Topic: Research
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Exploring a new way to make eligibility rules easier to implement
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.
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Shared Values/Conflicting Logics: Working Around E-Government Systems
This paper describes results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice.
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Benefits Cliffs Coaching with the Atlanta Fed’s CLIFF Tools: Implementation Evaluation of the National Pilot
The Atlanta Fed’s CLIFF tools provide greater transparency to workers about potential public assistance losses when their earnings increase. We find three broad themes in organization-level implementation of the CLIFF tools: identifying the tar- get population of users; integrating the tool into existing operations; and integrating the tool into coaching sessions.
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AI-Powered Rules as Code: Experiments with Public Benefits Policy
This report documents four experiments exploring if AI can be used to expedite the translation of SNAP and Medicaid policies into software code for implementation in public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems under a Rules as Code approach.
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Helping People with Low Incomes Navigate Benefit Cliffs: Lessons Learned Deploying a Marginal Tax Rate Calculator
This report details findings and lessons from a project to develop a calculator to help people anticipate how a change in earnings from employment would affect their net income and information on their estimated effective marginal tax rate.
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Exposing Error in Poverty Management Technology: A Method for Auditing Government Benefits Screening Tools
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
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Applying Rules as Code to the Social Safety Net
This short report outlines the promise and potential of digitizing benefits eligibility policy.
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Envisioning a Federal Rules as Code Approach to Public Benefits Eligibility
Digitizing public benefits policy will make the biggest impact for administrators and Americans, but only if it happens at the highest level of government.
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Digital Distortions and Interpretive Choices: A Cartographic Perspective on Encoding Regulation
This article analyses ‘digital distortions’ in Rules as Code, which refer to disconnects between regulation and code that arise from interpretive choices in the encoding process.
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Cracking the code: Rulemaking for humans and machines
The OECD report explores the concept of "Rules as Code" (RaC), proposing a transformation in government rulemaking by developing machine-consumable regulations alongside human-readable versions.
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Benefit Eligibility Rules as Code: Reducing the Gap Between Policy and Service Delivery for the Safety Net
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.
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AI-Driven Statutory Reasoning via Software Engineering Methods
This article explores how legal documents can be treated like software programs, using methods like software testing and mutation analysis to enhance AI-driven statutory analysis, aiding legal decision-making and error detection.