Have you ever heard of US Digital Services (USDS)? Neither had the Wrongologist before reading an interesting article in Fast Company, âInside Obama’s Stealth Startupâ, that describes how President Obama is recruiting top tech talent from companies like Google and Facebook. Their mission is to reboot how government works. Here is a first-person tidbit: (Brackets and editing by the Wrongologist)
Lisa GelobterâŚgot [a call] out of the blue last summer in New York, inviting her to some kind of roundtable discussion in Washington for tech leaders. Lisa had just spent time on the upper management teams at Hulu and BET. She decides, reluctantly, that sheâll go take the meeting, which includes this guy named Mikey as well as this other guy named Todd, and turns out to be in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing. Then President Obama opens the door and surprises everyone, and over the course of 45 minutes gives the sales pitch…They need to come work for him. They will need to take a pay cut…But he doesnât care what it takesâhe will personally call their bosses, their spouses, their kids to convince them. The crowd laughs. But he gravely responds: I am completely serious. He needs them to overhaul the governmentâs digital infrastructure now.
âWhat are you going to say to that?â asks Lisa.
Todd and Mikey, the pair who helped bring people like Lisa Gelobter to DC are Todd Park, former chief technology officer of the US, and Mikey Dickerson, who led a team of 60 engineers at Google and supervised the crew that fixed the Healthcare.gov website last year.
Since that time, Park and Dickerson have been steadily recruiting a team of startup-savvy techies, mainly from top private-sector companies, and embedding them in agencies of the US government. Their purpose is to remake the digital systems by which government operates, to implement the kind of efficiency and agility and effectiveness that we admire at Silicon Valleyâs biggest successes, across everything from the IRS to Immigration Services.
Dickerson has insights learned from the Healthcare.gov experience, which became an $800 million boondoggle, involving 55 contracting companies: (Emphasis by the Wrongologist)
And of course it didnât work…They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to build a website because it was a big, important website. But compare that to Twitter, which took three rounds of funding before it got to about the same number of users as Healthcare.govâ8 million to 10 million users. In those three rounds of funding, the whole thing added up to about $60 million.
OK, but Healthcare.gov may have been more complex than Twitter. Fast Company quotes President Obama regarding his big mistake in building Healthcare.gov:
When youâre dealing with IT and software and program design…Itâs a creative process that canât be treated the same way as a bulk purchase of pencils.
So, the Obama administration began USDS to recruit top tech talent to overhaul the governmentâs digital infrastructure. The point was not to sell these candidates on a career in government, but rather to enlist them in a stint of a year or two at USDS, or even a few months. For decades, lawyers and economists have worked in the capitol between private-sector jobs, so why not technologists? Fast Company quotes Megan Smith, the US chief technology officer:
What I think this does…is really provide a third option. In addition to joining a friendâs startup or a big company, thereâs now Washington.
Fast Company reports that the idea of short-term government assignments by software entrepreneurs appeals to Mr. Obama, and that it was built into the USDS design from the start. Mr. Obama:
Iâm having personal conversations with folks, meeting with them, or groups of them, and pitching them…And my pitch is that the tech community is more creative, more innovative, more collaborative and open to new ideas than any sector on earth…Is there a way for us to harness this incredible set of tools youâre developing for more than just cooler games or a quicker way for my teenage daughters to send pictures to each other?
Finally! Obama hits one nail on the head.
If the USDS team can successfully rebuild some of the digital infrastructure of Washington, it might not only change governmentâs functionality, it might transform Americansâ very poor attitudes about their government. And given our ideologically-riven Congress, success might just boost our citizensâ waning belief that America can return to a joint view of the future, but that’s a lot to ask of a group of techies.
Of course, if we have a GOP President and a GOP Congress starting in 2017, then itâll be back to technology outsourcing, since understanding high tech and the internet is only for capitalists.
Even though I agree with the thrust of this essay, as an insurance insider, I want to point out the additional complexities that separate the healthcare website from twitter. For each state, there were variables (like who was eligible for Medicaid) as well as a relatively small but important mandated benefits under state law. There are also addresses for each carrier – including details of who handles claims and who handled dividends. so the NY State DOI has this for NY Life, the Pru, Met Life etc. The complexity of it all made it impossible to gather all the requirements and data for each state in anything like a timely mannner. Itwould have been much better had each state handled their own – since they have the data.