An analysis showing that a proposed plan to shift some cost of SNAP benefits to states could push nearly 900,000 additional people into poverty during a recession.
This blog discusses how the “Big Beautiful Bill” (H.R. 1) contains provisions that undermine SNAP and warns that states will be burdened by its fiscal and administrative impact.
This FormFest profile spotlights the New Jersey State Office of Innovation’s Feedback Widget team, which collects resident input across state websites to improve services and empower agencies to act on real-time feedback.
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.
The Technology Transformation Service at GSA recently created a new Public Benefits Studio to focus on fostering a more cohesive, coordinated experience for the public, across programs.
Government agencies adopting generative AI tools seems inevitable at this point. But there is more than one possible future for how agencies use generative AI to simplify complex government information.
This essay explains why the Center on Privacy & Technology has chosen to stop using terms like "artificial intelligence," "AI," and "machine learning," arguing that such language obscures human accountability and overstates the capabilities of these technologies.
This update highlights progress in improving federal customer experience (CX) following Executive Order 14058, showcasing service enhancements across agencies.
Building modular, open-source, human-centered software is necessary to create equitable government services fit for the digital age. Nava emphasizes addressing large scale digital service challenges by building and releasing small, modular software components that are loosely-coupled by well-defined APIs. This enables agencies to quickly and conistently deliver services that help people immediately, whilst also building a flexible foundation for long-term technical evolution.
