[coldnebo]

In my mind, refactoring public policy is going to be like refactoring business processes in enterprise code.

The perception is that all these "horrible" duplications and inefficiencies exist.

The reality is that the duplications are actually slightly different business cases that are are difficult or impossible to generalize (it was easier to copy/mutate) and that seemingly irrelevant code has potentially far reaching and damaging consequences (oh, that was important?)

The essential problem is that we look at these individual lines of code instead of realizing that they grew as part of a dynamic system.

Refactoring code isn't a good analogy.

Try refactoring DNA.

It becomes quite tragic (or hilarious) when teams try to simplify such systems and instead end up breaking lots of business process that was ugly, but worked.

DNA/evolution is orders of magnitude more messy than that, but it gets things done more safely and efficiently than some refactoring efforts I've seen.