In schools, e-textbooks, online Zoom classes, and email chains have revolutionized how education works; in the greater world, remote work has taken industries by storm. As a consequence of technological advancements, including networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has digitized many facets of life and moved online.
This includes government services. Before global digitization, government was mostly, if not completely, serviced in person. Today, however, citizens can renew driver’s licenses or pay their taxes entirely online without ever having to send mail or set foot in an office.
This process has not reached the world equally. Organizations like the World Bank Group and the United Nations have collected information and ranked nations around the world on the speed, availability, scope, and accessibility of online government services. The United Kingdom, South Korea, Denmark, Singapore, and other notable countries have dominated government services in the last few years. The United States, on the other hand, has struggled.
According to information pulled from the United Nations E-government Knowledge base, the U.S., at the turn of the millennium and the decade following, was one of the world’s leaders in e-government, ranking consistently around 0.90 on the United Nations E-Government Development Index (UN EGDI), which goes from 0 to 1. This isn’t surprising. The U.S., starting with the invention of the first modern computer, has led the world in digital technology due to a risk-taking work culture, world-class research universities, and a large and willing economy, which led the U.S. to innovate in E-government and online services.
For the 2024 UN EGDI evaluation, the U.S. sat at 19th place, with a comparable e-government quality to nations like Bahrain and Ireland. The inherent quality of e-government has not dropped; 2024’s evaluation graded the U.S. with a score of 0.92, similar to 2004’s score of 0.91. The issue is that innovation has stopped. Denmark, which in 2004 had a similar score of 0.90, now sits at 1st place with a score of 0.98 in 2024, just a few steps shy of a perfect online government system. Singapore went from a score of 0.83 to 0.97 in the same time.
Why the difference? As the digital world has upgraded, the U.S. digital infrastructure hasn’t. The major hits to the United States’ UN EGDI score come from accessibility. First of all, internet access between urbanized and rural areas still struggles in many parts of the U.S. compared to nations like the U.K. and Australia, both tied for 7th in 2024. The U.S. online system is also much more decentralized and thus disorganized compared to the more focused and streamlined systems of other nations, such as the U.K. or Australia, causing users to become tangled in a maze of URLs and links that loop and end without reason.
The U.S. has a much larger population and larger area to cover with e-government compared to small nations like Singapore and Denmark, which impedes online service quality. Then again, the U.S. has a particular advantage when it comes to technological advancement, particularly due to a spendy military research and development focus, which raises the questions as to why Danish or British government servers are any better.
E-government in general brings almost only benefits in time, money, convenience, and waste. The United States’ online system is effective, but, compared to the rest of the world, which it once pioneered online government in, has fallen behind, partly due to a lack of initiative to improve. The country has many differing priorities and perhaps e-government quality is not one of them today. But, as time goes on and service around the world improves, perhaps the U.S. could take a step back and review where it stands in technology and research with the world.