GUEST COLUMN.

Connecticut leaves approximately $3 billion in legally owed taxes on the table every year—an amount that’s roughly the size of the state’s annual Medicaid budget. This isn’t a deliberate tax policy decision; the money simply isn’t collected because the state’s tax department lacks the people, systems, or analytic capacity to close the gap.

Yet, Connecticut is actually ahead of most states on this issue. According to recent analysis by our colleague Josh Goodman at The Pew Charitable Trusts, it is one of only eight states that has even measured how big the gap is.

Across Pew's recent work, findings such as these are part of an unsettling pattern. Even when governments know what works—and the policy debate on a consequential issue has largely been settled—delivering these solutions at scale is proving daunting for states and localities. The bottlenecks are typically operational: in the workforce, data, and administrative machinery needed to carry out the policies.

In the case of state tax gaps, the path from policy on the books to revenue in the bank runs through people, and that pipeline is thinning. State tax agencies struggle to hire and retain the staff they need, according to a 2024 Federation of Tax Administrators survey, and nationally about a third of staff members are age 55 or older. “If states don’t have enough capacity—enough staff in those roles, or if they don’t have experienced staff—it could lead these tax gaps to get even bigger,” Goodman recently told Marketplace.

There are consequences beyond the balance sheet. Suicide risk reduction is another one where inadequate staffing is hampering the effective implementation of proven strategies. Almost half of those who die by suicide visit a health setting in the month before their death, which means that healthcare providers can play a key role in preventing suicide. One study of emergency departments found that universally screening hospital patients and then following up with evidence-based interventions reduced suicide attempts by 30% for the year in which the study was conducted.

But high-quality interventions don’t work without adequate staff to support them. As of 2022, about half of U.S. hospitals reported that their ability to provide suicide care interventions was challenged by insufficient staffing, and 35% could not implement universal screenings, according to a survey conducted by Pew and the Joint Commission, an independent national organization that accredits 70% of hospitals in the U.S.

Getting serious about the ‘how’

What would it look like if we invested as seriously in state and local capacity as we do in policy design? We don’t think there are easy answers to that question, but it’s becoming increasingly urgent as trust in government diminishes and expectations rise for what government should be able to accomplish.

The encouraging news is that we’ve recently seen state and local governments make progress on the “how”—when they are intentional about it. A wave of state efforts has focused on operational efficiency as tightening budgets collide with rapid advances in technology, including generative artificial intelligence. The same shift is visible in city halls: a growing number of localities now offer libraries of preapproved building plans that let homebuilders skip months of individual permit review, an administrative fix that can measurably improve housing affordability.

The results of recent initiatives aimed at improving efficiency at the state level have generally been promising and leverage an interesting mix of analog and digital tactics.

Through Utah’s Government Reform, Innovation, and Transparency (GRIT) initiative, which has emphasized empowering rather than downsizing staff, agencies are required to identify and pursue efficiency projects and to regularly report on cost, time, and service improvement metrics. The governor’s office reports saving more than 14,000 hours of staff time and $11.2 million while making $14.3 million worth of service enhancements without adding costs.

Colorado is another interesting state to watch. In January 2025, residents faced average wait times on calls of nearly 37 minutes for help with unemployment insurance, but a mix of strategies, including an AI-powered virtual agent, has reduced waits to about 13 minutes. In May, the governor’s office announced a dramatic overhaul of its entire IT system, scaling up the Colorado Digital Service model behind many of the state’s recent operational improvements. The announcement was strikingly candid, describing the status quo as “the predictable output of a system that was designed for a different era.” It’s a diagnosis that Jennifer Pahlka and others in the field have long pressed.

Pew's own work shows how much a modest operational change can accomplish. Missing a court date is usually unintentional, yet the consequences are severe: bench warrants, suspended driver's licenses, even jail. A well-designed text message reminder about an upcoming hearing is among the simplest fixes in government, and one of the most effective: A meta-analysis of court-reminder studies found that reminders raised appearance rates in 11 of 12 cases, cutting missed hearings by 12% to 53%.

None of this is glamorous work. Collecting taxes already owed, staffing a screening protocol, sending a text before a court date—these are the unshowy mechanics of a government that functions. But they are exactly where the gap between what we decide and what we deliver is either closed or left to widen.

We’re convinced that closing it is among the most consequential things governments can do to rebuild confidence in our public institutions, and that the states and localities experimenting today are showing it can be done.

If rebuilding confidence in public institutions depends less on establishing the next big policy than on proving they can deliver the ones already on the books, how much longer can states and localities afford to treat implementation as an afterthought?

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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