Ezra Klein has an essay on building government infrastructure. Some thoughts on the topic, most unrealistic in today's polity:
- review and revise the statistical infrastructure. As I've written before, my guess is that the various statistical agencies of the government are operating in the context of yesterday's world. Because statistics is a boring subject, it doesn't attract much controversy or oversight.
- there's lots of real-time data out there, as we're reminded regularly in articles voicing concerns about consumer privacy. Can the government tap that?
- concerns about privacy mean that the census and other reports anonymized--is there a better approach to this?
- what gaps in statistical coverage have developed as the economy has changed over the last 40 years?
- Jimmy Carter had a vision for changing the federal personnel system with the Senior Executive Service, making it more like the UK system. IMO it's not worked as it was supposed to.
- Slowly slowly the government is moving towards more standardization with gov.id and the US Digital Service. Maybe over many years the US will approach the UK in the degree of uniformity in govt sites.
- Probably should be more interaction between the various associatons of state and local government entities and the federal govt. I'm just vaguely aware that such associations exist--like state legislature, county govts, sheriffs, etc. Possibly there is some formal interface which I don't know about
- Trying to encourage more standardization of state and local government operations would help, as shown by the problems with the unemployment insurance systems during the pandemic recession.
- Maybe giving each legal resident a no-charge banking account and govt email account would be good.
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