This brief analyzes the current state of federal and state government communication around benefits eligibility rules and policy and how these documents are being tracked and adapted into code by external organizations. This work includes comparisons between coded examples of policy and potential options for standardizing code based on established and emerging data standards, tools, and frameworks.
While much has been written on digital government as a general trend, this working paper instead examines how civic tech is changing American government, focusing on an influential constellation of actors who shape the understanding and implementation of technological opportunities.
This study examines how bureaucratic interactions differ among public assistance programs—WIC, SNAP, and Medicaid—highlighting variations in participant experiences and the psychological costs associated with each.
Algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs) are an emergent form of accountability for organizations that build and deploy automated decision-support systems. This academic paper explores how to co-construct impacts that closely reflects harms, and emphasizes the need for input of various types of expertise and affected communities.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
This resource is a research paper examining the role of the public safety net in insuring job losers against income loss, analyzing which government programs provide financial support and how benefits vary based on pre-job loss income levels.
This study investigates how administrative burdens influence differential receipt of income transfers after a family member loses a job, looking at Unemployment Insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Medicaid and SNAP have reduced racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare access and food security, but some administrative and eligibility policies continue to create inequitable barriers.
This paper introduces a framework for algorithmic auditing that supports artificial intelligence system development end-to-end, to be applied throughout the internal organization development lifecycle.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
This article examines how administrative burdens in U.S. social safety net programs have changed over the past 30 years, showing that while average burdens have declined, inequality in who faces these burdens has grown.
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Automated decision systems (ADS) are increasingly used in government decision-making but lack clear definitions, oversight, and accountability mechanisms.
