Access Denied Image

Public services are catching a lot of hell right now. This isn’t a new set of gripes about the need for things to work. For some people, administrative systems are burdensome necessities, others would require fewer checks and balances except for the things they care about.

Because I’m so service-pilled I’m constantly looking at different problems or examples in stories I read that are fundamentally service design problems. The latest was a New York Times story about a baby born without parents initially, who was given a computer generated name at birth.

The hospital gave her a temporary, nonsensical name that appeared to be generated by a computer, said Mr. Kilburn’s lawyer, Joshua Livingston. The name was Unakite Thirteen Hotel.

Why does it take a story in the paper of record, for Social Security workers at the local office in Omaha to issue a social security number for this child, along with a lawyer? Surely, this person spent exasperated numbers of hours on the phone and probably in person trying to fix this? How many layers of administrative burden did this father have to go through, only to be denied each time?

This is a cascading problem that exists across bureaucracies, whether it’s your local school district, some random tax office or dealing with non-governmental entities who through impose labyrinth rules and restrictions onto commerce that can be hard to navigate without luck, resources and competence on the other side.

What’s happening here is what I’ve been calling an “interface trap” - where administrative systems create unsolvable problems through their own disconnected interfaces. Each system (birth records, Social Security, health services) has its own separate interface with rigid requirements, none designed to talk to each other, and no one empowered to override the resulting paradox.

This kind of administrative deadlock shows what happens when we modernize systems without thinking about the interfaces between them. The father couldn’t get a birth certificate because he needed a Social Security number, but couldn’t get a Social Security number without a proper birth certificate. Each system was technically working “correctly” while creating an impossible situation.

This touches on what I’ve been exploring as Giedion’s Paradox - as systems become more modernized and standardized, they simultaneously become more vulnerable to these kinds of failures. The interfaces between systems become rigid control points that no one seems authorized to override, even in obviously ridiculous cases.

The real tragedy is that without these documents, this two-year-old couldn’t access health insurance or childcare - yet somehow, once media attention arrived, a solution appeared almost instantly. The system can work when someone with sufficient authority decides to make it work.

Anyone who’s ever had to tell their story repeatedly to different representatives of the same organization knows this problem. The frustration isn’t just inefficiency - it’s the complete inability to escalate beyond the rigid interface when the system creates impossible situations. Interface failures breed deep distrust of public services, and for good reason. The burden falls entirely on individuals with limited power, while agencies face no consequences for creating unsolvable problems. What’s missing isn’t more modernization - it’s human judgment points and clear resolution paths when systems inevitably fail.

Obviously we should be able to create APIs or ways for systems across the same governments or even parallel ones to be interconnected, but the lack of connection isn’t just about legacy technology. There’s actually resilience in not having everything directly connected - preventing cascading failures and creating important checks and balances. Imagine if this father could have opened a special “exception case” that would be visible to both agencies simultaneously, flagging the circular dependency. A case manager with cross-agency authority could then temporarily override the normal requirements to break the deadlock - similar to how things magically got fixed once the New York Times got involved, but without requiring media attention.

This isn’t about building some massive new government database. Think of it more like a diplomatic service between agency systems - something that can translate between them when needed and provide emergency pathways when the normal routes are blocked. What we need is a meta-system for case management that allows appropriate data sharing without requiring full system integration. Something that lets agencies interface across silos in specific cases without forcing costly upgrades across all systems at once. This would preserve institutional boundaries while creating pathways through bureaucratic mazes for situations like our unfortunate Caroline.

When administrative systems fail this obviously, it doesn’t just harm individuals - it erodes trust in governance itself. Getting these interfaces right isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about proving that our public systems actually care whether people can access the services they need and deserve. The problem here was the cascading failure was across multiple entities creating a broader “distrust” in “government” without isolating all of the points of failure. One or two people could’ve solved this problem in a phone call on the same day, instead…it took years. That’s just not acceptable, and it’s happening every day especially for poor people without access to anyone to advocate for them.

Until we design our administrative interfaces with human needs at the center, we’ll keep creating “Unakite Thirteen Hotel” situations - and people will continue to believe these systems are designed to frustrate rather than serve. Public trust requires interfaces that connect people to solutions, not trap them in bureaucratic loops that only media attention & going viral on social media can break.

Drafted while listening to BGR by The Kilans