[johnwatson11218]

If you want to know what you are up against I highly recommend - https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-Failing-D...

This book discusses the IT systems at the IRS and VA and shows the kind of push back you can expect from entrenched players.

[exceptione]

I don't know the book, but I hope it isn't yet another complaint about bureaucracy in need of "business thinking". I.e., how deep are they digging to find the real players? Because you can bet your home this "AI" initiative is just another instance of Elite Capture¹ here. The last thing any government needs right now is letting its policies and implementations being steered by (and made dependent on) hallucinating "AI", whose ownership ultimately is in the hands of the democracy destroying tech oligarchs.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture

[johnwatson11218]

They talk about the specific systems in terms of legacy code and how far removed government agencies are from automated testing and other modern, best practices. It has been a couple of years since I read it but I recall a part about a business process at the IRS that that people don't start learning until they have been there for about 17 years - due to the complexity. It talks about how there had been failed attempts to migrate to a new database, some of the data is now duplicated but the upgrade is de-funded so all the new code has to be aware that data may be duplicated.

I'm not sure if this book got into it but I've also read that the IRS has assembly code from the 1960s that is very optimized and only a few devs can work on it. ChatGPT knows a lot about this history as well.

[zbentley]

It’s not that. It’s a several-years-old (and still very good) book by one of the original leaders of the USDS, a group which put many of the proposals described therein into practice.