Digital State Capacity After the Age of DOGE

What kind of digital state capacity does America need to build to ensure every American can access government services and benefits efficiently and effectively in the future? That’s the question we sought to answer when we convened leaders in Nashville at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator this fall for two days.

Participants ranging from digital service veterans and policy architects to agency leaders and technologists came together around a vision of the “next generation” standard for public digital services:

• 100% uptake: The programs that Congress creates actually make it to every eligible person;

• Preventing fraud: Redesign services, informed by threat modeling, to prevent fraud in the first place, and;

• Zero trust government services: No unnecessary data collection, and ideally no paperwork at all.

If we rebuild the same services and collect the same data, and use the same tools, we’ll have the same outcome. We’ve seen how fast the government can change; the task now is to apply that same energy and sense of urgency, but toward building state capacity that protects its residents by design.

What We Heard

1. Every program deserves a public option.
Today, agencies and states pay again and again for the same systems and data from the same vendors, and those data and systems too often fail the public, leading to a titanic waste of money and time. Participants argued for a “public option” for digital infrastructure: shared, open, reusable code and components built once and offered freely to all, and a public option for currently privately owned data infrastructure. Taxpayers have already paid for it; it should work everywhere.

2. We need a national data purge.
Existing laws have not protected Americans from the misuse of their own data. The Privacy Act did not prevent data abuse. The Paperwork Reduction Act did not reduce paperwork. The group called for a fundamental rethink of how the government collects and stores data: design systems that don’t create sensitive data in the first place. The ultimate goal is to abolish applications entirely, moving toward program enrollment that happens automatically and securely, without data trails that can be exploited.

3. Eligibility can be decentralized.
Technical advances make it possible to verify eligibility at a community level, rather than relying on sprawling, centralized, and porous systems. Participants drew analogies to notaries: trusted intermediaries who can verify identity locally. With the right standards, eligibility could be determined securely and privately, closer to people’s lives. That would save significant costs, prevent fraud, and streamline the user experience.

4. Current structures limit innovation.
Even the most promising technical and policy ideas struggle to find a home in government. For example, if the federal government wanted to maintain world-class open-source software shops, where would they live? If the federal government created a public software option for states to administer federal benefit programs, how would it support implementation? If government services were organized like products with clear owners, lifecycles, and feedback loops, what would agencies need to look like? The group surfaced new organizational models that could make government more capable of continuous delivery and innovation.

5. Fraud is a national security issue.
Poorly designed benefits systems are targets for nation-state-backed scammers. Fraud isn’t just a budget problem; it’s a national security vulnerability. Future programs must be architected with this in mind, so that systems are resilient against abuse by design, not through reactive enforcement.

6. AI will not save us.
It is worth noting that this group of senior technologists did not mention artificial intelligence as a whole cloth solution to these challenges. This is not a dismissal of the discrete potential of technology in addressing these problems, but rather speaks to the reality that investment in people, process, and structures will be the backbone of change. There is no silver bullet algorithm.

A Realist Vision

We have seen what rapid digital change can look like. The challenge now is to build the institutions that make it durable, safe, and democratic.

This next generation of digital services must do more than modernize; it must redefine what the state can do. That means thinking big, underwriting with technical competence, and delivering simple, secure, human-centered systems.

The convening ended with shared clarity: building state capacity is the next frontier of civic infrastructure and is the prerequisite for regaining public trust in our institutions. It’s not about better websites, it’s about the operating system of democracy itself.

What’s Next

VPA plans to host follow-up convenings, including in Washington D.C., for policymakers, technologists, academics, and others focused on digital state capacity. VPA is also developing forthcoming work to advance the most promising ideas from the Nashville discussions, including on public options for shared infrastructure, zero trust government services, decentralized eligibility, and the organizational design of a “Next Generation” state.

The work ahead is big, but the need is clear: If we want a government capable of protecting data, preventing fraud, and ensuring everyone gets what they’re eligible for, we have to build it.