* Jennifer Pahlka, author of Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, on the An Honorable Profession podcast…

Pahlka: The last piece that I think is the most abstract, but probably the most important, is closing the loop between policy and implementation.

So right now, it sort of works in sort of a waterfall method. You pass a law or policy and it gets handed off to successive layers of a bureaucracy. By the time it’s actually being implemented on the ground by folks that are so distant from the folks who passed the law, a game of telephone has occurred. They don’t quite know what the real intention was. It’s been burdened with lots of procedure. It’s now more about the process than it is about the outcome, and they’re not able to sort of loop back and say, ‘Is what we’re doing what you intended? Is this working? Are we getting the results that we were hoping to get?’

And we have to really fundamentally think differently about the relationship between the executive and legislative branches in order to build these tight feedback loops so that by the time you’re actually hitting the ground we have tested things. We know what works, and we’re confident that we’re going to get there, and that we keep having those feedback loops all the way along.

But right now, most legislators are like, ‘I passed the law. It’s someone else’s job now. I’m moving on to the next piece of legislation, the next bill that I want to introduce.’

That’s a really big mind shift, but I would absolutely encourage anybody here in the legislative branch to shift their thinking. I think your voters will actually reward you for it, for caring more about the outcome than the bill. And that doesn’t mean you spend your days and your staff spend their days on fundamentally different things, but it will pay off.

Host: And that’s an interesting thing, because I think for a lot of elected officials, there’s been a little bit of a using how many bills you introduced or passed as the measurement for success. And so I think that’s a really interesting point to be able to talk instead about what you’ve delivered, because that’s really to your point. That’s what people are looking for.

Pahlka: Almost all of my friends, just like regular voters, people nodding, do you vote for somebody on the basis of the number of bills they passed? They’re like, I have no idea. Like, they don’t even know. They don’t know. But the reason that we introduce those bills, or your audience here introduces those bills, is because they get attention.

And what we have to do is create the mechanisms and affordances that give you the same kind of attention from the press, from the community, from academics, from community groups, that you get the same attention for the follow-up that you do for introducing the bills. And I think that’s the work that the civil service groups will do, that either the good government groups will do that. Academia can do that. You can train the media to pay attention to these things. You have to challenge that conventional wisdom that the reason that you’re doing this is either for votes or attention, because it’s not getting you the votes. There’s a different way to get attention that will also get outcomes, and your people will reward you for that.

She’s right that legislators too often just pass bills and move on to the next thing. She’s also right that successful implementation of laws can lead to much better news coverage.

But writing stories about bill intros is a whole lot easier and completely ingrained into news coverage norms than stories about successful implementation. Often, implementation stories are written after failures, and quote angry legislators railing at the bureaucracy, even though many of them had no idea that their bills were being implemented so poorly.