Making Government Work for People: Putting Life Experiences at the Center of Policy and Service Delivery

A major challenge for government in serving the public raises this question: how can agencies organized around programs engage with people whose needs are organized around their lives? A new parent seeking health coverage, food assistance, and job-protected leave may need to work with five federal agencies, each with its own forms and rules and often its own state or local partner. A disaster survivor may describe the same damage on multiple applications. As the report notes, a new parent can have up to 17 different agency touchpoints.

The authors bring rare firsthand experience to the topic. Boland served as the first federal customer experience lead at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and drove the Life Experiences Initiative from 2018 through mid-2024. Schulman was the senior policy official whose portfolio included the OMB customer experience team from 2023 to 2025. Their account draws on that work and on a March 2026 convening, co-hosted by New America’s New Practice Lab, the Federation of American Scientists, and the IBM Center, where more than 40 people who helped to shape the effort reflected on lessons learned and future models.

The report traces the initiative from its roots in 2018, through its expansion via a 2021 executive order, to formal implementation across five designated life experiences: having a child, recovering from a disaster, facing a financial shock, approaching retirement, and navigating the transition to civilian life. The effort ultimately engaged 36 government agencies and 34 states and territories.

The authors present several key findings. First, tangible projects build the most durable credibility. Specific, explainable fixes—such as integrating the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) with Internal Revenue Service data, changing Medicaid renewals, and creating a kit for families with newborns—lasted in ways that pure process reform rarely did. Work that leaders could explain in a single sentence often survived budget cycles and staff turnover.

Second, structural gaps continue. Accountability in the federal government runs vertically by agency, which leaves cross-agency priorities without a natural owner. Teams improvised funding, staffing, and legal pathways project by project, and many perceived legal barriers turned out to reflect siloed culture rather than statutory requirements. Personal relationships often stood in for institutional infrastructure, so when key people left, the connective tissue left with them.

The report offers several concrete recommendations for leaders, including:

• Start with one life experience and prove the operating model.
• Clearly designate who is in charge.
• Build the funding and data foundations before the work begins.
• Institutionalize shared infrastructure.
• Build in learning from day one.
• Engage Congress as a partner from the start.

The authors also look further ahead, asking how government might organize around what people intend to do and anticipate their needs, following global models like those in Estonia and Singapore.

This report builds on a sustained body of IBM Center work on human-centered government and service delivery, including Applying Design Thinking to Public Service Delivery by Jeanne Liedtka and Randall Salzman and, most recently, The Prerequisite: Human-Centered Design as Infrastructure for Government Service Delivery by Mark Lerner and Reilly Martin. Boland and Schulman’s report complements and extends this series by examining how government can organize services across agency lines around the moments that matter most in people’s lives. The authors bring insight to help improve government services in a way that can improve public trust.

We hope this report will offer value to a broad audience, including senior leaders setting management priorities, agency executives responsible for customer experience and service delivery, congressional staff shaping the statutes behind these programs, and the state and local partners who deliver many of these services directly.