Reply All - #34 DMV Nation

Episode Date: August 4, 2015

Even though technology evolves at a rapid clip, US government agencies seem trapped about a decade in the past. PJ talks to technologist Clay Johnson about why the government is so unable to adapt, and what it would look like if it could keep pace with the rest of the world. If you want to become a gimlet member, you can go here: http://gimletmedia.com/join. A year membership will get you a t-shirt, early access to pilots, and much more. Also, this Monday, August 10th, we'll be doing a live chat for members only. If you're already a Gimlet member, you'll find information about it on the gimlet page in the next couple of days. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. The show about the internet. I'm PJ Bo. And this week, we are talking to a man named Clay Johnson. Clay's done a bunch of impressive things that have to do with politics and the internet. His company built Barack Obama.com. He worked on the Howard Dean website, which was very revolutionary for campaign politics. And today, we are talking to him about none of that.

Today, we are talking to him about his pet interest, which is finding and complaining about the worst government websites on the internet. My favorite website to pick on is sam.gov, S-A-M, as an uncle sam.gov. Right, I'm loading it. So sam.gov, this website, I think, cost about $200 million so far to make. Just check it out. I'm looking at it.

It looks like a website you would build for your local softball team in like 1993. Right. Clay says that government websites, it's like they exist. on a different, worse internet than everything else. But Sam.gov is the jewel of his collection. It's particularly egregious because it's like the government's front door.

Anybody who does contract work for the federal government is supposed to register here. Whether they want to build a bridge or an airplane or a nuclear power plant, they have to funnel through this archaic portal. If you go to sam.gov and you try to open a new tab,

it will just show you whatever was in the tab you already had open. And you're telling me this website costs you know, almost a quarter billion dollars and it can't support two tabs at the same time. You know, for contrast, early in 2013, Barack Obama came out and said, you know, he was pressing for a grant to the NIH to spend $100 million mapping the human brain. And it was going to be this big thing. And I was like, you just spent that on a fucking website. Clay thinks that Sam.gov is symptomatic of this much larger slow motion national disaster.

It's like if every highway in America was actively on fire, but none of us realized it. And Clay says if you want to understand the reason that the U.S. government has such bad software, you have to start at the beginning. You have to start with how the government hires the people who build that software. And the ironic thing is that they hire those people using that same crappy website that we've been talking about, Sam.gov. Okay, so say that Obama decides he really wants to make a podcast, and so they open up a bidding process where they're like, we, you know, Gimlet's going to bid on it, NPR is going to bid on it. Like, what would that look like? Right. So they would issue an RFP. An RFP. They would issue a request for proposals. One of the requirements in the top 30 pages of this document will be that this contract cannot be awarded to you unless you are registered.

on SAM.gov. There's a lot of other things. You have to guarantee that you're not a terrorist. California makes you guarantee that you don't own any slaves. Okay. So assuming that I'm a non-slave-owning, non-terrorist podcaster, then I have to go to Sam.gov and I have to register there to be eligible to submit this bid? Yes.

So you start with sam.gov, and the first field at sam.gov is what is your, Duns number. So what's a Duns number? A Dunn's number is a proprietary number owned by a different government contractor, not the government. It's owned by Dun & Bradstreet. Then what you do is you leave Sam.gov and go to Dun & Bradstreet and apply for a Dunn's number. I wanted to try this myself to see how long it takes one to two business days to get a Duns number, and I was too confused by the process to actually go through with it. This is a rabbit hole that you cannot escape from. So this is just, this is just the first question. So in right now, like, imagine like a progress bar like you'd get when you're installing software. What percentage of the progress bar towards submitting this

bid are we at right now? One. This isn't just a big hassle. It's actually a problem. Because it means that the people who are the best in the business at making better technology, a lot of them are just going to decide not to go through with this process. So if you're like a young startup company and you make websites and you want to get your government contract, you've got to go here first before you can even think about starting it. You go to this website and you basically go, I'm done. Forget it. But what happens is that this regulatory environment is so huge and requires a real skill to understand that the people who win the contracts are the people oftentimes who understand those regulations the best, not the people who can understand the technology the best.

There are other inefficiencies in the bidding process. For example, because the process takes so long, years can pass between when you bid on a job and when you actually start it. Years. That'd be bad for any job, but this is software. In the case of healthcare.gov, the biggest recent government tech failure, only 16 companies were really eligible to bid on the job. And those companies were picked in 2007 when Bush was president. Those 16 companies were told, for the next 10 years, you're going to handle health care technology.

Which is crazy because in 2007, handling health care technology didn't mean building something as gargantuan and unprecedented as a national U.S. healthcare marketplace. Clay says that even once a company wins one of those bids, the red tape has just begun. With HealthCare.gov, the work ended up being divided between many different subcontractors, And in the end, there was a lot of confusion about which company was actually supposed to stitch all the work together. The first testing of the entire system happened two weeks before the launch.

iPhone video games get beta tested for much longer than that. This environment can make even really good companies do bad work. Sam.gov, Clay's least favorite website, IBM made it. They're great people. They're super smart. They won Jeopardy with a robot, man. They're pretty good. But how did they win Jeopardy with a robot and then also? build this website. Right. Part of it is because of the way that these projects are managed from the inside. We've been talking about the procurement process about what it takes to get to the starting

line of the marathon, but then you have to actually run the marathon, and there's lots of regs around that too. The marathon of regulations produces a lot of bad software, and the states have their own similar marathons. And the end result is that you end up with an entire nation afflicted with this plague of comically awful government technology. I was a, well, in Nevada we call them field services technicians, and those are just basically, I'm here to do anything, whether it's an IED, whether it's registration, all of it. This is Nathaniel Waugh.

Until recently, he worked at the DMV in Las Vegas. So you think you hate the DMV. The people who work, they hated even more. He said his days started out bad, beginning before he even gotten into the building. You see, you know, 30, 40, 50 people, where you probably woke up that more. They're already in a bad mood. It just drains you mentally because then you're like, you're like, okay, well, here we go.

And then it just doesn't stop. You know, you see those people lined up and then, you know, and then they just keep coming, coming, coming, coming, coming. Nathaniel said that the computers of the DMV, these antique Windows machines gasping along on 11-year-old software, they drove them crazy. One of the biggest problems is, the inability to bundle transactions together.

So if you show up and you have to do your car registration, you have to renew your license, and you have to do something else, and you want to get personalized plates. Well, rather than me being able to say, okay, well, let's just do all these three, I charge you one time, send you on your way, and boom, you're done,

is I have to do one at the time. You know, it would be like, go to a grocery store and like, okay, well, I'm going to ring up your produce first, and then I'm going to do the meat, and then pay you, and then you pay me for that. And I'm going to do your dairy.

You pay me for that. And it just takes so much more time in order to get someone through because you're basically doing so much transaction and then going back to the very beginning. That's insane. All over again on something else. Yeah. Very insane.

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I imagine different hells. One of the worst ones is that you die. And then you're just in a room with a video monitor. And the monitor just shows you a movie. It's every moment of your life where you sat there, and you waited for a computer to load. That's it. You just wait. I think for me, that movie would last for weeks.

But I feel so lucky that I've never had to use a DMV computer. Because all the computers are connected with the system all throughout the state, is also there's just a lot of lag. And so there's sometimes, you know, I'll be waiting for the program to finish the process. And all we can do is sit there for five minutes looking at each other. What I could tell from the look in some people's eyes is that I think to a degree, some of them just think it's the technician. Like, oh, you know, because this person did something wrong.

And it's like, no, it's just the computer system is just terrible. Nathaniel says after 10 months of fighting all this, finally just got to him. And can I ask when you, did you quit? I was probationarily discharged because I apparently wasn't patient enough with some people. Nathaniel says his time at the DMV turned him into somebody he didn't recognize. He was a student body president who got into public service to try to make a difference. But at the DMV, he found himself cursing, beating countertops, slamming drawers. Even when he left work, the DMV was still with him.

He found himself avoiding strangers. Just the idea of someone engaging you in conversation, even a stranger, is like repulsive. They look like they're going to ask me a question, and it looks like it's going to be a stupid question. And I'm going to have to stand here for too long answering it. So then you just walk around with this miserable look on your face. And the only people who you even kind of remotely get along with are your fellow DMV employees. and that's just more of a misery loves company kind of thing than anything else. But then once I left DMV and got that out of my system,

then, you know, people are amazing, love them. Can't get enough of them. There is a model for how all of this could work better. It's like a magical kingdom, where they decided to take organization and process and technological literacy extremely seriously, where it's basically all they think about. And we were going to go to that place after the break.

Welcome back to the show. So we spent the first half of the episode in government internet hell, courtesy of our government internet hell tour guide, Clay Johnson. Clay works in politics, and I wanted to know, of the people running for president, who would he pick who could fix all this stuff? And he wouldn't give me an answer. He just said he wanted to ask all of them one question. First off, I'm going to give you the question that I'd really love to ask

that I would never really ask as a moderator of a debate. Clay would like to ask the candidates about a law that I promise you you have not heard of. My favorite law inside of the federal government is called the Paperwork Reduction Act. What it says is that if you want to collect any information from the public, then you need to ask the public whether or not it is okay for six months. You should have a public comment process of about six months as to whether or not it is okay for six months. you to ask that question. The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 was supposed to save time. According to the law, if the government wants you to fill out a form, it has to first send

that form to an office that decides how many hours of the citizens' time that form is going to waste. And the chief statistician of the United States, which, P.S., we have a chief statistician nobody knows about, has to report to Congress as to the estimated number of burden hours over time in all of these forms. There's actually a list of, like, you know, like, you know, like. Like the 1040 form is, you know, for the IRS is something like, you know, 7.8 billion hours that it's estimated to be spent. And we track the number of hours.

But anyway, when the president first took office, this president first took office, which got elected based on new media and Twitter and the Facebooks and all that stuff, he wanted to tweet something. The staff wanted to tweet something like, hey, guys, you know, how's everybody feeling today? He wanted to tweet a question. And the lawyers were like, well, I don't think you could really tweet a question because that would be an information collection. Oh, my God. And so if you wanted to tweet that thing, you would need to put that out. You'd need to put that tweet out for six months asking people if it was okay for you to tweet that before you tweeted it. According to Clay, the policies have since loosened.

Now you can ask questions. This took like real guidance as long as they are unstructured question. For instance, you cannot ask someone without going through the PRA process, what is your age? You could ask someone, tell us what age you think you are and why. Wait, I don't understand that distinction. What they basically said was it's not okay for you to put out a survey without going through the process. This story, frankly, seemed crazy to us. So we tried to confirm it.

We talked to a couple of people who had worked inside Obama's social media world. They didn't remember the specific incident, but they said that it seemed totally credible. In fact, they had examples of other arcane laws that they thought also could have been responsible for restricting what a president could tweet. They said that there were always lawyers around the White House, worried about the implications of anybody using social media. When Obama got into office, Twitter was blocked by default on White House computers. Facebook, too. And the sites were only opened up to those who completed a social media. especially fussy training process.

According to somebody who still works in the executive branch, every day is just one ridiculous fight after the other. Fights for the right to use basic social media and collaboration technologies. Stuff that you and I take for granted. For example, one person told us that in a recent meeting, they just had to show their colleagues how Google Docs works. They were fielding questions about what all the different colored cursors meant, how you save a document.

And as a result, a lot of people who work in government have just given up trying. Obama himself says that this is a huge mess. This is him talking at a Wall Street Journal Live event. The way the federal government does procurement and does IT is just generally not very efficient. In fact, there's probably no bigger gap between the private sector and the public sector than IT. And this, more than anything, is Clay Johnson's big fear. This is the reason he spends so much time complaining about government websites like a snobby film critic. He's worried that there is a widening chasm between the world that we live in and the world our government lives in.

And even though government is supposed to be deliberate and technology is supposed to be fast, he doesn't think there's a reason why they should be this far apart. Is there a country that you look at and you think they have done a much better job of this stuff? I feel like Estonia or Sweden, like there's somewhere that would have had it. Yeah, Estonia. Really, Estonia? Yeah. I got it in one?

Yeah, you got it in your first guess, Estonia. Estonia is doing really interesting stuff. So they, for instance, started a digital identity system. So when you're born now, instead of getting a Social Security number, you get a public-private key. And, you know, that's a method that you can use to have secure transactions with government and verify your identity with government. A quick language advisory here. Fucking Estonia.

In Estonia, you pay for your parking space with your phone. In Estonia, you vote from your home computer. In Estonia, you file your taxes online, which we get to do. But in Estonia, it takes five minutes. Estonia is heaven on earth. But Clay says if you don't want to move to Estonia, there's one more place that is a lot closer to home, where it says that things actually do work the way that they should.

A magical place. You know, look at what Disney World has done the line, right? Now at Disney World, apparently, you just get a bracelet and, you know, you can tap your way in. You get reservations for the individual rides. Right. Why can't we have that at the Department of Motor Vehicles? Why can't we have that for any customer service experience? I bet you that the people behind the desk would be happier and the people in front of the desk would be happier.

I went to, like very recently, like I guess a couple years ago, I went to Disney World with my mom and my stepdad, her husband, and I didn't understand like why, because it was just us. We're all adults. Like I didn't understand the appeal of going. And we got there and we got into the parking lot. And they had this really genius system for parking. Like all these people have to park there every day and there's, you know, there's sort of an air traffic control thing. But essentially you get gracefully guided into this space. bought and everything's taken care of it and perfect. And my stepdad looked at me and my mom. He's like, you see? You see? Like, this is it. Just to be in a place where the system works is. Right.

Peace making. Can you imagine if the TSA worked that way? Right. And what I'm saying is that, you know, you and I, we can build a bridge to the 21st century. You know, even though we're 15 years in, we can still build that bridge. We can, we can get that. We can do that. We can make it so that the TSA works a little bit more like Disney World and a little less like Dante's Inferno.

Clay Johnson. He's written a book. It's called The Information Diet, a case for conscious consumption. That's this week's show. Reply All is me, PJ Vote with Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Struthy Pinnaminani, Fia Bennon, Catherine Wells, and edited by Alex Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz. We were engineered by the Reverend John DeLore, production assistants from Sylvie Douglas.

Matt Lieber is Estonia. Special thanks to Emily Kennedy and Paul Ford. And thanks to Susan Grossman from Vancouver for being a Gimlet member. Our theme music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Built Buildings. You can find more episodes of our show at iTunes.com slash reply all. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.