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.