Decentralization All The Way Down

In my last blog post I asked: “What levers does the federal government have to reduce the time tax?” The post got excellent replies on Twitter. Dan Hon noted that a mirror version of this question exists at the state level too:

tbh for some states just getting them to reduce admin burden across counties would be a big deal

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) March 13, 2022

States & Counties

I recently opened up the USDA Food and Nutrition Service State Options Report. It’s a guide to all of the variations in the SNAP food assistance program across states. Open up the report and scroll through its kaleidoscopic maps to get a visual idea of how SNAP programs differ across states.

The first entry (page 12) is about which states have chosen to decentralize SNAP administration to the county level. Ten states share SNAP administration with county agencies, while 43 states and territories have a more centralized model:

So SNAP administration is decentralized down to the county level, but not uniformly so.

Code for America’s two most well-known successes building online SNAP applications have been with county-administered states: GetCalFresh in California and MNBenefits in Minnesota.

GetCalFresh started with a single county. Dustin Palmer at Code for America wrote about welcoming complexity in choosing to work closely with Minnesota. Welcoming that complexity let CfA tackle challenges like how to improve outcomes when an application is sent to the wrong county by mistake:

In the teeniest of victories, we worked with the stage to set up a forward button for apps sent to the wrong county (instead of faxing).

Otoh, we initially tried to route apps based on USPS verified address and quickly learned it was less accurate than a counties drop-down.

— Dustin Palmer (@dustinbpalmer) March 14, 2022

Code for America is now working with a third county-administered state on food assistance, Colorado. I’m curious to see what CfA will learn and publish over time about how states can support counties in improving access to SNAP.

Serving City Departments

I see similar themes of complexity around decentralization when I look at digital services in the city & county where I live, San Francisco. 🌉

The San Francisco Digital Services team partners with other departments to improve public services. The team has tackled interesting questions related to centralization & decentralization. Take a look at pages 63-65 of San Francisco’s Digital Services Strategy. It shows a template for a workshop to discuss striking the balance between centralized/decentralized ways of organizing services across many axes, from visual brand to product development and policy governance.

San Francisco Digital Services is hiring for several roles, including a technical director. The whole technical director position description is worth a read, but take a look at this section in particular:

Having established credibility and a track record of delivery, the [San Francisco Digital Services] team must now turn its attention to scaling. The team must scale its impact by empowering other departments to build services themselves, using platforms provided by Digital Services. Digital Services should become the source of standards, platforms, and microservices that allow the City to make services for residents accessible online. This will be achieved through training, support, standardization, shared platforms, and citywide policies.

I love the flexibility in this thinking about what empowering other city departments might look like. It encompasses standards, such as the city’s Digital Accessibility and Inclusion Standard. Good training and good policy development are core ways for the digital services team to support other departments.

So what / Now what

Is “let’s share lessons learned” too cliché of a way to wrap this up?

Well … that’s where I’m going.

• San Francisco is an example of terrific work on service delivery thinking at the city level – in a city where services are spread across departments.

• Code for America and many others are working on improving benefits delivery – including in states where benefits are administered by counties.

• There is strong federal interest right now in reducing administrative burdens – in a system where key services are delivered by states.

Decentralization runs deep in U.S. government. I would love to see different layers of government and nonprofits in conversation with each other – including, yes, sharing lessons learned – as they each think through this work.

Federal Levers

I ended my last blog post with a question: “How can we make things work better across different strands of government?” As far as questions go, this is pretty vague. What does “better” mean? And once we know what we mean by it, what can the federal government specifically do to push towards “better”?

When asked how government could be better, many people might mention reducing paperwork. Last year, journalist Annie Lowrey wrote in The Time Tax about the administrative burdens of navigating bureaucracy in the United States: the many billions of hours Americans spend mired in administrative obstacles; the racist histories and policies behind these burdens; the academics and nonprofits pushing for a better way.

Then came a federal mandate on administrative burdens. In December of last year, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience. Excellent writeups and Twitter threads have been written about it. The Order calls on specific federal agencies to do specific things, such as the Department of State delivering a new online passport renewal experience. One of the trickiest and most interesting angles to this goal is that a whole lot of benefits and services are administered at the state and local level, not the federal level.

For example – I’m writing this post in California and I am a California resident.

• When I moved to the state, I needed to register an out-of-state vehicle. I filled out the California DMV’s form REG 343, waited twice in lines at the California DMV, and used the DMV’s phone line and website to try to figure out answers to my questions. (And, of course, tweeted.)
• If I become unemployed in California, I apply for unemployment on California’s Employment Development Department.
• If I need SNAP benefits, I can apply online with GetCalFresh, an online application built by Code for America.

All of these are forms and processes managed at the state or local level, not the federal level. So the federal government wants to reduce administrative burdens and time taxes, but many of the forms that create administrative burdens and time taxes are not being created or managed by the federal government. What levers does the federal government have to reduce the time tax?¹

Congress – the legislative branch of the federal government – could make major structural changes.² How about the executive branch of the federal government, the president and the federal agencies? After all, this post started out talking about an Executive Order – so, what can the executive do to reduce administrative burdens at state & local levels? Here are a couple of possibilities.

• Funding. The federal government funds lots of state & local services. Federal funds make up between 20%-45% of state revenues, depending on the state.³ Does dispensing those funds give the federal government leverage to reduce administrative burdens? Which streams of funding involve federal oversight & conditions, as opposed to streams with lots of state and local discretion?
• Guidance & Oversight. Federal agencies do a lot of guidance-giving. They interpret laws and statues giving state agencies guidance on how to implement the law. Federal agencies also conduct oversight activities such as audits. Can the federal government use its guidance & oversight roles to reduce administrative burdens at the state & local levels? What are the opportunities, and what are the constraints?
• Shared Services. What if the federal government acted as a sort of central IT office, building technology that made accessing benefits simpler, and sharing that technology with states? Shared services are mentioned in the Executive Order, which calls for “common services and standards.” The proposed Unemployment Insurance Technology Modernization Act of 2021 wanted the federal Department of Labor to “provide States with modular, open system technology capabilities and shared services to administer their unemployment compensation programs.”

The U.S. government is vast, and I am just one person with very limited experience. I want to learn more.

If you’ve worked in U.S. state, local, federal, tribal, or territorial governments, what do you think? What levers have you seen federal government use successfully to push for better outcomes? What’s missing from this list? Which are pulled too often, and which aren’t pulled often enough? You can reach me at @alexsoble on Twitter – my ears are open!

Updated 13 March 2022: Edited to clarify focus.

~ Footnotes ~

Making Things Work in the Marble Cake

Getting things done in U.S. government usually involves not one, but many different kinds of government: federal, state, county, municipal, tribal, territorial.

This matters for almost every public goal. Want to upgrade transportation infrastructure? Most of the funding comes from the federal government, but state governments decide how to spend it. Want to deliver public benefits to help people pay for food or medical care? Most benefits programs (think SNAP or Medicaid) are federally funded, but administered by state and county governments.

In the 1960s, a professor named Morton Grodzins compared the interlocking governments of U.S. federalism to a swirling marble cake:

The American form of government is often, but erroneously, symbolized by a three-layer cake. A far more accurate image is the rainbow or marble cake, characterized by an inseparable mingling of differently colored ingredients, the colors appearing in vertical and diagonal strands and unexpected whirls. As colors are mixed in the marble cake, so functions are mixed in the American federal system.

His goal was to describe messy, real-world U.S. federalism, where multiple strands of government need to work together to accomplish anything.

This metaphor from the ’60s still feels spot on. Important programs get stuck or slowed down when government’s different strands don’t work well together. Following headlines and reports about programs like unemployment insurance and emergency rental aid, I’ve seen the challenging & complex interplay between federal, state, county, and local governments recur as a theme.

My goal with this blog is to “learn out loud” on the topic. I’m starting with a big, broad, potentially naive question in mind: “How can we make things work better across different strands of government?”

I’m hoping this blog will lead me to ask new questions; introduce me to keywords I haven’t thought to search on, papers I hadn’t heard of, doers and experts I haven’t known to talk to. If you think I’m missing something important as I go – please fill me in! You can reach me at @alexsoble on Twitter.

Thanks for reading along!

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Updated 15 Feb 2022: Wording changes and clarifications.