Delay Government: How Technology Can Fix Slow Federal Service Delivery

The U.S. federal government currently operates as a delay government because many of the critical services it provides to customers (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid, passports, Social Security, tax refunds, veterans benefits, etc.) are delivered too inefficiently and slowly through a bureaucracy of complex procedures, manual processes, outdated technology, and insufficient staffing.

There are many reasons why federal services got to this state, the principal ones being the lack of incentive to improve—if you don’t like passport services, it’s not as if you can go to another passport provider—and limited funding to staff up fully to meet service demand.  In the private sector, when demand grows, a company hires more staff. In the federal government, when demand grows, the line for delay grows.