10 records

Cases

Governance projects, recorded against a common set of fields.

• Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)UnverifieddraftA US federal effort begun in 2025 to cut spending, headcount and process across the executive branch. Recorded here as a stub only; the analytic fields are deliberately empty rather than guessed.
• Dutch childcare benefits scandalUnverifieddraftThe Dutch tax authority used risk-scoring, including nationality as a risk characteristic, to detect childcare benefit fraud. More than 20,000 families were wrongly accused, with harms running to bankruptcy and family separation. The Rutte administration resigned in January 2021.
• India StackUnverifieddraftA layered set of national digital public infrastructure built on the Aadhaar biometric identity number, extending to payments, document exchange and consented data sharing. Still operating, and still contested.
• OGASUnverifieddraftGlushkov's proposed All-State Automated System, a national computer network for managing the Soviet economy. Repeatedly funded in fragments, never built at national scale, and defeated by ministries unwilling to make their own numbers legible to the centre.
• Project CybersynUnverifieddraftAn attempt to build a real-time cybernetic management system for Chile's nationalised industries under Allende, designed by the British cybernetician Stafford Beer around his Viable System Model. It combined a telex network, statistical alerting software and a futuristic operations room. It was ended by the 1973 coup before its claims could be properly tested.
• RobodebtUnverifieddraftAn Australian scheme that raised welfare debts automatically by averaging annual tax data across fortnightly reporting periods. It was found unlawful, settled for around 1.8 billion Australian dollars, and was the subject of a royal commission that reported in 2023.
• System Risk Indication (SyRI)UnverifieddraftA Dutch government system that cross-linked data held by tax, benefits and employment agencies to score neighbourhoods for likely fraud. The District Court of The Hague struck down the legislation behind it in February 2020 as incompatible with the right to private life.
• The Fulton Report on the Civil ServiceUnverifieddraftAn official inquiry that attacked the cult of the generalist amateur in Whitehall and recommended professionalisation, specialist career structures and a civil service college. Largely unimplemented.
• The Portugal gameUnverifieddraftA CivBench run in which the agent, playing Portugal, built a leading diplomatic position, then spent fifty turns and two nuclear weapons stopping a rival's culture victory while losing to that rival's diplomatic one.
• X-Road and Estonian digital governmentUnverifieddraftA decentralised open-source data exchange layer allowing Estonian public and private databases to interoperate securely, underpinning a national digital identity and near-universal online public services. Built incrementally from the early 2000s and still running.