Recoding America is a response to a crisis. It started with a book, my attempt to describe the ways in which government was failing to do what it set out to do, and to offer prescriptions for how to set it back on course. The book resonated with a lot of people who were seeing the same failures and looking for remedies. It was the influence and action of many people that turned the ideas from a book into an organization and a movement.
Recoding America, the book, tells stories of the government we have today, the structures and ways of working that aren’t fit for the job we need them to do, and the ways that many creative, dedicated public servants often deliver results for the American public in spite of those structures. It draws on my past experiences running Code for America, laying the foundation for the United States Digital Service in the White House, serving on the Defense Innovation Board, and co-chairing a task force during the pandemic unemployment insurance crisis. But the most powerful voices in the book are not mine. They are from people trapped in a system that, by trying to please everyone, serves no one — like the official at the Veterans Administration who, when asked why he deferred all questions about a failing system that was supposed to get veterans their benefits, told me “If they ask us to build a concrete boat, we’ll build a concrete boat.” And they are from courageous public servants fighting to change that system, risking their livelihoods to put the needs of the American people first.
The problems I document in the book, and others that public servants face every day, are downstream of a much larger problem. Try to fix service delivery and you find yourself battling HR, procurement, funding, oversight, and management. Pull the thread long enough, and you realize we are trying to run the country on an operating model built in the industrial era. We lawyered it up starting in the sixties to correct for abuses of power, slapped websites on the front of it when the internet arrived, but never fundamentally adapted it to a changing world and changing needs. The basic assumptions about how government functions have been largely frozen in place for decades while the world changed around them. We’ve let policy and process accumulate like geological layers of sediment. It’s been nobody’s job to clean it up.
When Recoding America came out in 2023, I spent the next year talking about it with anyone who would listen — members of Congress, state legislators, governors’ offices, philanthropists, civic tech folks, good-government reformers. And I kept hearing the same thing: “You’re correctly diagnosing the dysfunction, but where is the political power behind fixing it? These are ideas without a constituency.”
I looked around the think tank ecosystem and saw hundreds of millions of dollars going to the development of policy proposals in every imaginable domain, and essentially nothing going to build the state capacity needed to deliver on any of them. My first step was to establish toe holds in that ecosystem, and the natural starting place was the Niskanen Center, which had recently published a paper called State Capacity: What It Is, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back. (I loved the paper, but found it a little light on the “How to Get It Back” part.) They saw the natural fit with my work, so I agreed to help them establish a state capacity team and practice, and Ben Bain came on to lead it. Daniel Correa at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) saw how important this work was as well, and he began laying the groundwork for a team he called government capacity (recognizing how confusing the academic term “state capacity” can be, often seen as referring to work only with US states). He eventually brought on Loren DeJonge Schulman to lead that work. I affiliated with both organizations.
Both of those were still relatively nascent when the idea for something bigger came along. A former White House colleague, Cristin Dorgelo, and I helped organize a small conference of people working on related issues, and I gave a brief talk there about how state capacity underpins every other issue that government, philanthropy, and the public might care about. It was at the cocktail reception that evening that Kumar Garg and two of his colleagues from Renaissance Philanthropy cornered me. “If you really believe what you said, Jen, then you need to raise a fund,” they told me. I did believe what I’d said, with enormous conviction, but it had never occurred to me to raise a fund. The ten years I spent running Code for America involved a lot of fundraising, and I was not eager to put that burden back on my shoulders. I wanted to do the work — writing papers, building the case, helping everyone else see their own work through a state capacity lens. And I knew that funding was only part of what was needed. But I saw Kumar’s point. And it was the same one I kept hearing from policymakers: these are good ideas but have no organized constituency. Without a coherent vision, organization, and resources, they would likely never move from good ideas to the change I so desperately wanted to see in the world.
“At Renaissance Philanthropy, we’ve helped launch dozens of what we call thesis-driven philanthropic funds — time-bound efforts that pool donor capital behind a clear theory of change, led by someone with deep expertise and field credibility. It’s a model designed for exactly the kind of complex, cross-cutting challenge where individual donors struggle to have impact on their own. When Jen’s book came out, it was obvious that state capacity needed this treatment: a focused vehicle with real resources, a credible field leader, and a coalition of funders who understood they could accomplish more collectively than any of them could alone.”
I was certainly not the only one who cared about this work. Charlie Anderson at Arnold Ventures had been funding not only the work at Niskanen and FAS but other state capacity efforts as well, and he’d been saying for a while that someone was going to need to crowd in funding from other sources if there were ever going to be enough resources available to tackle this massive agenda. What philanthropists usually thought of as state capacity was generally workarounds in the service of a particular policy goal, not transformation of the system. But not only was there not much of a funder community, there was also no defined field of advocates organized around state capacity. Mostly, folks had been too busy working around the system to try to change it. And efforts were often acting too far downstream of the action to have scalable, durable impact. To be serious about meaningful change, a reform movement would need a far more robust, actionable agenda and the political will to bring it into existence. It would require a diverse set of actors coordinating across ideological and other divides. Kumar was right that none of that was going to happen on its own. It would require resources, but it would also require a big vision. What was needed was something more than a funder.
While I was contemplating the task at hand, I met Galen Hines-Pierce. Galen had been helping organize the Congressional modernization community with much the same frame that Charlie and I were seeing the executive branch-oriented problems. Along with Marci Harris at POPVOX Foundation, Zach Graves at the Foundation for American Innovation, and Travis Moore at TechCongress, Galen was thinking about raising a fund. The problems of executive branch capacity are downstream of Congress, and the point of updating how Congress works is to be able to get better outcomes for the American people… which happens through executive branch agencies. They are two sides of the same coin, or rather, two key nodes in what should be a build-measure-learn loop. We decided to join forces, with Galen, Charlie and I constituting the founding board. We were soon joined by Santi Ruiz and Judge Glock.
“My experience as a civil servant revealed how legislative intent is often diluted or outright fails during implementation, a realization that drove my focus on how Congress gathers, synthesizes, and acts upon information. Applying a systems-thinking lens to these breakdowns in design and feedback loops led me to join forces with Jen and Charlie to work across the full stack of state capacity. While our ecosystem partners are doing essential work, investing in this space remains largely illegible to the average foundation; I am thrilled to be part of an effort to change that, as I view it as one of the most critical investments we can make today.”
One of our first tasks was to hire a CEO who shared our vision and had the chops to bring it to life. We were lucky to find someone uniquely suited for this mission in Anne Healy. She’d been one of those public servants with the will and intellect to reform the agencies where she worked from the bottom up, delivering results in spite of the powerful forces of the status quo working against her. She knew what reform would need to look like to make a difference, and knew that we’d need to build a powerful, durable field to get there, because she’d done that before in her work in international development. It was Anne who brought us language for what we’d been trying inelegantly to describe: that Recoding America would need to be a field catalyst.
That’s how Recoding America became an effort to build and resource a field that has never really existed — a field of state capacity. Not transparency, not modernization, not civic tech, but the simple, foundational question of whether our government can achieve its policy goals. The frame had changed, and so had the ambition. We weren’t going to tinker with the existing system. We were going to catalyze a coalition, spanning left, right, and center, committed to updating the operating model of government for the era we’re actually living in.
Whatever you care about — deterring adversaries, building housing, a functioning social safety net, permitting clean energy, or simply a government that doesn’t waste your time and money — none of it is possible without a government capable of executing on its goals. The time for incremental fixes has passed. We’re building the government our future demands.