Government · Customer & Citizen Experience
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14 articles · Government · Customer & Citizen Experience
Articles
Week of 20 April 2026
DOJ’s accessibility delay moved one date and put the budget at risk
The Justice Department pushed back its web accessibility deadline by a year, but the standard, the legal duty and residents’ experience stayed exactly where they were. The real risk was to budgets that had leaned on April 2026 to justify the work.
Week of 3 November 2025
For SNAP systems, paying less was harder than paying nothing
During the 2025 shutdown, court orders pushed states toward partial and then full November SNAP food benefits within days. The systems that calculate, load and explain those benefits were built for paying in full or not at all, and paying less proved hardest.
Week of 7 October 2024
At American Water, containment was the part customers saw
After a cyberattack, America’s largest water utility kept the water flowing, but customers experienced the incident as a billing portal that went dark. For any utility or agency, what the public sees comes down to four decisions, and most can be made in advance.
Week of 29 July 2024
Systems contained, data exposed: why Columbus’s reassurance outran its evidence
Columbus could show early that it had contained the attack on its systems. It could not yet show what the stolen data held or whose it was. Each claim needs its own evidence, and borrowing confidence from one to answer the other costs trust.
Week of 1 January 2024
For FinCEN’s beneficial ownership launch, the hardest design problem was shrinking
On January 1, 2024, FinCEN opened beneficial ownership filing to tens of millions of small companies while the law faced a constitutional challenge. A public obligation at that scale has four design problems, and the last one, how it shrinks, is rarely planned.
Week of 19 June 2023
Why a stolen DMV file weakened identity checks at agencies that were never breached
The MOVEit hack exposed the license records of most drivers in two states, and license numbers and issue dates stopped being secrets. Every agency that used them to check who residents were online inherited the breach, whether or not it ran MOVEit.
Week of 3 April 2023
Eligible but unreachable: Medicaid unwinding ran on contact data
With pandemic-era continuous coverage over, states had about a year to recheck Medicaid eligibility for tens of millions of people. Who kept coverage depended less on the rules than on data: renewing people automatically, reaching the rest and processing their replies.
Week of 15 August 2022
Why the IRS’s ten-year budget needed a one-year payoff
The Inflation Reduction Act handed the IRS about 80 billion dollars over a decade, and opponents vowed to claw it back from day one. When long-term money can vanish, every year’s spending has to be worth having on its own.
Week of 11 July 2022
988 launched without 911’s plumbing: location, dispatch and a fee
In July 2022 the national crisis line got an easy three-digit number, 988, but none of the hidden machinery that makes 911 work. States inherited three gaps: no caller location, no settled way to send help, and no dedicated funding.
Week of 31 January 2022
One door is not a service: the IRS selfie reversal
In February 2022 the IRS stepped back from making selfie verification mandatory. The reason matters to any public service: one way of proving identity, however good at stopping fraud, shuts out part of a population that includes almost everyone.
Week of 2 August 2021
The paper card that made Key to NYC’s digital pass work
New York City’s August 2021 vaccination requirement accepted slick digital passes and the humble paper CDC card alike. That paper fallback carried the program through patchy records and untrained door staff, and it is the design choice any agency issuing digital credentials should copy first.
Week of 18 January 2021
Vaccine access hinged on open appointments nobody could see
Vaccine eligibility widened in January 2021 faster than states could show where doses were. Booking failed less because of web traffic than because of three ownership gaps: eligibility rules, appointments held in partners’ systems, and phone and community help treated as overflow.
Week of 17 August 2020
Why the Postal Service slowdown belonged on agency risk registers
The August 2020 mail slowdown was covered as an election story. For agencies that mail notices, payments and medicines, it revealed something less visible: a critical dependency with legal deadlines attached and nobody inside the agency watching it.
Week of 11 May 2020
Every unemployment fraud control had a cost to real claimants
In May 2020, federal warnings about organized fraud against state unemployment systems pushed agencies to add identity checks to services already buckling under demand. Wherever they placed those checks, at application, before payment or after, someone legitimate paid part of the price.