See how Jennifer Pahlka develops this series of paragraphs:

The crisis in unemployment insurance during the pandemic led to lots of questions about why these systems hadn’t been modernized in recent decades. Agency directors around the country blamed governors and state legislatures for not funding modernization. Legislators blamed their predecessors for inaction, vendors for their high price tags, and the agency directors for not putting forward credible modernization plans before the crisis hit. In fact, when Marina and I started our work, California’s EDD was theoretically just weeks away from awarding a modernization contract that it had been working on for ten years. With the EDD in the spotlight, the legislature paid particular attention to this pending contract and noted, with horror, that the modernization effort was projected to take another eleven years.

The legislators were understandably upset, but it’s odd that they seemed surprised. Their state had spent ten years and over $500 million on a system to connect the courts with a common document management system—and then scrapped the entire effort. It is also working on a modernization of its financial information systems that started in 2009 and has grown in cost to over $1 billion. As of 2022, it remains unfinished. The EDD’s IT modernization timeline was not exactly an outlier.

It wouldn’t be an outlier in federal government either. The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs has been trying since 2009 to modernize and consolidate the systems that handle visa issuance, passport renewal, recording births abroad, and other services. It first projected a 2016 launch date, but as of late 2021, the bureau still had not expanded that pilot and the other components still had not launched. A report by the Office of Inspector General’s best estimate is that, as of mid-June 2021, the cost for ConsularOne ranged between $200 million … and $600 million.”

The ever-slipping timelines are pretty standard. In 2000, the IRS announced a plan to replace one of its core systems, called the Individual Master File (IMF). Then in 2019, the agency’s CIO stated that the project was too broad and complex and that the focus would shift to updating only some parts of the system. In 2021, the IRS gave a new date for retiring—or perhaps mostly retiring—the IMF: January 2030.

Pahlka, J. (2023). Recoding America. Metropolitan Books. (pp. 33-34).