Backchannel Goes to Washington
--
Hi, Backchannel followers! I wanted to flag some stories we’ve done this week about an important and fascinating subject: reforming government information technology.
Don’t yawn! This is juicy stuff! Remember the debacle when the healthcare.gov website almost tanked the Affordable Care Act…hell, it almost tanked the entire Obama administration. People were calling it “Obama’s Katrina.” People wondered, with good reason, why a country that produced Amazon and Google couldn’t pull off a website that let people enroll for health insurance. Those in the know understood that this incompetence — hundreds of millions spent for systems that didn’t work — was business as usual for government IT.
But then something amazing happened. A small team, recruited from the segments of the tech-sphere that actually did work (like Google, or Obama’s election campaign) worked overtime to try to fix things. And they pretty much did. I was lucky enough to be one of the first to write about that team when I was still at Wired.
Right after that, under US CTO Todd Park, the government began building on that effort, recruiting our top geeks to do temporary stints in government. (I wrote about that, too, in my last Wired story.) This was the focus of a new agency, the United States Digital Service. It is led by Mikey Dickerson, a Googler who was a big part of the healthcare rescue.
It’s now almost a year since the USDS began. And also at that time Park stepped down as CTO and was replaced by Megan Smith, who had a stellar Silicon Valley career.
I set out to speak to these people to see how they were doing. We published the fruits of those sessions in Backchannel this week.
The White House’s Alpha Geeks
I first met Megan Smith in 1993 when she was working for the (now legendary) startup General Magic. She later became a key executive at Google, known for deep technical knowledge, great business sense, and a strong advocacy of inclusion in a tech industry that is alarmingly homogenous. She brings those skills and more as the US CTO. I also knew Alex Macgillivray (aka AMac), her deputy, as a strong supporter of free speech and strong cryptography at Google at Twitter. So it was great to catch up with the two of them as they explained their agenda of using government to spur tech hiring (particularly in the service of diversity) and to promote transparency in police departments with open data.
I also had a great exchange with AMac about cryptography. I was curious what it was like for a guy with cypherpunk inclinations to be part of the government now. Check out the interview for what he told me.
Another key moment: when Megan talked about the paucity of women VC partners, I asked what the government could really do about it. A bully pulpit? “Less bully, more convening,” she said. And then she told me what the president was actually doing about it.
CLICK THIS TO READ THE INTERVIEW
Stock Options? Don’t Need ‘Em! I’m Coding For Uncle Sam!
How big a boost can we get by reforming government IT with Silicon Valley style production? Well, let’s see. In newly released figures, the government says that constructing the original enrollment system, known as the Federally Facilitated Marketplace operating system, cost $200 million and would have required $70 million a year to maintain. The new version of the site, revamped by United States Digital Service engineers from Google, Y Combinator startups and other commercial tech outposts, cost $4 million to produce, with annual maintenance costs also $4 million.
Mikey Dickerson, head of USDS, and his deputy Haley Van Dyck share plenty of eye-popping stories like this.
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THIS. I PROMISE YOU IT’S WORTH YOUR TIME!
A Government Techie’s Promise on Improving the Immigration User Experience: Yes, We’re Serious
In this short companion to the USDS interview, another co-founder of the agency, Vivian Graubard, talks about how her team revamped the onerous visa process, the bane of immigrants and visitors. She describes how adopting the UI conventions of modern Internet sites — like Amazon, or a zillion startups — was a key to this. And she also explains why this project is very, very pesonal for her
One thread that ran through all these discussions was that none of this might have happened had it not been for the utter disaster (and subsequent triumph) of Healthcare.gov. In an exchange I had with Mikey that didn’t make it into our edited interview, I wondered whether the White House might now conclude that the original train wreck of the healthcare website might have been a good thing — after all, it became the impetus for a push that might finally resolve decades where the nation wasted billions of dollars on tech systems that didn’t work. Recalling the pain of those weeks where the White House tech effort was a punching bag for jokes and worse, he said plainly that he did not expect that the administration would ever say that.
“Well okay,” I replied. “But maybe a future administration?”
“A future administration?” said Mikey. “You bet.”
Hey, I’ll say it myself. Obama’s Katrina might have led to one of his greatest accomplishments. Read these stories to see why.
Best,
Steven
