This brief highlights the complex journey that older adults experience when applying for and enrolling in SNAP, including the major barriers and solutions that improve access along the way.
In this report, the Digital Benefits Network shares learnings from the Rules as Code Community of Practice. Insights are grouped along core themes expressed by cross-sector practitioners, including complexity in policies, interest in sharing knowledge, tools, and code, the need for more training and technical assistance, and willingness to collaborate on an open standard for writing rules and developing a shared code library.
This issue brief illustrates the challenges that many older adults with low income face in gaining access to benefits online. It addresses digital literacy, access to broadband internet, and the increasing prevalence of connecting online to SNAP.
This book explores the current capabilities, future possibilities, and necessary governance for facial recognition technology. The report discusses legal, societal, and ethical implications of the technology, and recommends ways that federal agencies and others developing and deploying the technology can mitigate potential harms and enact more comprehensive safeguards.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
The DBN’s Rules as Code Community of Practice (RaC CoP) creates a shared learning and exchange space for people working on public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems — and specifically people tackling the issue of how policy becomes software code. The RaC CoP brings together cross-sector experts who share approaches, examples, and challenges. Participants are from state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academia, and private sector companies. We host recurring roundtable conversations and an email group for asynchronous updates, insights, and assistance.
To improve the .gov registrar, 18F and CISA created customer panels to gather feedback, opinions, and suggestions. Using a customer-centric approached enabled 18F and CISA to identify areas for improvement, build a product roadmap, and establish relationships with users.
Artificial intelligence promises exciting new opportunities for the government to make policy, deliver services and engage with residents. But government procurement practices need to adapt if we are to ensure that rapidly-evolving AI tools meet intended purposes, avoid bias, and minimize risks to people, organizations, and communities. This report lays out five distinct challenges related to procuring AI in government.
Safeguarding privacy and addressing algorithmic bias can pose an under-recognized trade-off. This brief documents tradeoffs by examining the U.S. government’s recent efforts to introduce government-wide equity assessments of federal programs. The authors propose a range of policy solutions that would enable agencies to navigate the privacy-bias trade-off.
In 2018 the Better Identity Coalition released a Policy Blueprint outlining five key initiatives that to solve the majority of America’s challenges in the digital identity space. This report from 2024 grades progress on each of the original Blueprint’s five key initiatives – as well as the 19 items that were contained in the “action plan” to support those initiatives.
