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Jan 21, 2025 | 
niskanencenter.org | Jennifer Pahlka
On January 13, 2025, Niskanen’s Jennifer Pahlka joined Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots Podcast. Pahlka discusses the causes of government inefficiency, how to create meaningful improvements in government operations, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
eatingpolicy.com | Jennifer Pahlka
I assume Elon and Vivek think they’re being bold and decisive by planning to use existing authorities to lay off vast swaths of the federal workforce. They indicated in an op-ed recently that they are aware of the rules that prevent layoffs from considering performance as a major factor. But are they aware of the rest of the restrictions? And the effect those restrictions will have?
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
niskanencenter.org | Ben Bain |Jennifer Pahlka
Recent guidance from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) finally clears up long-standing confusion that has prevented service designers from testing government forms and websites with users and making appropriate adjustments based on that research.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
eatingpolicy.com | Jennifer Pahlka
There is a little dust-up about Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s claim that childcare workers in her state aren’t allowed to peel bananas or oranges to serve to the kids in their care. Do the regulations prohibit this? Don’t they? The whole spat is missing the point. MGP made a little video for Democratic Wins Media, in which she says a constituent who worked at a daycare told her about the banana-peeling restriction, so she decided to look into it.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
eatingpolicy.com | Jennifer Pahlka
Have you ever said something you thought would be controversial and maybe even offensive, only to find that you hadn’t gone far enough? Once, at one of those networking unconferences, I said I thought our military would be more effective with a smaller budget.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
eatingpolicy.com | Jennifer Pahlka
Indulge yourself for a moment in this delightful story, courtesy of Jeremy Singer, who, along with many others, has been working to get the FAFSA stable for college students. As you may know, the Department of Education rolled out a new FAFSA --- what high school seniors and college students use to apply for financial aid nationally --- last fall. It went badly. But this is a comeback story, at least for now.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
eatingpolicy.com | Jennifer Pahlka
If Trump wins the election, it seems that we will see Schedule F return. For viewers just tuning in, Trump issued an executive order creating a new category of federal employee just before he left office in 2020. The order created a new job classification (F) for "confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating" positions, and removed standard civil service protections for these positions.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
niskanencenter.org | Jennifer Pahlka
The following essay was originally published in “The Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America“, on September 24th, 2024. This contribution is authored by Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. A quarter of the way into the 21st century, we face multiple, overlapping crises, what Adam Tooze calls the polycrisis. One factor quietly underpins or amplifies each of these individual crises: the diminished state capacity of the world’s advanced democracies.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
open.substack.com | Jennifer Pahlka
People keep asking me if I’m okay. An intruder came into my house in Oakland while I was home recently. 911 took six minutes to answer (well longer than that — you can read the full story here), and the Oakland Police Department took two days to show up.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
eatingpolicy.com | Jennifer Pahlka
LFG. If you’ve ever given to a Democratic candidate, the moment Joe Biden stepped out of the race, your inbox was full of LFG. The Obama Alumni Association didn’t even acronym it. They went for the full monty. This is great. The Harris-Walz campaign should effing go. The convention had amazing go energy. But remember 2009?
