I Tried To Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up.
Maybe DOGE will succeed where U.S. Digital Services (mostly) failed.
When I helped create the United States Digital Service (USDS), it was not on my bingo board that it would become the U.S. DOGE Service a mere decade later. As a lifelong libertarian, the years I spent trying to make government more efficient at the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) and USDS required a lot of patience. Now I'm fresh out.
We have been making tiny, barely perceptible "improvements," paid for with years of compromise and hand-holding in endless pointless meetings, and then celebrating this as success. I can't get Alana Newhouse's description out of my head: "Half the time our institutions feel like molasses, and the other half like concrete." I'm fed up with a government that can't implement its way out of a paper bag.
Apparently most of America is fed up, too.
I care deeply about trans people, immigrants, and others who are targets of so much hate right now. I do not support the harmful actions being taken against them. At the same time, I could not possibly care less that someone plugged in a server to create a new email list without a Privacy Impact Assessment. If no one ever adheres to FIPS 140-2 again—great, it's about time we took that "kick me" sign written in Mandarin off our back. Much of the current system hurts everyone and needs to go.
When I was chief technology officer of the V.A., a highlight of my career was persuading our inspectors general (I.G.) to allow cloud computing. At the time, most of our websites had business hours, and/or ran on servers that sat in mop closets under a fire sprinkler without backups. I wish I was exaggerating. Cloud would allow us to offer modern online services to America's 20 million veterans.
I spent countless meetings, demos, and lunch-and-learns overcoming I.G. arguments. One objection became a favorite interview question for new hires: "But how do you put the cloud in an evidence bag?" I cheekily baked cloud-shaped sugar cookies and distributed them—in evidence bags—around the office. More than two years later, the I.G. issued a memo approving the use of the cloud.
But you know what? I shouldn't have had to waste two and a half years of my life on this, while millions of veterans went without health care and other benefits they had earned. People in charge of regulating computers should know how computers work. They should even be good at computers.
As we got closer to launching a modern website, I was thwarted in a new and creative way. The Department of Labor bought the domain veterans.gov—the one we intended to use—and said they would only give it to us if they got to approve every page of our website.
Not going to happen. Beyond the delays this would add, the labor department sucks at websites. Their "My Next Move for Veterans," a multi-million-dollar website that every individual separating from the military is required to use, is one of the worst you could ever see. It tells veterans their primary skills are that they can "communicate by speaking" and "use [their] arms and/or legs together while sitting, standing, or lying down." Thanks for your service. If you don't believe me, look for yourself.
The White House got involved, requiring months of in-person mediation meetings. I was never able to get the domain back. (To this day, the labor department owns veterans.gov.) How exactly are we qualified to intervene in foreign wars if our processes can't even stop one agency from squatting on another's domain name?
Getting a government position description for a technologist approved—for what later became USDS—was even worse. On my first attempt, I posted a senior role for a graphic designer on USAJOBS. Human resources selected a candidate with multiple PhDs from the University of Phoenix with zero graphic design experience. I still lay awake at night and wonder: What would they have done if I approved that hire? How many other serious jobs are held by people with zero qualifications?
It took years of back and forth, questioning and fixing virtually every step of the hiring process with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) before we hired our first qualified technologist. I recently learned, in Bureaucracy by James Q Wilson, about the "China Lake OPM Demonstration Project." Facing a dearth of technical talent, China Lake sought to streamline the process for hiring technologists into government—in 1979. How many generations should it take to update a position description?
I hope DOGE will obliterate the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) from space. This law, which was written in 1980—before computers were common in homes—requires that every government form, and every change to every government form, must go through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This office has no expertise in user research or form design. It has no ability to check whether a form is asking for information that the agency has already asked for 100 times or whether multiple agency forms ask for the same information in different ways (making it harder to reuse or cross-reference). Agencies self-report how many "burden hours" it takes to fill out their forms, and OIRA has no way to check this either.
Some of the most talented people I've ever worked with have spent years of their own getting OIRA to agree to, and write down, such novel concepts as "legal things are legal." I'm not kidding—OIRA issued guidance last year that agencies are allowed to get feedback from the public, something which has always been legal, yet threats of going to "PRA jail" for doing exactly this persist today.
As part of the aforementioned new website, I wanted to have one form "wizard" that would allow a veteran to enter their information once, and automatically apply for all the benefits for which they were eligible. OIRA told me that to do this, I would first have to submit every possible permutation of this wizard for approval—a request I would have found delicious to comply with, were there enough trucks on the planet to deliver that amount of paper.
The PRA creates dramatically more paperwork and makes agencies ask for the same information more times, and in more confusing ways. It also kills people. It took OIRA over a year to approve the addition of a single checkbox to a disability application form. This checkbox would enroll veterans with serious conditions like PTSD in health care for their disability. Instead, these veterans sat in a backlog of unprocessed paper health care applications. The I.G. of the V.A. may not know how to computer, but if you believe they know how to math, 307,000 veterans died in that backlog, waiting to enroll in the agency's health care that surely would have saved some of their lives.
The death toll continues: Transplant surgeons identified and approved life-critical form updates to the organ donation matching process in 2022, which OIRA is still sitting on today. OIRA has no medical expertise of any kind.
We were told this labyrinth of rules and regulations was required for democracy, fairness, and delivering services to a user base that couldn't exclude anyone. So we worked within the system. We respected it. We followed every rule or dutifully changed the rule before we moved forward.
The system blocked us from helping people at every turn. Yet today, it's totally rolling over in the face of actually harming our most vulnerable while people cheer on its collapse. The system is not coming to save you or anyone—because the system is not currently designed to do much of anything at all.
Let's fight for an America where you are free to live as yourself without fear—but let's not waste any time fighting to keep the status quo of molasses and concrete.
