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.
This update highlights progress in improving federal customer experience (CX) following Executive Order 14058, showcasing service enhancements across agencies.
18F describes modular contracting, the process of breaking up large, custom software procurements into a small constellation of smaller contracts. Modular procurement requires agile, product thinking, user-centered design, DevSecOps, and loosely-coupled architecture.
Code for America explores the systems at play and the individuals experience of participants in WIC. By investigating overall quantitative trends in coverage, redemption, and retention rates, they use the data as a guide to build out a qualitative research plan that explains why such trends are occurring.
Better Rules utilizes multidisciplinary teams that include people skilled in policy, legal, business rules, programming, and service design working together in an iterative fashion to develop rules. Several outputs are produced using this approach, each offering an opportunity that can be fed back into that iterative process and re-used to solve other issues.
In this blog post, we’ve detailed some of the steps we take to help capture the best data possible when conducting interviews. This post is intended as a guide for people who need to conduct user interviews and for people simply curious about how we work.
This blog introduces the GSA’s Public Benefits Studio, which partnered with agencies to build shared tools—starting with a multi-channel notifications service—to improve coordination and access across federal public benefits programs.
This article highlights how state unemployment insurance (UI) agencies are leveraging data to modernize systems and enhance access for unemployed workers.
This profile on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Open Source Program Office, the first of its kind in the federal government, showcasing how it advances transparency, collaboration, and innovation across agencies through open source software.
