DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: California’s COVID unemployment reckoning goes national.

Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code For America and former U.S. deputy chief technology officer, writes that the turmoil at California’s Employment Development Department is a prime example of failures that have also plagued other major civic tech efforts, such as the post-Obamacare implosion of healthcare.gov or archaic IT systems at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

“Of all the tech disasters I’ve witnessed and tried to help untangle, the one I’ve come to see as most emblematic of these forces — and the ways we consistently misunderstand them — is the story of California’s unemployment insurance in the first year of the pandemic,” Pahlka writes in the book “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing In the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.”

Three chapters of the book chronicle Pahlka’s time co-leading a “Strike Team” deployed by Newsom in mid-2020, as long benefit delays and outlandish stories of fraud began to dominate headlines. In the months to follow, state officials would find that payments were delayed to some 5 million workers and may have been improperly denied for another 1 million, all while the state lost as much as $32 billion to fraud, according to varied state and industry estimates.

Once you understand that enabling fraud was a primary goal and that proving relief was at best a tertiary concern, everything makes sense.