Trump’s new tech agency sparks sense of uncertainty
A new White House office unveiled by the Trump administration has left two Obama-era federal tech agencies, both heavily staffed with Silicon Valley talent, facing an uncertain future.
The Office of American Innovation is designed to combine the “best ideas from government, the private sector, and other thought leaders.” Among its plans: reimagining the Department of Veterans Affairs, remodeling government workers’ training and providing broadband Internet service to every American. It aims to modernize the government’s approach to technology and data, and is seeking the counsel of the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Tesla
CEO Elon Musk.
“The government should be run like a great American company,” White House adviser Jared Kushner, the sonin-law of President Trump who will lead the office, told the Washington Post.
But the government is already at work on some of these projects: The U.S. Digital Service, part of the Executive Office of the President, includes training government workers in its mission and has projects under way that benefit veterans. 18F, housed within the General Services Administration, is bringing open source and other software techniques from the technology industry into government agencies. And the Federal Communications Commission released a National Broadband Plan in 2010 designed to spread adoption of fast Internet connections.
Under Trump, those existing agencies have gotten little mention, while the new office has been closely associated with Kushner, whose influence with the president seems to be on the rise.
“The devil is in the details of this thing,” said Andrew McMahon, the creator and former administrator of 18F. “Are they setting up an office to be a public affairs machine, or are they actually going to do the hard work of actually making the government run better?”
White House promises to deploy tech for the betterment of America are nothing new. As candidates in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore released an 18-page position paper titled “Technology: the Engine of Economic Growth.”
The plan made technology experts “giddy with excitement,” the New York Times reported after their election.
In 2004, President George W. Bush released a technology agenda, complete with a typeface straight out of “Star Trek,” that promised better job training and universal broadband access.
But nearly three months into the new Trump administration, plans for a digital overhaul of the government remain little more than a White House press release. The government has neither a chief technology officer nor a permanent head of the U.S. Digital Service. Kushner is also the president’s adviser on relations with China, Mexico, Canada and the Middle East. And Trump has reportedly questioned the need for Kushner’s new office.
Despite the uncertainty, Matt Cutts, Digital Service’s acting administrator, welcomed the office as an opportunity to further the work of the organization on an executive level.
“I’ve been very heartened by the support that we’ve gotten by the new administration,” Cutts said. “And we see with the announcement of the Office of American Innovation, that they see how top talent with a nonpartisan approach can improve the government.”
Mikey Dickerson, Digital Service’s former administrator, left in January. He said he’s skeptical of the new office and will “assume it’s nothing until proven otherwise.”
When Dickerson was the agency’s administrator, he said he met with President Barack Obama at least once every three months and sometimes as frequently as twice a week. Cutts declined to say what meetings he had, but said he has received a “positive indication” that the administration is open to working with the agency.
The U.S. Digital Service and 18F were the outgrowth of a mutually beneficial relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley that sprang up during Obama’s administration: Software engineers modernized the government’s inner workings, while former politicos left the capital and brought their government knowledge and connections to tech companies such as Facebook, Airbnb and Google.
“Silicon Valley is its own world, and most people have not considered how their skills can serve the greater good,” said David Kaufman, who worked at Google and a startup before leading public engagement and communications for Digital Service. The agency, he said, “really stumbled on a special group of people.”
But now, many worry how both Digital Service and 18F will continue to attract the likes of Kaufman and persuade them to uproot their lives and work under an administration that often clashes with the ideals of Silicon Valley.
Trump’s victory was a bleak surprise for those in the federal tech wings who supported Hillary Clinton. Several former Digital Service members said some employees left as a result of the election, while others could separate their work from politics.
Cutts, well-known for his work on the Google search engine, initially came to the U.S. Digital Service for a three-month stint last summer. He decided to stay after the election to provide the organization with “some consistency,” he said.
The popular engineer’s decision to stay has been considered a saving grace for the agency’s ability to recruit people. But he is just the acting administrator, and his plans are unclear.
In January, the new administration put a hiring freeze on executive-branch employees that affected Digital Service’s ability to recruit employees to work with certain federal departments. The freeze was recently lifted.
David Eaves, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who specializes in the government’s use of technology, said Trump’s new innovation office could be a way for the administration to continue attracting the engineers, designers and product experts it needs.
Both Digital Service and 18F rely on a “tour of duty” model, where employees typically serve only a short assignment in the government before returning to the private sector. As workers come and go, the White House will need to continually fill roles — or lose technical expertise.
“They do have a fixed amount of employees, and they need to attract people to replenish the attrition,” Eaves said. “I do think that (the Office of American Innovation) is an effort to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to be working on nonpartisan stuff.’ ”
During her brief stint in the White House, Janine Gianfredi, who left a job at Google last year to join Digital Service, said she quickly realized the government does not have the luxury of playing out the Silicon Valley mantra of “moving fast and breaking things.”
But, she said, that shouldn’t deter people from the tech sector from embracing the agency’s mission to “improve the American experience.”
“I think the tech industry feels some really healthy constituent ownership of the (Digital Service) and 18F, in a really good way. People really believe in the mission,” Gianfredi said. But “this work takes time.”
“The devil is in the details of this thing. Are they setting up an office to be a public affairs machine, or are they actually going to do the hard work of actually making the government run better?” Andrew McMahon, the creator and former administrator of 18F, shown at left