I Tried To Fix Government Tech for Years. I’m Fed Up.
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.Â
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
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