A recap of the two-day conference focused on charting the course to excellence in digital benefits delivery hosted at Georgetown University and online.
The RFI summary report consolidates submissions received from the open-source software community and details twelve activities that members of the OS3I plan—or have completed—in 2024-2025.
This post argues that for the types of large-scale, organized fraud attacks that many state benefits systems saw during the pandemic, solutions grounded in cybersecurity methods may be far more effective than creating or adopting automated systems.
This Code for America article discusses how tax filing can be a powerful tool for economic justice, highlighting efforts to make the tax system more accessible and equitable for low-income individuals.
Code for America describes its work building the P-EBT online application and the consulting it provided to 10 states regarding implementing the program in a quick, effective, and human-centered way. Despite herculean efforts among human services and education agencies to get P-EBT off the ground, there were a few key technological, operational, and logistical barriers that consistently got in the way and hampered a smooth rollout of the program across the country.
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.
