service systems at all levels fit for that purpose. Our civil service systems run the gamut from merely outdated to fundamentally unfit for this critical work.

• It must ask those people to do the right work, which means reducing the procedural bloat that keeps most civil servants from focusing on the substantive outcomes the public needs and expects.

• It must have purpose-fit systems, which means changing how we build and buy technology so it can adapt to changing needs and drive effective operations.

• And it must employ test-and-learn frameworks, which means being able to act on what we learn as we pursue policy goals rather than stay locked into decades-long plans even as we can see they are not working. This also means constructing feedback loops between the makers of law and policy and those who implement them or experience their consequences, intended and unintended.

Just as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tell us that you can’t have self-fullfilment if you’re not fed, housed, and clothed, we must address the basic needs on which all policy outcomes depend. The Recoding America Fund will resource and coordinate efforts to update each of these four elements of government’s operating model to be fit for purpose.

Fit-for-purpose means fit for not just today, but for tomorrow, and highly adaptable in a fast-changing world. As my colleagues and I have been developing this fund, I’ve had to check myself from time to time as I noticed my own desire to take another swing at the problems that have vexed me over the course of my career. Those problems remain, but the field they play out on is changing, and it will do us no good to fight last decade’s battles. The fight to build and buy purpose-fit digital infrastructure, for instance, must recognize that AI changes not only the tools government can use but also the world it must respond to, raising the expectations of the public, increasing the sophistication of bad actors, and requiring even faster adaptation to changing needs. (For more on this, I recommend Dan Munz’s The end of civic tech’s interface era and The Agentic State, by Luukas Ilves and others.) AI will also change the nature of the work that government must do, and therefore the needs that civil service systems must meet. We must be vigilant about skating to where the puck will be, so to speak. Success can’t be dragging government boldly into the 2010s.

We embrace the political realignment that has made state capacity not only a prime time issue, but a common cause for what might in the past have seemed strange bedfellows. We are committed to working not only across the aisle but with leaders who have a wide diversity of ideologies that recognize the importance of this work and no longer tolerate the status quo.

Our excellent team reflects that diversity. We have veterans of Republican Congressional offices and the House Oversight Committee on our team, including Lauren Lombardo and Laurent Crenshaw, as well as former Administration and Hill officials from the Democratic side, including Victoria Houed, who leads the team’s operations. And we have plenty of help from civil servants as well as thought leaders on issues of state capacity, including Santi Ruiz, of Statecraft fame, who serves on our board. Statecraft has fast become a mandatory listen for anyone interested in the issues the Fund will seek to tackle. In addition to me and Santi, Charlie Anderson, the EVP for Infrastructure at Arnold Ventures, and Galen Hines-Pierce, an independent researcher and philanthropist focused on democratic modernization and innovation, round out our board. Galen and Charlie have been thought partners for more than a year in developing this fund and the work, and Arnold Ventures has seeded a lot of the early progress upon which the Recoding America Fund will be building.

We are fortunate to have Robert Gordon leading our state-level work, which he has been developing and already executing since the beginning of this year. Robert has held senior roles in New York City, for the State of Michigan (as the Director of the Department of Health and Human Services), and at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Management and Budget and the White House Domestic Policy Council. He has also spent time in the private sector at the College Board and in academia. States of every political shade need change; if they achieve it, they can not only help their residents, but also provide models that scale nationwide. We’re lucky Robert will continue leading and growing our work to support them.

And as we launch, I’m thrilled to welcome our newest team member, Anne Healy, who is joining us as CEO after a rigorous and expansive search. Anne comes to us most recently from USAID where she held a groundbreaking non-political position as director of the Office of the Chief Economist. (For more about this office, I recommend Santi’s excellent interview with Anne’s former boss, Dean Karlan, on Statecraft. As he talks about moving from evaluations based on accountability to those based on impact, you’ll recognize some of the principles that drive our work.) Anne previously led AID’s Development Innovation Ventures and has held key roles at J-PAL, Evidence Action, and the State Department. Anne is passionate about the need to reform the administrative state, and we’re delighted to have her leadership on this critical effort.

We’re also delighted to have the support of some of today’s most forward-thinking philanthropists, who have helped us achieve one-third of our fundraising goal thus far. (We are still fundraising, and welcome support!) Arnold Ventures, founded by Laura and John Arnold and led by President and CEO Kelli Rhee, is anchoring the fund, and we are inspired by their novel thinking and dogged persistence on so many critical issues. Those characteristics also describe Seemay Chou and Jed McCaleb, who are major contributors through the Astera Institute. They fund transformative science, but support Recoding America because they believe that whatever your policy goals, the road to scale runs through government. The Packard Foundation, Alta Futures, RMR Foundation, Minerva Fund, Steve Newman, and John Wolthuis are also supporting, with several others in the process of finalizing their commitments, including the Hewlett Foundation and other major donors. We are grateful to all our donors for recognizing this critical unmet need.

This fund exists because a small set of people who have been doing the work saw the need to connect and supercharge their efforts with others. When Kumar Garg, Parth Ahya, and Anjali Fernandez at Renaissance Philanthropy originally ganged up on me at a conference, convinced that a fund was needed, I was staunchly opposed. But Daniel Correa at the Federation of American Scientists, Ben Bain at the Niskanen Center, and Charlie Anderson at Arnold Ventures brought me around. It turns out that Galen Hines-Pierce, Marci Harris at POPVOX Foundation, Zach Graves at the Foundation for American Innovation, and Travis Moore at Tech Congress were thinking along the same lines, and we joined forces. This group, as well as Jenny Mattingley at the Partnership for Public Service and Alec Stapp and Arnab Datta at the Institute for Progress, and a few others have served as the core of our braintrust, informing the strategy and sketching the outlines of both a new operating model for government and the path to get there. As we grow, we’ll be tapping a wider range of partners and grantees.

And we’ve assembled an impressive board of advisors to bring a diversity of perspectives to our strategy. Together they bring experience from the state and federal levels, from the executive and legislative branches, from a birds eye view and the nitty gritty details of implementation, and of course, from the left, right, and center.

• Ben Buchanan, Dmitri Alperovitch Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and former White House Special Advisor on AI

• Dan Ho, Professor, Stanford University; Director, Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab); and Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)

• Daniel Stid, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

• Dean Ball, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, and former Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology

• G.T. Bynum, Vice President of Community & Government Affairs at Saint Francis Health System and former mayor of Tulsa, OK

• Jeanne Lambrew, Director of Health Care Reform and Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation and former commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services

• Judge Glock, Director of Research and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

• Marc Dunkelman, Senior Fellow, Searchlight Institute; Fellow at Brown University’s Watson School for International and Public Affairs; and author of Why Nothing Works

• Marina Nitze, Director, Child Welfare Playbook and co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy and Crisis Engineering

• Marshall Kosloff, Host of The Realignment and Arsenal of Democracy Podcasts, Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, Foundation for American Innovation, and the Hudson Institute

• Nicholas Bagley, Professor of Law at University of Michigan and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center

• Reeve Bull, Director of Virginia Office of Regulatory Management

• Solitaire Carroll, former Acting Director of Veterans Experience Services Portfolio at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, now writing on digital government for Niskanen Center

• Stefanie Sanford, Chair, Institute for Citizens & Scholars and President of Civic Ventures at Alithi Consulting

• Zachary Liscow, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, former Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget at the White House

We know this won’t be easy. Updating government’s operating model means confronting decades of accumulated procedures, outdated systems, and entrenched interests. But the convergence of forces we’re seeing today—technological disruption, fiscal pressures, and political realignment—has created an opportunity for change that we must take. Whether your priority is national security, economic and technological dynamism, protecting the vulnerable, or simply getting basic services to work, none of it is possible without a government capable of executing on its goals. The time for incremental fixes has passed. Let’s build the government our future demands.

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