Governor Newsom convenes tech industry leaders to advance government efficiency and effectiveness

“The Governor’s Efficiency Executive Order is helping state government deliver better, faster service to Californians. Our partnership with CalRecycle shows how responsibly prototyping generative AI tools can save staff time, speed up public comment processing, and give experts more capacity to provide meaningful responses. This is a practical innovation that California is learning from and plans to scale,” said Director Jeffery Marino, Office of Data and Innovation

California Breakthrough Project 

Drawing on the expertise of California’s tech industry leaders, the Breakthrough Project group helps

• Foster collaboration between state decision-makers and the private sector.

• Bring innovation and new ideas to identify and address systemic inefficiencies in government processes, services, and technology.

• Generate new California challenge-based efforts to catalyze modern solutions within public services.

The group members at this meeting included Chris Larsen (Ripple), Topher Conway (SV Angel), Casey Aden-Wansbury (Instacart), Paul Grewal (Coinbase), Jason Wheeler (Midi Health), Andre Haddad (Turo), Sam Rodriques (FutureHouse and Edison Scientific), Brandon Levin (Snap), and Ernestine Fu Mak (Brave Capital).

Efficiency in action 

The latest effort by Project Breakthrough has created a new and more efficient way to process public comments. CalRecycle and the Office of Data and Innovation piloted a tool that helped process more than 1,200 public comments about 30% faster during a recent rulemaking process by identifying and then grouping comments with similar feedback. CalRecycle staff then reviewed and responded to all the public comments. With the support of the tool, attorneys and staff were able to focus on unique comments that needed more analysis.

The Breakthrough Group has made an impact throughout state government to advance the Governor’s efficient, engaged, and effective strategies, including: 

• Expediting and streamlining the state hiring process, consolidating more than 32,000 positions into eight distinct categories and merging 67 generalist job titles to cut redundancy.

• Saving $12 million through smarter tech contracts by pooling eight departments’ contracts into one.

• Making 40,000 water rights records more transparent through a simplified reporting process, reducing errors and building on the state’s process to digitize records, which are now more easily accessible to the public.

• Expanding access to the outdoors by revamping the Golden Bear Pass Program, so that Californians on public assistance can now access over 200 state parks for free vehicle day-use. 

• Saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in printing at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation(CDCR) by identifying publications that no longer need to be printed. Now, only required notices and visitor passes are printed in-house and workbooks are digitally accessible, saving over $563,000.