Jennifer Pahlka is the author of Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists. She founded Code for America in 2010 and led the organization for ten years. 

In 2013, she took a leave of absence to serve as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama and helped found the United States Digital Service. She served on the Defense Innovation Board under both President Obama and Trump. At the start of the pandemic, she also co-founded United States Digital Response, which helps the government meet the needs of the public with volunteer tech support. 

Pahlka is the winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the David Packard Award, the Oxford Internet Institute’s Technology and Society Award, the National Democratic Institute’s Democracy Award, and was selected by Wired magazine as one of the people who have most shaped technology and society in the past 25 years. Her 2012 TED Talk, “Coding a Better Government,” has been viewed over 1M times. She holds fellowships with Ashoka and the National Academy of Public Administration.

Jennifer is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, CA with her husband, Tim O’Reilly, her daughter, and the family’s six chickens.