Star Spangled Geeks
To the dismay of government contractors, the United States Digital Service is gloriously hacking away in the VA and the Pentagon.
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Meet Dominic. This 35-year-old former soldier, now living in Maryland, spent over a year trying to sign up for his medical benefits. He certainly is entitled: he served in Iraq. And he certainly is in need of the assistance: for the past few years he has been periodically homeless. He hasn’t seen a doctor since 2008. A formidable obstacle has been blocking his path to coverage —the Veterans Online Application, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) website. The application was supposed to make it easy to get benefits, but instead provided a digital obstacle course that unfairly eliminates participants.
Last March, he was asked to attempt the feat one more time, on a computer equipped with software to track his clicks and mousing. He began with the dense VA home page active at that time, and stumbled his way to the initial form required to apply. “I know I’ve filled that form out at least ten times,” he remarked. This time around he couldn’t get even that far; his efforts were frustrated by an error message triggered because a security certificate did not pass muster.
“Why do I not understand this?” said Dominic. “What is the terminology they’re trying to use with this? It doesn’t make any sense.”
The interviewer directed him around that, and he was able to access the form required to sign up for benefits. But instead of opening the file, the site bumped him to a page with a few more lines of computerspeak. In this case he was able to make the translation, understanding that his browser needed an upgraded version of the Adobe reader in order for him to get the form. (Since Chrome, Safari and Firefox do not play well with Adobe, the VA acknowledges that this affects 70 percent of its users. In many cases, older computers are unable to run the most recent versions.) To upgrade, he figured he’d need a new computer. “Some people don’t have the finances to upgrade their Adobe,” noted Dominic.
“How many times have you seen this before” asked the interviewer.
“In the last year alone, I’ve probably seen this a dozen times,” he answered.
No wonder fewer than ten percent of veterans signing up for health benefits are able to complete the process online.
The VA’s digital incompetence frustrating Dominic was far from an anomaly. Dysfunction and incoherence are so built into government systems that you’d think it was a contract provision. (We know it isn’t, because vendors seldom live up to their contracts.) For many years, a sense of despondency and hopelessness permeated the world of government information technology (IT), as contractors pocketed billions for systems that didn’t work, and many agencies relied on legacy systems predating the internet. Meanwhile, the private sector makes technology accessible and routine. The gap kept widening between government sites and the ridiculously easy-to-use apps people accessed on their phones every day. The pot finally boiled over with the healthcare.gov debacle. The epic fail of the site, intended to implement the centerpiece legislation of the Obama administration, was a tire-fire political crisis, not to mention a threat to the medical well-being of millions of citizens.
Miraculously, that low point became a turning point. Some techies in the White House, including the nation’s CTO (chief technology officer) Todd Park, readied a rescue plan — recruiting a small team of coders, steeped in the best practices of Silicon Valley, to save the project. Against all expectations, it worked, and in the first enrollment period over eight million people used the site to get insurance. Building on that effort, on August 11, 2014, the White House formed the United States Digital Service. The USDS intends to replicate, assembly-line-style, the sprint that saved healthcare.gov. Using talent recruited on the basis of patriotism and the promise of impactful work, USDS tries to target similar moribund projects, or problems that could be addressed by modern tech practices, and produce stuff that works, at a fraction of the traditional cost.
To do that, the USDS needs to fan out from the White House and embed its Silicon Valley hacker recruits into the major government agencies, to get direct access to a select set of projects that would make a difference in citizens’ lives.
And it is doing just that. The USDS has worked on thirteen major projects involving eleven agencies, and claims to have saved the government many times its $14 million budget. It has charters to place full-blown teams in seven different agencies, with more to come before the end of the year. When the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) quizzed managers at the agencies on whether they were satisfied with the effort, the average score was 4.67 on a scale of 5.
A year ago, when I last interviewed its administrator, former Googler Mikey Dickerson, and deputy administrator Haley Van Dyck, they told me that the goal of the USDS was to prove itself so that the next person in the White House would not even consider dissolving the effort. Today, they feel confident that they have chalked up enough victories to make that happen. Indeed, Hillary Clinton has gone on record supporting the effort. (No word from the other candidate.) And four legislators in the House have co-sponsored the United States Digital Service Act, a bill to extend the effort through 2026.
But this is Washington DC, and nothing is simple. Even an inspirational, money-saving effort like the USDS has powerful foes. Judging from the focus of a recent hearing held by the House Oversight and Government Reform IT Subcommittee, one might think that the most pressing issue in government tech was not saving money and delivering services effectively, but making sure that the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in a given agency has total reign over his or her domain (Congress had recently passed a law granting agency CIOs more authority). Will Hurd, the subcommittee chair, fretted that USDS people might “parachute into an agency, and fix things, without the knowledge of the CIO.” (You mean they would … fix things?) One of the five witnesses before the subcommittee was the GAO’s David Powner, who testified on his lengthy report documenting that the USDS and a sister effort called 18F (housed within the General Services Administration) already had positive impact on the government — but warned of dangers if they did not submit to more control, take more care in explaining their missions, and devise accountability metrics. Especially needed was coordination with those CIOs!
But when I talked to Powner later, he admitted to me that, as far as he knew, not a single agency CIO has registered a complaint about the USDS. Zero. So why the fuss? “I think the timing [of the report] was to put people on notice,” he says.
Perhaps the real reason for the hearing’s focus centered around the concerns of two lobbyists who managed to find their way onto the five-person panel testifying. They represented the interests of traditional IT contractors, who seem to believe it is their right to overcharge taxpayers for complex computer systems that don’t work. Even though, as one congressperson at the hearing put it, those special interests are likely to view the USDS and 18F “with a jaundiced eye,” they were given the opportunity to seize on the authority issue as a way to cast doubts on the Obama tech surge. (They were cagey enough not to launch a direct attack on a feel-good effort where super-talented techies take giant pay cuts and the loss of stock options and free lunches to work in bare-bones facilities and suffer looney regulations for no other reason than to serve their nation.)
One of those lobbyists was A.R.“Trey” Hodgkins, of the Information Technology Alliance for the Public Sector, funded by government contractors like Oracle, Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and AT&T. According to his official bio, he has previously worked for the National Rifle Association, the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association, and the Association of Old Crows. Yes, this is the resume of the man Congress asked to help evaluate the mission of improving government by adopting Silicon Valley best practices. (To be fair, the “Old Crows” association has a tech bent, involving electronic warfare.) So perhaps it isn’t shocking that he suggested we touch the brakes on this effort — to “right-size” it — and that he says the “lack of clarity makes it hard to see these programs surviving a Presidential transition.” (The other lobbyist represented the Software and Information Industry Association. He also pitched a message that essentially said, “Thanks for your innovation, geeks, we’ll take it from here.”)
History shows that outside pressure does have an effect on government, and the tenor of the hearing, once it spread around the internet, let to a Twitter-storm of concern from the community supporting the administration’s efforts. It wasn’t just the predictable objections of industry representatives that drew alarm, but the observations that those objections were received so sympathetically. The GAO report and, indeed, the legislators in the hearing seemed to hit the same notes — that the missions of the USDS (and 18F) remain vague and their activities opaque.
In fact, the missions of both USDS and 18F seem pretty clear, and a steady stream of press reports in their brief history (including some from me) seem to indicate that the tech surge is anything but secretive. Indeed, I recently was granted an in-depth look at the USDS teams inside two government bodies hosting the most challenging IT swamps in the nation. First, the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs. And then the biggest agency of all, the Department of Defense.
Just what is this little $14 million boutique coding shop doing that threatens the powers that get the lion’s share of $80 billion of federal IT spending?
GETTING VETS THEIR DUE
It was August 2014, and Marina Martin was frustrated. She had been the CTO at Veteran’s Affairs for over a year. This in itself was eyebrow raising, as only two years earlier she’d been an obscure web consultant in Seattle (biggest credit: author of Business Efficiency for Dummies). Her life had taken a turn when she was asked to serve a government stint as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2012. After that year-long assignment, in July 2013, she was installed as VA’s CTO on an agency that was getting plastered for botching its key mission.
But she couldn’t hire anyone. Not a single engineer.
Since her arrival at the VA, Martin had realized that it would be difficult to buck the bureaucracy and introduce modern IT practices. “With any change, any kind of paradigm shift, there are — I’ll use the word — forces,” says VA Deputy Secretary Sloan D. Gibson. “Maybe influences is a better world…influences invested in the way things are. It’s the way it is with everything.”
So Martin dug in for the long haul. Realizing that many top VA officials preferred reading material they could hold in their hand, she worked in her off hours with some White House colleagues to create a lush brochure promoting change. “It was an expensive vision document,” she says. “And it kind of laid out what a 21st Century VA looks like.” She paid for printing out of her own pocket — $30 each, at Kinkos. Spotting DepSec Gibson in the elevator on his first day, she shoved a copy at him and said, “Please read it.” He became a close ally.
She began winning trust with small-ball victories. One of her earliest coups involved “green packs,” named after the folders used in the VA to keep hold of official letters sent to the Secretary by important people. There was no easy way to track who had them. People would roam from office to office asking, Do you have Green Pack 72? One Friday, Martin took three hours to build a little app that could identify who had the folder, via a barcode sticker. “Now everybody has a barcode scanner at their desk so when you get a green pack you go ‘boop’ and it scans it and puts it in a log,” she says. It was a neat lesson of what outsiders steeped in the latest practices could do.
She racked up more wins, like helping to start the first GitHub account in the agency, but she still couldn’t hire anyone. “We tried normal government hiring for a year and a half to bring in one engineer and we couldn’t do it,” she says.
When the USDS became official in August 2014, she saw it as a breakthrough— Dickerson agreed with her that the VA alliance was the perfect starting point for his plan to embed geeks into the agencies. So on Dickerson’s first day of work, she bugged him to help get her an engineer.
Dickerson saw an opportunity when White House chief of staff Denis McDonough asked him, “What do you need help with?” Getting someone hired in an agency would be nice, said Dickerson. McDonough mentioned that his next appointment was with the brand new VA Secretary, and invited Dickerson along. The two of them, trailed by Secret Service, walked across Jackson Place and met the new secretary. Gibson was there as well. Both VA officials became enthusiastic to get USDS people inside the agency.
“One hundred percent of our meetings go like that,” says Dickerson. “Everybody says, ‘Yes, of course, it’s our new number one priority.’ That’s the beginning of the negotiation, not the end of the negotiation.” Van Dyck explains that it’s not as if people want the USDS to fail, but in government people recoil at the very thought of doing anything different. “The culture is very persecutory. If something goes wrong it’s usually followed by a witch-hunt, and the result is very chilling. People are afraid to take risks.” In this case, there were all sorts of technicalities to say why you couldn’t hire a USDS person to work in VA — arcane experience requirements, veteran’s preferences, civil service seniority rules— that meant you would have to stick your neck out to say yes.
On August 22, 2014, things reached a head. All the stakeholders jammed themselves into the fusty wood-paneled conference room on the tenth floor of VA headquarters, a few blocks from the White House. “We just closed the door and said, “We're not going to leave until we figure out how we can hire these folks,” says Sloan.
With the hiring door open, Martin began building the “Digital Service at VA.” The early recruits cast around for the projects that would have the greatest impact. “There’s low hanging fruit everywhere,” says Kavi Harshawat, a veteran of Silicon Valley who decided after a stint at Google Plus that he’d try a term of government service. “It’s identifying what is going to have the biggest impact and what we’re gonna have the most success with.” At first they looked at the backlogged benefits process, but decided that since there were already career VA people working hard to reform that, it was difficult to carve off a discrete piece without getting in the way. (Yes, USDS recruits do try to coordinate with civil servants within their agencies.) Then they heard about the Veteran’s Board of Appeals.
This is the process by which veterans can appeal a ruling that they are not eligible for certain benefits. Currently there are around 400,000 appeals backlogged. That’s shameful. But if you look at the process, you see why. There are multiple points where files have to move from regional offices to judges to other parts of the bureaucracy. But various parts of the system don’t talk to each other. The way files move from one step to another are tracked by a hackish program called VACOLS (sounds like bagels), which helped bridge the shift from paper to computers a few decades ago. Even so, there is a lot of manual transporting and locating involved.
VACOLS itself is a symbol of the way the federal government sputters along when massive contracts for IT projects produce nothing but failures. It was the creation of a single civil servant who has worked on it for decades — even though it was not part of his day job. “He is a single point of failure, the only person who understands how to maintain it,” says Harshawat, who is in awe of the guy. “Some lines of source code are older than I am.” Recently, a Presidential Innovation Fellow assigned to the VA had been trying to revamp the system, but it really needed a total update. So a Digital Service at VA team is setting out to update it, creating a brand new system called Caseflow.
Caseflow won’t totally reform the appeals process but could speed it up considerably, by eliminating long pauses where files move from one place to another or sit somewhere waiting for the next step. There are six people on the team: three engineers, a project manager, a data scientist, and a UI designer. Last April, the team released one small piece, automating the process that previously required having a Board of Appeals employee access the virtual file to check if was ready for the next step, which had been a cause of logjams. Over the next few months more pieces will be released until eventually there’s a post-VACOLS system that eliminates a huge portion of what is now an endless trail of forms that need to be filled out, slowing down the appeals process and introducing human error.
“We launched a piece of software in one of the most bureaucratic organizations in the federal government and through that we were able to demonstrate that, hey, it doesn’t actually require six months of paperwork exercises or buy-in from senior leaders,” says Harshawat. “It’s not sexy, but for veterans waiting for life-changing assistance, getting a ruling months or even years earlier will make a huge difference.”
The second big initiative in the Digital Service at VA was a pet project of Martin’s— a consolidated website for the entire agency. When she arrived, the VA had over a thousand websites, with more than five hundred of them public-facing. “If you’re a veteran, often times you don’t know where to look to get the information you need,” says Gibson.
On Veteran’s Day last year, the Digital Service at VA launched Vets.gov, which is only a skeleton of what the finished product will be. By the end of this year, she promises, all those different VA sites will be consolidated into just one.
“You’ll be able to apply for healthcare, you’ll be able to check the status of your claim, you’ll be able to check the status of your appeal, you’ll be able to fill out online forms,” says Kelly O’Connor, the Vets.gov project manager. “There’s over five hundred forms at VA, and we’ve prioritized the top twenty based on user data.”
As part of that effort, the Vets.gov team is working on the online signup for veteran’s health care benefits. This was the process that flummoxed Dominic, torpedoing his efforts with incomprehensible error messages and superfluous demands to upgrade his Adobe. The very act of doing user research in this manner was a drastic departure from typical government practice, and when top officials saw how Dominic struggled with the sign-up process, they were mortified. “It’s been incredible to share this work with people who just haven’t seen human-centered design in action,” says Mary Ann Brody, a user experience researcher whose brother is a disabled veteran. “We have been invited to meetings at the White House with CIOs across government to share these videos and I’m, like, This is what I do. It’s not anything crazy, but it’s just so new in government.”
Fixing the sign-up process would not require groundbreaking computer science, but something that people from Silicon Valley do all the time: creating a clear front end that lets people fill out a form on the site, on desktop or mobile. “The current process is incredibly fragmented and decentralized,” says Emily Tavoulareas, the project lead on the healthcare application. She explains that the system relied on the Veterans Online Application, a fill-able Adobe PDF created in a time when browsers defaulted to Adobe. Now, most browsers don’t. “When we saw that, we realized anything being done to the current online application is a Band-Aid,” she says. “That’s when we got a product team set up to build a solution.”
“This is a turning point, a paradigm shift,” says Tavoulareas. “If you look at other parts of government, that doesn’t happen in other fields. No one is going to build bridges without structural engineers. Or build battle ships without whoever builds battleships, right? To many of us, having worked outside of government, this is incredibly simple. But up until now, we’ve been building services for government without the people who actually build services — and that’s starting to change”.
Not everybody is thrilled. But the lifers are coming around. “You’ve got people who see this and immediately get it and they say, yes, wonderful, sign, tell me how I can help. There are the people who will probably push back for quite some time. And then there are the people in the middle who just need to see how this is actually working — ‘Now that I’ve seen how easy and cheap and fast this can be, why would I do it any other way?’”
What about the complaints from the agencies that the House Subcommittee sought to expose in its hearing — that the USDS doesn’t coordinate well with the full-time IT workers in the agencies, and isn’t transparent enough?
It’s true that there are tensions between the geeks and the lifers. But ultimately what matters are the results, and there are plenty of civil servants who value their mission more than protocol. “I think people see us and at first they’re like, Who are these guys and why are they breaking all the rules?” says Paul Tagliamonte, an engineer on Caseflow. “But all it really takes is for us to really communicate and convey how much we genuinely care about serving veterans. Once people understand this they’re like, All right, let’s do this thing.”
“It was about myth-busting, about people trusting us,” says Martin. “We had to show we were going to deliver.”
I asked Deputy Secretary Sloan about problems he had in allowing these geeks in his sanctum. “The greatest frustration that I have with the Digital Services team is that I don’t have about ten times as many,” he says. “If I had three hundred, I doubt that it would be enough. So that would be my big frustration.”
HACKING THE PENTAGON
Dickerson and Van Dyck originally thought the Department of Defense would be among the last of the agencies to welcome their geeks. “It’s humongous, as big as the next several biggest agencies put together,” says Dickerson. “And it’s the military, a different culture we don’t know anything about.” But Ash Carter, the man in charge of the military, had other thoughts. Carter is a Stanford physicist who is deeply familiar with Silicon Valley and has been trying to infuse the military bureaucracy with some of the innovation found in the tech world. And he talks all the time about “thinking outside of the five-sided box.” So when he heard about the USDS, his knee-jerk response was to ask for a hundred techies, immediately.
He now has thirteen, located in the E Ring of the iconic five-sided military headquarters. The leader is Chris Lynch, a serial entrepreneur and coder from Seattle. The office of the Defense Digital Service is easy to find — just hang a left at the big wall decoration that reads “Hack the Pentagon,” and look for the door with the plaque that reads, “Rebel Alliance.” Inside you will find an office unlike any in the massive building. On the wall is a sign saying, “Get Shit Done.” And while some people are in uniform, it is the standard-issue garb of troops at Facebook and Y Combinator startups: hoodies, T-shirts and jeans. So different from military issue is the USDS that career military folks who work in the building indulge in “DDS Tourism,” dropping by the office just to peek. One day, an anonymous admirer left a stunning hand-drawn etching of the Star Wars AT-AT Walker. “Notify Lord Vader,” it says, “We have found the Rebel Base.”
Carter himself takes an almost unseemly pride in the effort. He was instrumental in assuring that the Defense Digital Service could operate freely, in what they wear and how they code. In an early meeting, the USDS worker who was going to run the presentation — a young man who was formerly the tech assistant to Mark Zuckerberg — incurred gasps of horror from the Secretary’s entourage when he appeared wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The aides sent him out of the room. When SecDef and deputy secretary Bob Work showed up, they asked for the presentation. When they were told that the key presenter had been dispatched to the lobby for sartorial malfeasance, Work blew up. This will never happen again, he said. Carter agreed completely.
“Chris and his people have their own uniform, the hoodie and the T shirt, which is great — it’s what suits them,” says Carter. “Moreover, it signifies to whoever passes them in the hall that the innovative part of America belongs with us — that these are people who are on our side.”
Lynch was originally recruited to the USDS by Park. “I swear to God, I had no fucking clue who Todd Park was,” Lynch recalls. “Then I got this email from the White House. So then I looked and I was like, Oh shit, Todd is the CTO of the country!” (Probably Lynch’s best qualification for the DoD is that he talks like a sailor.)
Before embedding a USDS team in the Pentagon, Carter okay’ed a test project, a short sprint to see how Silicon Valley coders might make an impact. They did not pick a toy task, but embarked on a challenge that had bedeviled the military for years. Unbelievably (except for in government), the DoD and VA use different systems for medical records, and the two systems get along just about as well as North and South Korea. Moving a medical history from one to the other — a pretty common task, since service people by definition become veterans upon discharge or retirement — could only be done by physically scanning the military records and sending files to the VA. But even that often failed, because the VA system was very finicky about file formats — if the field officers didn’t store them in the precise format and specify the proper compression ratio the files would not upload to the VA. Even worse, the failure would be silent, and no one would have any idea that someone’s military records were not making it through to the VA. Only months later would the failure become apparent.
This had gone on for a long, long time. “We had good people working on that, some of our best people,” says Secretary Carter. But they hadn’t cracked the problem, and indeed, hadn’t shipped anything for over a year. Nor were they thrilled at the idea of a bunch of hacker-types appearing in medias res. “At first the people who were working on the program were insulted at the suggestion they needed help,” admits Carter. “So some of them needed to be nicely helped to understand that was a good thing.”
The USDS picked Lynch to lead the sprint. His team was given 45 days to make a difference. And it was enough. “So how do you untangle that cluster fuck?” he says. “We worked with the teams to get thousands of documents to go through, wrote converters for the documents that were stalled already and had failed silently, and worked on changes so that basically people would know what was going to happen when they did these things. And we got them shipping to production every two weeks.” More important, he says, is how the outsiders got the message across to the regulars that incremental improvements can icebreak a seemingly hopeless jam. Now the DoD-VA records team routinely ships improvements every two weeks.
After that success, Carter officially authorized the Defense Digital Service in November 2015, appointing Lynch as leader. Early this year, the Secretary specified its mission: “to drive game-changing evolution in the way DoD builds and deploys technology and digital services.” In the digital era, Carter says, the DoD needs to change its mindset, away from heavy weapon systems that last for decades and towards nimble software systems that update as frequently as smart phones. “That kind of speed and agility is not a habit of [an agency] whose technological system grew up in the cold war, against an inexorable but lumbering Soviet Union,” he says. “It’s our primary deficiency, but we are trying to correct that.” (Does that mean the DDS is involved in actual warfare? No. “We don’t work on weapons but we like to work on things that are ultimately going to support the war fighters,” says Lynch.)
One of the first things out of the DDS was a bug bounty program, a contest where well-meaning hackers are invited to pound on a system to locate flaws, with cash prizes for those who uncover zero-day vulnerabilities. Lisa Wiswell, who joined Lynch’s team as a “bureaucracy hacker” after several years working on cyber-warfare at DARPA, says, “It was a way to extend olive branches to the hacker community,” but the main reason Carter approved it — along with the provocative “Hack the Pentagon” slogan — was that it was a cost-effective way to improve security, well-tested in the private sector, though never tried by the federal government. In this case, the Pentagon did background checks on interested hackers and gave them access to certain assets to probe. (The program did not extend to “critical mission-facing systems.”)
Hack the Pentagon was a huge success; 1400 hackers participated, uncovering 138 serious bugs. The DoD paid out $75,000 in bounty for crowd-sourced security work (half the cost of the program) that the DoD says would have cost over a million dollars to buy from professionals.
The DDS’s biggest current project came at the suggestion of the agency’s CIO (a good example of how chief information officers can work well with USDS teams): revamping the Defense Travel System. The DTS is the bane of a Defense employee’s existence — it’s commonly referred to as the Don’t Travel System. Responsible for $3.5 billion of the Pentagon’s annual $9 billion of air, rail and auto travel, DTS is full of glitches. Lynch himself has been stranded several times in distant cities. At 1400 pages, the list of regulations is much longer and more impenetrable than Finnegan’s Wake. Figuring out how to book a trip that adheres to all the rules can often take as long as the travel itself.
“It’s a patchwork, a clumsy and expensive system” says Carter. “We needed someone to teach us how to do it in a state-of-the-art way. So the best way to do this was to ask the digital service to give us this library of best commercial practices.”
Lynch’s team approached the problem as a startup looking for its own travel software would. From that point of view the obvious solution was to adopt a successful product that already existed and modify it to satisfy the Pentagon’s needs. They now have a contract with a system called Concur and are testing it for DoD travel. And, with some support from the top brass, they are greatly simplifying all those arcane rules. Lynch hopes to cut the 1400 pages of regs to a document 20 pages long.
Besides the travel software, the DDS has targeted a few other projects, keeping track on a whiteboard that covers an entire wall of the Rebel Alliance office. Lynch recently went to Afghanistan for a week to meet with service members on the ground, exploring ways to help their missions with software. Another project involves working on the Global Positioning System. Lynch still can’t believe that he can work on something that cool while serving his country. “I didn’t even know that we ran GPS, right?” he says. “That’s crazy shit.”
Secretary Carter expects the government’s digital surge, at least as far as the Pentagon goes, to last a long time. “I’m confident enough in the logic of what we’re doing in innovation that my successor and my successor’s successor will come to the same conclusion — this is only way to do this,” he says. “It has to be this way if we’re going to stay good.”
SERVING DOMINIC — AND THE REST
This is definitely easier to read…this is super straightforward. This is super easy. I have not had this level of ease with a website for the government before. I’d use this over anything the VA offers… this is awesome.
Those were Dominic’s remarks as the Vets.gov team showed him a prototype of its rewritten, Adobe-free version of the Veterans Online Application on Vets.gov. While the previous version, in his words, “takes you around the corner, over the meadow, and tried to lead you into a back door with spikes and IEDs,” this one seemed as easy as filling in a quiz from a Facebook post — just punch in the information, and you are signed up.
And as of June 30, vets do not have to dream about using this instead of anything the VA offers, because it became officially part of Vets.gov, courtesy of the USDS working with the agency’s Health Eligibility Center. “We have in three months [created something] that would have taken a contractor, being generous, at least twice the time, and God knows how much more money,” says Tavoulareas.
The release came a week after a blog post by industry lobbyist A. R. Hodgkins, following up on the hearing where he had earlier testified. Again he questioned USDS’s alleged lack of focus, its practice of hiring people outside the usual channel, its competition with the private sector, and even its need to exist past the current administrations. He didn’t mention any of its accomplishments, its promise of more victories, or its potential to influence the wider activities of government by introducing the methods that made American tech companies wildly successful. It’s all a matter of control, of making sure nothing goes awry, he was saying.
These criticisms aren’t going away. A new report from the GAO is coming in August, submitted to a Congress asking the same questions. And the legislators at the hearing, though expressing a desire for everyone to work together nicely, seemed determined to make sure that USDS and 18F meticulously played by the rules, even if tough oversight meant spending a lot of time documenting compliance.
No one claims a desire to be standing in the way of progress, and it makes sense for even a small agency to justify its taxpayer funded activities. But the calls for “accountability” from this nascent effort seem out of proportion to the tiny investment that the USDS represents. In fact, these demands seem very much a part of the risk-averse culture that led us to the current mess in government IT.
If hundreds of thousands of people like Dominic are easily able to sign up for health benefits when they previously could not, how much does it matter if the people rewriting the system dress casually, demand changes in the rulebook, and prioritize results rather than respecting the sorts of authority that let people down for so many years? What I saw in VA and the Pentagon was that with strong “air cover” from top officials, small teams empowered to stretch boundaries and try new approaches could break through logjams.
It won’t be easy — can’t be easy — to replace kludgy systems and moribund practices that have mired government IT in misery for years. And certainly a few hundred, or even a few thousand, USDS short-termers can’t do it themselves. Undoubtedly, there will be confusion, as career staffers make accommodations to new methods. And some stuff just won’t work out. (For instance, at DDS one volunteer told me about an exciting project she was working on — but during the fact-checking process for this story, I learned it was scrubbed.) But in its two years of existence, United States Digital Service has shown that control and authority may not be the solution to effective government IT projects. Sometimes it takes a rebel alliance.
Now all the USDS needs is to make sure the lobbyists and those allied with them can’t “right-size” it out of existence.
“We at least have one thing going for us,” says Dickerson with a sly smile. “The government being the way it is, it takes ten times more effort to get rid of something than it does to create it in the first place. And it took a tremendous effort to create this in the first place.”
