The new Recoding America Fund — so-named for a book written by Obama-era technology leader Jennifer Pahlka — officially launched last week with a six-year mission to improve government services for Americans with strategic investment. While the venture is spearheaded by Pahlka, who sits on its board, the organization’s leadership includes former staff for Democrats and Republicans alike.
Building that “cross-ideological effort” has been a core part of the organization from the beginning, Anne Healy, the fund’s CEO and a former U.S. Agency for International Development economist, told FedScoop in an interview.
At the heart of the venture is a focus on improving the underlying capacity — or what Healy described as “effective plumbing” — that various policies and their outcomes rely upon. For the fund, that plumbing spans four pillars: Attracting and retaining talent, having employees focused on the “right work,” building and purchasing “purpose-fit” technology, and applying a “test-and-learn” approach to implementation of plans that allows for adjustment.
Of course, the new effort is set against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) group that has applied a scorched-earth approach in its pursuit to shape the same areas within the federal government.
But Recoding America Fund has not criticized the work of the DOGE. Instead, its leaders have marked the current moment as an opportunity.
In her post announcing the initiative last week, Pahlka described DOGE as “moving the Overton window for the speed and scale of change.”
“We embrace the political realignment that has made state capacity not only a prime time issue, but a common cause for what might in the past have seemed strange bedfellows,” Pahlka said later in her post. “We are committed to working not only across the aisle but with leaders who have a wide diversity of ideologies that recognize the importance of this work and no longer tolerate the status quo.”
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