This report examines how the U.S. federal government can enhance the efficiency and equity of benefit delivery by simplifying eligibility rules and using a Rules as Code approach for digital systems.
The Benefit Cliffs Calculator helps case managers and public benefit recipients to prepare for benefit cliffs (i.e., declines in benefits due to an increase in earnings). It compares the net resources and benefits available to families under different employment scenarios.
Github repository for Policy Rules Database, which encodes up-to-date rules and provisions for all major federal and state public assistance programs, taxes, and tax credits.
Digitizing public benefits policy will make the biggest impact for administrators and Americans, but only if it happens at the highest level of government.
The DBN’s Rules as Code Community of Practice (RaC CoP) creates a shared learning and exchange space for people working on public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems — and specifically people tackling the issue of how policy becomes software code. The RaC CoP brings together cross-sector experts who share approaches, examples, and challenges. Participants are from state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academia, and private sector companies. We host recurring roundtable conversations and an email group for asynchronous updates, insights, and assistance.
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.
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.
This course from the European Commission aims to provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of Law as Code and its relationship to digital-ready policymaking.
