The complexity in applying for government benefits is not just poor design; it functions as an implicit policy tool. This "administrative burden" can be increased or decreased to control program access and costs without changing explicit eligibility laws, effectively making policy below the surface.
Policymakers and interest groups often reject "good enough" solutions that would help the vast majority. They fear that implementing a simple, 98% solution will eliminate the political urgency needed to address the remaining 2% of complex edge cases, which are often central to their ideological goals.
To minimize risk, government contracts often require bidders to have prior experience building the exact same system. This seemingly prudent rule creates a catch-22, barring new entrants and locking in a small number of incumbents who can then dominate the market and inflate prices.
When one software vendor dominates a government sector, it creates a "software monoculture." This introduces systemic risk, where a single bug can be forked across dozens of states, simultaneously disabling critical services for millions of people, as seen when a Medicaid eligibility error affected 29 states.
The intricate rules for verifying eligibility for government aid ("means-testing") have spawned an entire industry of vendors who profit from building these complex systems. This creates a perverse incentive where contractors benefit from the very administrative friction that harms beneficiaries and taxpayers.
Government procurement processes are rooted in a pre-digital, paper-based mental model. They treat software like a physical commodity that must be procured anew for each jurisdiction, preventing them from leveraging software's inherent scalability and leading to massive, redundant development costs.
Counter-intuitively, making a government benefit universal can be more cost-effective than restricting it. Universal programs eliminate the significant administrative costs of means-testing—the staff and systems spent verifying income—which can outweigh the expense of providing the benefit to those who could otherwise afford it.
Unlike private tech, government digital services often lack basic instrumentation like user funnels. This blindness to where users drop off means millions can lose benefits due to simple software bugs or confusing design, with agencies unaware of the root cause until manual intervention.
Government agencies without in-house technical expertise are at the mercy of contractors who inflate costs. Hiring even one skilled software engineer provides the capacity to call a vendor's bluff, potentially saving millions by demonstrating that a requested "million-dollar fix" is actually a 30-minute task.
The disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov deeply scarred the D.C. policy community. The received wisdom became to never bear technology risk directly. This incentivizes outsourcing everything to contractors, not just for expertise, but to create a buffer that can be blamed if a project fails, preserving the politician's reputation.