Digital Benefits Network
Equitable and ethical benefits delivery
Social, health, and economic supports in the United States are delivered through a patchwork of programs funded and legislated at the national level, but delivered through 56 states and territories, and often additional local levels of government and nonprofit organizations. The policy design and funding has led to a system with wide variations and inequities, with significant burdens placed on people who seek assistance. Recent estimates suggest that if U.S. benefits programs received full funding and 100 percent participation, the poverty rate would decline by 31% overall, and would push 14.9 million people — including 4.8 million children — above the poverty level. Increasingly, digital services have become a primary channel for assessing eligibility, applying for programs, and maintaining enrollment. However, the digital systems reflect their policies — rife with variations and inequities.
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The Digital Benefits Network, a project of the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., supports government in delivering public benefits services and technology that are accessible, effective, and equitable in order to ultimately increase economic opportunity. We work with people who design, deliver, administer, use, and influence public benefits. We work across key benefits programs including food and nutrition (SNAP, WIC), health (Medicaid/CHIP), cash assistance (TANF, basic income), child care, and unemployment insurance (UI) to identify shared challenges and opportunities, and to amplify strategies to enable equitable and effective implementation. We explore current and near-term challenges, while also creating space to envision and explore future policies, services, and technologies.
Service Journeys for critical touchpoints
Often these policies, and resulting systems, have been built over time, frequently without a complete picture of how beneficiaries and government workers experience them. We are working with cross-sector practitioners to understand service journeys holistically, as well as document and imagine what good delivery can look like for critical moments in the service journey. This includes initial online benefits applications, account creation, information verification, recertification or renewal, as well as staff-facing backend systems for application processing and administration.
Building legibility into systems
We are exploring how systems can be more legible, transparent, and humane — with all stakeholders understanding when, how, and why decisions are made. Technical framing and implementation through methodologies such as Rules as Code can enable straightforward policy integration into delivery systems that are both standardized and transparent. A Rules as Code approach would allow for legal policy (or rules), to be accompanied by plain language logic for anyone to read and understand, as well as be coded into a common syntax for integration into software. Rules as Code can speed up digital delivery, help individuals understand how decisions are made, and open new horizons for evaluating, testing, and iterating on policy. Through our Rules as Code Community of Practice, we recently hosted the Policy2Code Prototyping Challenge where 14 cross-sector teams experimented with using generative AI for turning policy into plain language summaries and software code.
Balancing access with integrity
With the rapid digitization of benefits services, especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen an increase in cybersecurity vulnerabilities compromised by adversaries. In response, governments have deployed a variety of technologies, including through approaches like identity proofing. Reactive efforts to ensure program integrity risk compromising access and can create barriers for eligible individuals. To build understanding of these issues, we started by gathering data on how technologies like digital authentication and identity verification are being used across core programs in all states and territories. We are now working on documenting promising practices that ensure ease of access, while meeting program and security goals. There is a clear need to adapt digital identity standards and risk assessment frameworks to the nuanced scenarios of delivering services to people experiencing poverty and other vulnerable groups. Earlier this year, we joined a collaborative research project with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) exploring the use of digital identity in the secure delivery of public benefits.
Increasing coordination
In order to meet the ambitious goal of equitable and ethical digital services for benefits delivery, we need more coordination across nonprofit partners and every level of government. We need shared documentation and metrics of what excellent service delivery looks like, and milestones on how to achieve it. These efforts would enable government to both build and buy digital services more effectively, and hold the field collectively accountable. We are actively working to stand up spaces for this collaboration.
We are excited to share what we’re learning, and publish our research openly, and when we can use Creative Commons licensing for data and resources. We’re also eager to learn from others who are doing this work successfully in other domains and countries.
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Ariel Kennan leads the Digital Benefits Network, building on a career in public interest design and technology. She’s worked in the nonprofit, public, private, and academic sectors.
This article was published in The Service Gazette Vol. 9, №1 in autumn 2024.
