The US Digital response partnered with dozens of states, counties, and cities to support them in using and tracking CARES Act grants. This article presents six lessons learned from their work to help governments better assist residents, particularly small businesses and low-income communities.
This article describes the necessary factors for a public interest technology project to succeed, including leadership support, organizational and team support, proper scoping, time and resources, and a sustainability plan.
This article discusses the various benefits of publicly-funded open-source software. These benefits include fairness and transparency, economic stimulus, and support of the Federal Source Code Policy Agenda.
Overwhelming unemployment rates during the pandemic created significant demand for state-based unemployment benefits. As a result of the increased applications, states are also experiencing an overwhelming volume of calls to their call centers. U.S. Digital Response has been working with states to mitigate problems arising from heavy demand on call centers. This article describes tangible steps state governments can take to manage call volume.
County workers typically spend most of their time trying to get income information right during eligibility interviews. This article provides several recommendations for asking about income, accounting for cognitive biases, under-reporting, and complexities in reporting income.
Programs like Medicaid and SNAP are managed at the federal level, administered at the state level, and often executed at the local level. Because there are so many in-betweens, there is significant duplicated effort, demonstrating the need to simplify eligibility rules to facilitate easier implementation.
Though the rhetoric of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is ubiquitous when it comes to welfare programs, low-income households receive little relief from benefits programs. Most efforts to make public benefits systems more “efficient” actually just waste time and money in practice. They instead serve to stigmatize low-income families and chip away at the little assistance that remains available to them.
The inability to apply for Medicaid and SNAP in person during the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a new way of interacting with social service agencies through online application submission. States can facilitate this by making online applications and systems more accessible and allowing for telephonic signatures on benefits applications.
Code for America highlights the importance of recognizing the effects of intergenerational trauma on communities that have been systemically marginalized when conducting research.
Technology enables governments to engage in “pilot” projects to see where they are headed and course-correct along the way, as opposed to evaluating the results over the course of multiple years. Delivery-driven government utilizes technology and “pilot” projects to see institutions and processes through the eyes of users, allowing for more effective service delivery.
Code for America helped expand GetCalFresh (a service that guides Californians through the SNAP application process and helps government deliver food assistance to people in need) from a small pilot into a statewide service. They also recently concluded a similar pilot in Michigan along with Civilla and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
