It’s been 5 years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. From my notebook, I found a brief presentation I gave at Code for America in April, 2020 about that first month of the pandemic and the positive impact that GetCalFresh had during the initial lockdown and economic turmoil. There’s a contemporary postscript at the end too.

The idea of flattening the curve is to create time and space to build up the system capacity and avoid a catastrophic failure leading to greater social disruption and deaths.

Within the social safety net, like the healthcare system, there is a limited systemic capacity to help people. Within the social safety net, catastrophic failure is not only that people aren’t able to apply for or receive benefits because the systems to receive and process their applications are overloaded, but also that they lose trust in society and government entirely as a result.

Demand for CalFresh / SNAP / Food Stamps has massively increased over the past month. Our digital assister, GetCalFresh.org, has seen 6x the number of applicants, with a peak of over 9,000 applications per day.

The government and their contractors are beefing up the capacity of their own systems to deal with the increased volume but it’s taken them several weeks to marshal those resources.

During this time period of massive demand, these government-managed systems have suffered, leading to client-facing error messages, timeouts and service degradations.

GetCalFresh, independently operated by Code for America and funded by CDSS (California Department of Social Services) and private philanthropy, has been online, stable and accepting applications this entire time, giving CalFresh applicants a path for submitting their applications regardless of the stability or availability of the underlying government systems. GetCalFresh is able to accept and hold those applications until they can be successfully processed through the government systems, once their outage is fixed or during non-peak usage times like overnight.

GetCalFresh is a fantastic resource for Californians. And we’re seeing heavy promotion of GetCalFresh, likely because of the quality and stability of our system.

GetCalFresh is now assisting two-thirds of all statewide CalFresh applications.

And we’re maybe starting to see the government systems stabilize. Over the past 3 days we’ve observed a decrease in error rates and an increase in stability when interfacing with these government systems, which should also be comparable to how applicants would experience these government websites too. This implies that the government is successfully growing their capacity to address the increased volume of applicants.

GetCalFresh has been a critical resource in ensuring that people-in-need can get safety-net resources during this unprecedented pandemic and maintain trust between themselves, society, and government. 👍

Postscript (2025)

Here we are, 5 years later. Of what I remember of putting this presentation together, it came of a desperation to find a story, a meaning, to the grief and fear and exhaustion of that first month. It creates a narrative arc: that things were fucked, and through the specificity of our efforts, they became unfucked. I believe that discovering the tidy stories in what we have done is inarguably a necessary comfort. And such stories are, inarguably too, inadequate at giving certainty to what we must do next.

I’m immensely proud of what we accomplished during this time. It strengthens my conviction of what small, durable, cross-functional teams, supported by stable, well-funded organizations with long-term goals, can accomplish together. And every act and decision I see leading up to that, during the good times: every boring technology decision, every generalist full-stack hire, every retrospective and team norms and career ladder conversation… it was worth it, because we performed how we had previously practiced together: exemplary.

And what the fuck! I have to reflect on this in the contemporary context of DOGE and the gutting of 18F and USDS and everyone else and any sense of stability or generative capacity in our federal government and the trickle down it will have everywhere. My original presentation is rather bland in calling them “Government Systems” but in reality these are systems that have already been outsourced, for decades, to private enterprise. They fell over, badly. And us, some stupid nonprofit geeks playing house in silicon valley, we happened to be there to hold things together for 60 million Californians until the safety-net could be stood back up again. Whatever the fuck DOGE is doing is bad. To face the dangers of an uncertain world, we need more capacity in-house in government, not less. I am angry, still.

There’s so much more that must be done.