Errors in administrative processes are costly and burdensome for clients but are understudied. Using U.S. Unemployment Insurance data, this study finds that while automation improves accuracy in simpler programs, it can increase errors in more complex ones.
This report presents new national survey data showing how benefits cliffs and asset limits negatively affect the economic mobility of low-wage workers in the U.S.
This academic paper examines how federal privacy laws restrict data collection needed for assessing racial disparities, creating a tradeoff between protecting individual privacy and enabling algorithmic fairness in government programs.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
This article explores how anticipatory logics—drawing from foresight, futures thinking, and design—are shaping the future of government by creating space for innovative policy approaches, public participation, and proactive governance.
This paper describes results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice.
CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
This research summary presents findings from a randomized controlled trial demonstrating how mRelief’s simplified SNAP application significantly increases application rates among eligible individuals.
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.
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.
This article examines the concept of "viral cash" and suggests that the future growth of basic income programs will depend on advocacy networks rather than traditional policy diffusion across jurisdictions.
