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As former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Jen Pahlka helped to create the U.S. Digital Service (USDS). Today, the USDS houses Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), hell-bent on quick, disruptive change. Pahlka shares why the motivation behind Musks disruption of the status quo isnt necessarily wrong, arguing that we must clear the sludge out of government processes to finally create the conditions for substantive change. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. When we last spoke, it was in the early days of the pandemic to talk about a new nonprofit that paired volunteer tech pros with struggling government agencies. It was called U.S. Digital Response, modeled in part on the U.S. Digital Service, which you helped set up inside the White House. Now, the U.S. Digital Service has been renamed the U.S. DOGE Service, housing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. When and how did you first learn that USDS was going to change into something else? I found out the way everyone else did, which was the night of inauguration, right? Those EOs started hitting, and the fact that it had actually been renamed the U.S. DOGE Service. It shouldn’t have been a shock. Do you take it personally? I mean, it was a lot of work that you put into creating the U.S. Digital Service. I mean, you can’t take anything personally. I mean, it’s something of an honor that someone with a lot of power sees a thing that you had a hand in building and says, This is the thing that I’m going to use for my agenda. I think that they were very smart about it: There is great tech talent in the U.S. Digital Servicenow the U.S. DOGE Service. It has the hiring authorities that they needed. They could bring Elon and his special government employees and he didn’t have to divest from all his investments. But it hasn’t been necessarily a pleasant experience for folks in USDS, who on the one hand have really been waiting for somebody to give them more oomph and speed up the transformation that they’ve been trying to make for a long time. These new folks come in and they’ve had very brief conversations with the team and then sort of let them go back to their work so far. We’ll see how it goes. And it just means that the USDS is just associated with things like stopping payments to USAID, which is really not at all what USDS is about. When we first talked about USDS, as I recall, there were a lot of rules about what the administration could and couldn’t do. And you took a lot of care in trying to navigate that. In hindsight, were folks too beholden to those rules? Like that they were rules and not laws? I mean, the Trump administration certainly acts as if it’s unencumbered. They sure do. USDS has been able to do some great stuff. You know, they were part of the Direct File launch last year, which was hugely successful. They did online passport renewals recently. I think that whatever you’re doing, whether it’s setting up something like USDS or trying to get Direct File working for low-income Americans, there are a lot of rules. The right way to do it is to come in with a very bold, ambitious, curious agenda and say like, but this is the right thing to do for the American public, right? And these rules seem to be stopping us. Let’s ask, “Is this really a law? Is it a policy? Is it a regulation? Is it a memo?” And figure out how you might change it legally, so that you can serve the public better. And that’s hard. It’s really hard because people will just say it’s illegal. And you have to distinguish, is it something that . . . so this manager over here could change just because it’s just a memo that his predecessor wrote and it can be rewritten? Or do we have to do notice-and-comment rulemaking and actually go through the regulatory process and change it? Or do we have to go back to Congress, right? And that’s the work. That’s the work that needs to happen. And it needed to be happening at a far faster pace than it had. People will say, well, now it’s happening at a faster pace. Yes, if you don’t count the fact that sometimes they’re just ignoring the law entirely, right? You recently wrote an opinion column for The New York Times about how you align with some of the motivations that Musk and Trump express for more efficient government. You talked about, I’m quoting here, “the layers of process and procedure that encrust so much of government operations.” It’s strong words. Yes, I think what I said about motivations was that their motivations seem to be very different from mine. . . . Stopping payments that Congress authorized or firing as much of the workforce as you can indiscriminately seems to be driven by maybe a different motivation. What I think we have in common is the tactics of bringing in talent, having a little less patience with the status quo. I think we should have had less patience with the status quo for the past, say, 20 years. And maybe we would have been able to avoid this irresponsible kind of transformation that seems to be going on right now. In the article, you called your goal “de-proceduralization.” That’s a long word. Can you explain what you mean by that? To define de-proceduralization a little bit . . . I mean, during the pandemic, you know, last time I saw you, we had this crisis in unemployment insurance. All of the state’s labor commissioners got called up in front of their legislatures and yelled at for the backlogs that they’d accumulated. One of them was very smart: Rob Asaro-Angelo. He’s the commissioner of labor for the state of New Jersey. When he gets called up, he brings boxes and boxes of paper and puts them on the table as he’s being yelled at. And they are labeled 7,119 pages of active regulations that govern UI in the state of New Jersey. And he just keeps pointing at the pages and saying, you want a system that can operate at very low levels during times of high employment, and then scale apparently now to 10, even in some cases 15 times the number of claims on a dime. . . . You have to have a simpler system for it to be able to scale. And who created all of those regulations that have made this system so fragile, so complex, and so non-scalable and non-resilient? Well, the state legislature, the federal department of labor, courts. . . . The labor commissioner himself can’t do anything about that. But it does make it very hard to keep trust and faith with the American public when you can’t deliver because you̵re drowning in regulations which then drive great volumes of procedure and process that mean you can’t act quickly and you can’t act in a way that people expect. We have a world that is moving really fast and it seems like government just doesn’t have the capacity to move at that pace. And I guess what you’re saying is it’s not that the people within government don’t have that capacity necessarily. It’s that there’s so many rules and so many hoops to jump through that you just can’t move at that speed. Right. And I think one of the things that Elon seems to be recognizing in real time is that the people that he said such horrible things about before he got into government are the people who most want those regulations changed. So many public servants just want to do their jobs, they just want to serve the public, and they know that they’re really constrained by these huge volumes of procedure, regulation, policy, and law.
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E-Commerce
The 2025 tax season is in full swing, and the number one question most people have on their minds after filing their return is, Wheres my tax refund? Thankfully, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) offers a quick and easy online tool to help you check the status of your tax refund. Heres what you need to know about the tool as well as how long it may take to receive your refund. Check your tax refund status with the IRSs Where’s My Refund? tool If youre anxious about where your refund is, theres good news: you can check its status in just a few seconds using the Where’s My Refund? tool from the IRS. Checking your refund status is pretty easy. Heres how: Go to the IRSs Where’s My Refund? tool at www.irs.gov/wheres-my-refund. Click the Check your refund button. On the refund status page, enter your Social Security Number. Next, select the tax year you are inquiring about. Now, select your filing status for the tax year you selected in the step above. Finally, enter the exact whole dollar amount of the refund you are expecting. Click the Submit button. The IRS says the tool will show you one of three results: Return Received means the agency has received your tax return and it is still processing it. Refund Approved means your refund has been approved. You will also see a date that the IRS expects to issue it by. Refund Sent means the IRS has already issued your refund. How long until I get my IRS tax refund? After receiving word that the IRS has issued your tax refund, the next question most people want answered is, When will I receive my tax refund? According to tax firm Jackson Hewitts Chief Tax Information Officer, Mark Steber, that depends on the method by which your refund is being delivered. If your refund is being delivered by direct deposit to your bank account, you should receive it in your account between 2 to 5 business days after the treasury issues the payment. If your refund is being delivered by paper check, it should be delivered to the address on the check within about 5 to 7 business days. But as Jackson Hewitts Steber points out, the IRS cannot legally send the payments for some refunds out yet. Thats because of a 2015 law known as the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act. The law stipulates that if the taxpayer who files the return claims the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), the IRS must hold the refund until after February 14. The delay is designed to help the IRS detect and prevent tax return fraud. So, even if you filed your return on the first day of this tax season, if you have claimed either one of those credits, your refund will not have been sent yet. For these people, the IRS says its Where’s My Refund? tool should show an updated status by February 22. The agency further explains that it expects most EITC/ACTC related refunds to be available in taxpayer bank accounts or on debit cards by March 3 if they chose direct deposit and there are no other issues with their tax return.
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E-Commerce
Literate in tone, far-reaching in scope, and witty to its bones, The New Yorker brought a newand much-neededsophistication to American journalism when it launched 100 years ago this month. As I researched the history of U.S. journalism for my book Covering America, I became fascinated by the magazines origin story and the story of its founder, Harold Ross. In a business full of characters, Ross fit right in. He never graduated from high school. With a gap-toothed smile and bristle-brush hair, he was frequently divorced and plagued by ulcers. Ross devoted his adult life to one cause: The New Yorker magazine. For the literati, by the literati Born in 1892 in Aspen, Colorado, Ross worked out west as a reporter while still a teenager. When the U.S. entered World War I, Ross enlisted. He was sent to southern France, where he quickly deserted from his Army regiment and made his way to Paris, carrying his portable Corona typewriter. He joined up with the brand-new newspaper for soldiers, Stars and Stripes, which was so desperate for anybody with training that Ross was taken on with no questions asked, even though the paper was an official Army operation. In Paris, Ross met a number of writers, including Jane Grant, who had been the first woman to work as a news reporter at The New York Times. She eventually became the first of Rosss three wives. Harold Ross and Jane Grant in 1926. [Photo: University of Oregon Libraries] After the armistice, Ross headed to New York City and never really left. There, he started meeting other writers, and he soon joined a clique of critics, dramatists, and wits who gathered at the Round Table in the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan. Over long and liquid lunches, Ross rubbed shoulders and wisecracked with some of the brightest lights in New Yorks literary chandelier. The Round Table also spawned a floating poker game that involved Ross and his eventual financial backer, Raoul Fleischmann, of the famous yeast-making family. In the mid-1920s, Ross decided to launch a weekly metropolitan magazine. He could see that the magazine business was booming, but he had no intention of copying anything that already existed. He wanted to publish a magazine that spoke directly to him and his friendsyoung city dwellers whod spent time in Europe and were bored by the platitudes and predictable features found in most American periodicals. First, though, Ross had to come up with a business plan. The kind of smart-set readers Ross wanted were also desirable to Manhattans high-end retailers, so they got on board and expressed interest in buying ads. On that basis, Rosss poker partner Fleischmann was willing to stake him $25,000 to startroughly $450,000 in todays dollars. Ross goes all in In the fall of 1924, using an office owned by Fleischmanns family at 25 West 45th St., Ross got to work on the prospectus for his magazine: The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk. The magazine, he famously added, is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. In other words, The New Yorker was not going to respond to the news cycle, and it was not going to pander to middle America. Rosss only criterion would be whether a story was interestingwith Ross the arbiter of what counted as interesting. He was putting all his chips on the long-shot idea that there were enough people who shared his interestsor could discover that they didto support a glossy, cheeky, witty weekly. Ross almost failed. The cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, dated Feb. 21, 1925, carried no portraits of potentates or tycoons, no headlines, no come-ons. Instead, it featured a watercolor by Rosss artist friend Rea Irvin of a dandified figure staring intently through a monocle atof all things!a butterfly. That image, nicknamed Eustace Tilly, became the magazines unofficial emblem. #OTD in 1925Eustace Tilley on the very first issueCover of The New Yorker, February 21, 1925Rea Irvin#TheNewYorkerCover #ReaIrvin #EustaceTilley pic.twitter.com/SaeEZvBILO— Ron Lacy (@LRonLacy) February 21, 2024 A magazine finds its footing Inside that first edition, a reader would find a buffet of jokes and short poems. There was a profile, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and a few ads. It was not terribly impressive, feeling quite patched together, and at first the magazine struggled. When The New Yorker was just a few months old, Ross almost even lost it entirely one night in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Bayard Swope. Ross didnt make it home until noon the next day and, when he woke, his wife found IOUs in his pockets amounting to nearly $30,000. Fleischmann, who had been at the card game but left at a decent hour, was furious. Somehow, Ross persuaded Fleischmann to pay off some of his debt and let Ross work off the rest. Just in time, The New Yorker began gaining readers, and more advertisers soon followed. Ross eventually settled up with his financial angel. A big part of the magazines success was Rosss genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices. One of the founding editors key early finds was Katharine S. Angell, who became the magazines first fiction editor and a reliable reservoir of good sense. In 1926, Ross brought James Thurber and E.B. White aboard, and they performed a variety of chores: writing casuals, which were short satirical essays, cartooning, creating captions for others drawings, reporting Talk of the Town pieces, and offering commentary. Portrait of E.B. White at work for The New Yorker Magazine circa 1955. [Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images] As The New Yorker found its footing, the writers and editors began perfecting some of its trademark features: the deep profile, ideally written about someone who was not strictly in the news but who deserved to be better known; long, deeply reported, nonfiction narratives; short stories and poetry; and, of course, the single-panel cartoons and the humor sketches. Intensely curious and obsessively correct in matters grammatical, Ross would go to any length to ensure accuracy. Writers got their drafts back from Ross covered in penciled queries demanding dates, sources, and endless fact-checking. One trademark Ross query was Who he? During the 1930s, while the country was suffering through a relentless economic depression, The New Yorker was sometimes faulted for blithely ignoring the seriousness of the nations problems. In the pages of The New Yorker, life was almost always amusing, attractive, and fun. The New Yorker really came into its own, both financially and editorially, during World War II. It finally found its voice, one that was curious, international, searching and, ultimately, quite serious. Ross also discovered still more writers, such as A.J. Liebling, Mollie Panter-Downes, and John Hersey, who was raided from Henry Luces Time magazine. Together, they produced some of the best writing of the war, most notably Herseys landmark reporting on the use of the first atomic bomb in warfare. A crown jewel of journalism Over the past century, The New Yorker had a profound impact on American journalism. For one thing, Ross created conditions for distinctive voices to be heard. For another, The New Yorker provided encouragement and an outlet for nonacademic authority to flourish; it was a place where all those serious amateurs could write about the Dead Sea Scrolls or geology or medicine or nuclear war with no credentials other than their own ability to observe closely, think clearly and put together a good sentence. Finally, Ross must be credited with expanding the scope of journalism far beyond standard categories of crime and courts, politics, and sports. In the pages of The New Yorker, readers almost never found the same content that theyd come across in other newspapers and magazines. Instead, readers of The New Yorker might find just about anything else. Christopher B. Daly is a professor emeritus of journalism at Boston University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
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