[q845712]

as someone else is already saying -- Arizona basically already has this for DMVs. There's a parallel system of privately owned and operated offices where you can make an appointment to e.g. get your drivers license. You show up right around your appointment time, there's somebody ready to help you within minutes, and everything is streamlined / easy. Most pleasant experience I've ever had of getting a license in a new state. In that case it was never clear to me whether I paid extra for the private service or not, but whatever I paid seemed unremarkable.

[solardev]

I wish we had a trickle-up, trickle-down system where states could experiment with different strategies/providers for tackling some public use case, and the successful ones could push that up to Congress to then disseminate back down to other states.

But alas, either that never happens because nobody cares (most digital services) or it becomes a political battleground (California vs Texas in education). Sometimes I hate our system of powerful states vs centralized nations...

[Karrot_Kream]

> But alas, either that never happens because nobody cares (most digital services) or it becomes a political battleground (California vs Texas in education). Sometimes I hate our system of powerful states vs centralized nations...

You hit the nail on the head. We have a trickle down system, where states implement services differently. The reason states don't learn from each other is because of the huge culture war. Texas would rather freeze the state than learn from California, and California would rather pay 20x for public infrastructure than accept a contractor based out of Nevada due to the state's political leanings. It infects every piece of cross-state collaboration and is also why Federal budgetary politics are so acrimonious these days.