What I Learned and What Lies Ahead: Reflections on My Time in Government (It’s not over yet!)
In December, I celebrated two years since the day I clicked “send” on my application to the United States Digital Service.
After that moment, time has moved so quickly that I haven’t had an opportunity to look back on how I got here, or forward on what I have yet to do. With 2017 coming to an end, and 2018 lurking around the corner, now feels as good a time as any to reflect.
I have always had a hard time describing what I do. I am a generalist. I was once a procurement specialist for the federal government, ran sales and marketing teams for tech companies, started a small composting business, and consulted for startups looking for government grants and contracts.
When I first applied to the USDS, under the skill section, I typed in, “making shit happen,” and clicked send. A box popped up, “thank you for submitting your information to the White House.” My chest got tight and I started to feel lightheaded imagining someone in White House HR reading my use of the s-word and moving my application to the bottom of the pile. Two weeks later, despite that moment of shortened breath and increased heart rate, an email popped up inviting me for an interview.
The subsequent details of interviews and the hiring process felt pretty standard. It is government, so background check and peeing in a cup are expected. When it was finally over, I received an official offer letter and started planning my move. The only thing missing was clarity on exactly what I would be doing. At this point the work of USDS was still very much shrouded in secrecy. This was before the Wired article, before the official USDS.gov site, and the only insight I had was Haley’s TED talk. I knew I was hired on as part of a team focused on technology procurement related issues, but what my day to day would actually look like was still unknown.
Unsure exactly what was in store, other than an epic adventure as a White House employee surrounded by some of the brightest minds in technology, I packed up my horse, dog and daughter and travelled across the country to start a new journey at the United States Digital Service.
No one could have prepared me for the work that would be waiting when I arrived at USDS. The wins and losses I found have been simultaneously the most challenging and rewarding that I am ever likely to experience.
Work at USDS is unlike anything else. It is a tight knit group of some of the smartest people you will ever meet all working towards a common goal of improving government services for the American people.
You might think that with a little White House aircover and a gaggle of super smart technologists, fixing government tech issues would be an easy thing to do. I mean, anyone can build a website, right? Au contraire. Trying to make changes in agencies with trillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of people requires precise action and a strong sense of how money, people, processes, and legal requirements fit together. Making lasting change requires bringing in expert teams of engineers, designers and product people and coupling them with civil servants who are frequently roadblocked by the bureaucracy and anxious for help. This partnership is crucial to success. These career feds have been here longer than any of us and will be the ones driving the momentum when we are gone.
Ever heard of imposter syndrome? I hadn’t until I started at USDS. The first six months I couldn’t help but think I had somehow falsified all the work I had ever done and was mistakenly hired. My imposter syndrome seemed to linger a little longer than others. Perhaps because my skillset doesn’t quite fit into the traditional engineer-design-product buckets. It took a lot of exploring and mentoring for me to figure out the value I added for USDS teams. The other day when someone asked me what my superpower is, I blurted out an answer, in the moment not realizing how true it was, “seeing the moving parts in large complex organizations.” Finally I could say in a single sentence the value I brought to the USDS mission and what I add.
At almost a year and a half since my cross country move, I started grappling with a potential transition back to Arizona and out of the Digital Service. I was missing my family, the desert and quiet days not dictated by complex bureaucracy. That decision was put on hold in September of this year, when I was asked to consider taking over the role of Director of Digital Service at Health and Human Services.
During the month before I made this decision, I spent many days pondering existential questions and soul searching about what I wanted out of my career and my time in government. I was feeling restless and anxious to start a new project or get swooped up by a company where my earning potential wasn’t capped by legislation. Outside of just my career, this job had taken a toll on parts of my personal life that I wanted an opportunity to get back. I had let go of relationships, my morning hike in the desert, warm enough weather for swimming in December and the community support that I needed as a single mom.
I knew how challenging the new role would be. My days would be spent managing a high functioning team of brilliant people, across multiple projects, and interfacing with the highest layers of government leadership. I would be inheriting the role from someone who had become my mentor, who had challenged me in all the right ways, and who had built this team, our projects and the relationships that let us be succesful. I was as scared of failure as I was of the stress that would come with the job.
Helping systems change is hard work. It requires a tremendous amount of empathy, ruthless truth telling, and knowing that many people are not going to agree with you — and will be vocal about that disagreement. For any human, no matter how strong, these things are a heavy weight to carry.
As my soul searching continued, I reached the conclusion that my time in government wasn’t done. With the support of an amazing team and my family and friends, saying yes came easier than I thought it would. There is still work for us to do (a never ending list, in fact!), there is still time for us to make change, and there is still opportunity to make the Federal Government work for the American people. I knew that I was uniquely positioned to assume this role and make a positive impact and because of that, I was willing to continue to leave my desert life on hold.
As part of this decision, I needed to tightly scope personal goals for my remaining time in government. Knowing that burnout factor can run high in these jobs, I needed a connection to the outcomes I wanted to see. On days when I am fighting with one of 26 help desks just to get my email to work, or filling out endless amounts of paperwork, I need a reminder of why I am here. I settled on three key problems that would get me out of bed and into an office each morning:
1. You, your delegate and your physician still can’t easily access all of your medical records.
2. The average life expectancy is dropping because of opioid related deaths that include our family members, friends and neighbors.
3. America still has the worst maternal death rate in the developed world.
These are all huge problems to tackle, and they each require more than intervention by the federal government. The solutions lie somewhere between multiple federal agencies (plus state and local governments!), a number of complex systems, even more complex laws and regulations, and a critical dependency on the free sharing of data.
Right now, there is tremendous opportuntity to start identifying solutions or potential paths forward. Working with the brilliant minds of the Digital Service at Health and Human Service team and the subject matter experts across Health and Human Services, I look forward to starting to chip away at some of these issues. From reducing clinician burden so time can be spent caring for patients, to encouraging various agencies and entities to release more of their data using modern technology for researchers and innovative companies, or helping show how we can use data to drive decisions around how government serves and it’s end users and regulates industries, the opportunities to make a difference are limitless.
I am spending the last days of 2017 reflecting on the lessons learned over the last year — the landmines, the opportunties to use current momentum to drive forward — and to celebrate the success we have seen and have yet to see.
Cheers to an amazing year and to all the opportunity that lies ahead in 2018.
