..agency and fed-state-local IT systems and databases?

You know, some money to make government more efficient, and our lives easier? Another great story from the field. My wife is helping this refugee family. Time to get info in to get their green card. Requires lots of background info and healthcare info. Feds send her paperwork to fill out. Lots and lots of paperwork, where on every page you have to fill out name, dob, and other info at the top...on EVERY page, and if you don't do that, you get rejected. So, she does it and takes it to the local county dept of health. "oh, they (the feds) sent you the wrong paperwork, its updated and we no longer accept that form".

Why isn't there a flipping nationalized database, that all states and localities rely on. The story above, is similar to so many other things that she has run into when helping this family where you are filling out the same crap on so many ifferent forms, all that have a slightly different ask at the end. Unfortunately, those who engage with the government the most (the poor), are saddled with this type of stuff at every level. And even for the most of us, I've always said, for most of the public, the IRS should fill out your return, leave unknown stuff blank (like cap gains), and make that so much easier on all of us.

A few days ago there was discussion regarding those who run for office with no political experience. You know, it might do our government good, to have more of these people, who engage with government at the lowest levels, to actually be elected to office, as I feel 99% of our current crop is out of touch. Just like a good company that focuses on quality, it is important to get the input from those on the assembly line to be able to operate more efficiently. Current clowns in DC just want to continue throwing money at broken shit (its the same strategy we used to try to win a war in Afghanistan - except the results aren't so apparent - or maybe they are, how many trillions of debt are we handing over to future generations?) because throwing money is their number 1 solution to everything. We need a Department of Fixing Shit, with DARPA in it,to analyze stuff that is wrong, and making non partisan suggestions on how to improve them.