GOVERNMENT SEEKS BRIGHTEST FROM THE TECH INDUSTRY
Tech-starved government seeks industry’s best, brightest in Colorado, U.S.
In this post-impeachment era of divisiveness and deadlock in the nation’s capital, Uncle Sam has a message for top U.S. technologists:
I Still Want You. A Washington-based nerd strike force called the U.S. Digital Service is seeking private-sector coders, programmers and software engineers to make government userfriendly for a tech-savvy public.
Launched after the 2013 crash of the Obama administration’s Healthcare.gov website, the USDS recruits the nation’s top tech talent for Peace Corps-style tours of duty to tackle the government’s most pressing information management and online security problems.
It has an increasingly rare distinction as an initiative supported by both the Obama and Trump administrations, according to current and former USDS staff and White House officials.
“We’ve been enthusiastic about USDS since Day One,” said Mathew Lira, a special assistant to President Donald Trump in the White House Office of American Innovation.
Among current projects: Enabling electronic access to health records for millions of Medicare patients and their doctors; building a robust and navigable Veterans Administration website; and securing civilian agency and Defense Department websites.
“The government is incredibly short of engineers, designers and product managers,” said USDS administrator Matt Cutts. “You can apply for a mortgage on your phone, but government services are another matter.”
The service also has spawned a growing civic tech movement assisting state and local governments as well as nonprofits.
A constant challenge is convincing well-paid private sector technicians to take a two-year sabbatical for the good of the country, despite the political climate. USDS purposely limits its tours to bring in the latest talent and let it go to stay abreast of industry.
Cutts — who pioneered Google’s search engine optimization efforts before joining USDS — cites his own conversion.
“When I started in the tech industry, I firmly believed that Google’s mission was to organize the information world,” he said.
A change of heart and pursuit of purpose led him to civil service.
“Now a lot of my friends ask themselves how they can have more impact on the world,” Cutts said. “It’s something we serve in buckets at USDS.”
Chris Calabrese, vice president for policy at the Center for Technology & Democracy, said he’s concerned about how facial recognition and other technology is being deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“That might be a turnoff for some
candidates,” even if USDS isn’t involved, he suggested.
USDS leaders insist their mission is to help career IT staff members in government, not supplant them.
Once a project is done, a code is rewritten, an application interface is created, USDS teams leave the new technology in place and move on.
A “Hack the Pentagon” program invites hackers to find security flaws. A new NATO system allows the coalition to track its efforts to support the Afghan government. New software enables U.S. troops to quickly detect enemy drones.
“Our goal is to come in, look at the problem with fresh eyes, deal with people in government who have been banging their heads against the wall, and empower those people,” Cutts said.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of U.S. states are adopting the USDS model, including California, Colorado, New Jersey and Georgia.
In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis created the Colorado Digital Service, led by
USDS vet Kelly Taylor, a onetime artificial intelligence specialist at IBM Watson who developed the Medicare health data system, and Matthew McAllister, an Obama White House technology policy adviser.
“We have hired people
“We have hired people out of the hottest tech ventures who want to make an impact with their lives, rather than help such-and-such a company make more money and sell more widgets.” Theresa Szczurek, Colorado’s chief information officer
out of the hottest tech ventures who want to make an impact with their lives, rather than help such-and-such a company make more money and sell more widgets,” said Theresa Szczurek, the state’s chief information officer.
The Colorado Digital
Service is replacing a 35year-old payroll and benefits database affecting more than 30,000 state employees. It takes small programming steps and tests them before proceeding. The iterative industry practice, dubbed agile, quickly delivers new software. It saves millions of dollars by forsaking traditional all-in-one government IT contracts that hopefully will work upon delivery.
“I got to see the U.S. Digital Service from its inception,” said Polis, who nowadays dabbles in Bitsbox coding with his son, Caspian.
“We have a great state
IT workforce, and the digital service allows really elite folks to help us address public sector problems.”
Code for Denver, one of dozens of city-based brigades, draws technicians and the simply curious on Monday nights to share ideas and develop apps and websites for the community.
“It’s an addicting feeling when you do make a small change that affects a lot of people,” said brigade cocaptain Patrick Collins, a 34-year-old digital designer who deployed an app allowing housing inspectors to get Colorado state credentials online.