Quotes
Below are select quotes from interviews with people who helped create and shape the U.S. Digital Service, capturing experiences and reflections in their own words.
More quotes will be added as new interviews are posted over the coming weeks.
If you’d like to get in touch, please email hello@usdigitalserviceorigins.org
... on making it happen.
“The problem in telling the story of USDS is the myth that there is just one story to USDS. That there were five people who understood our government needed to be modernized. With USDS, there were people in the right room and the right positions at exactly the right time with the support of a president — but that doesn’t mean that our idea was novel or that we were the first people to have it. The idea that we needed to innovate in government and upgrade the way that we work with the public was not ours.” – Vivian Graubard
“The most poetic thing about the digital service is that so many people’s individual actions made it what it is. There is not one single owner of the digital service. There is not one single person that could have done it by themselves. […] It’s also the hardest case study on the planet, because there’s no one thing. There are four or five threads, including funding, people, and the right moment.” – Ryan Panchadsaram
“In the afternoon, we visited the GDS office, and I cannot tell you how crazy it felt. It was electric. […] When you walk into the office, it’s like no government tech office you have ever seen. They had what they called the ‘Wall of Done.’ They were working on gov.uk at the time, taking some enormous number of fragmented, unclear, gobbledygook government websites and simplifying the language. Taking out all of the stuff that’s about government instead of users. The energy was just amazing, an office buzzing. You’d see somebody get up, go over to one of the walls, pick off a sticky note, and stick it on the Wall of Done. You could see in real time as people were making progress from something that was crappy to something that was good.
At that time, I got so much grief about Code for America. Folks would say to me, ‘Great tech talent will never work in government.’ But when you walked into this place, it was 250 of the best tech talent in the UK. In my mind, the Overton window just swung way off to the other side. This is what could happen.” – Jen Pahlka
“Going from inception to reality in the White House often followed one of a few paths, and we took all those paths.” – Steven VanRoekel
“Marina Martin (now Marina Nitze) was one of the first PIFs. She was at the Department of Education. Ryan Panchadsaram was one of the first PIFs at HHS, working on Blue Button. Charles Worthington was in the second round. The 11 people who started 18F back in the day were mostly second-round PIFs. Some of them may have even been third-round PIFs. Any story of USDS needs to include how fundamental the PIFs were. Mollie Ruskin, a second-round PIF, was also really instrumental to early USDS.” – Nick Sinai
“What’s interesting to me are the decisions that were made at the beginning. We initially put the PIF program office at GSA. I believe GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini’s thinking was, ‘Let’s not ask Congress for money, because it will take years.’ So he put PIF in as part of the GSA Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), so that the model would mostly be reimbursable. Whereas the way USDS was funded meant that it didn’t have to be reimbursable, so there was a lot more flexibility for firefighting and crises. People tend to focus on the sexier stuff, but those budget and structural decisions are the things that really matter to someone setting up a digital service.” – Nick Sinai
“When HealthCare.gov crashed, it was also the same time as a government shutdown which means it was illegal for us to work. So I have this new job and I’m watching this horrible news. It’s hard because I feel like I could help: I’ve worked at a functioning technology agency before. I know how to hire technical people. I know how to do all this other stuff. It was shell shocking to watch tech failures snap policy in half.” – Erie Meyer
“There were times when I felt defeated and had to call Mike Bracken. He would say, ‘This is really hard and you can’t give up. You can’t concede on these fronts.’ I wanted to go home. I was so convinced that I wasn’t succeeding and that I wasn’t the right person. Mike is the one who said, ‘It’s not complicated, it’s just hard.’ I called him on July 4, 2013. I was near tears and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ He said, ‘Shut up. Yes, you can.’ – Jen Pahlka
“In the 90 days after the HealthCare.gov crisis, there was a massive sprint to create USDS. You had buy-in from the President. […] That 90-day window felt like three years. We were figuring out: How do you do the paperwork piece of USDS? How do you make the playbook? How do you hire the right people? And how do you launch it, from a press point of view, in a way that makes this thing special and a desirable place to work?” – Ryan Panchadsaram
“When did it feel like it absolutely could happen? There was this moment post-HealthCare.gov, where all eyes were on Todd Park. Todd proved that bringing in technologists and applying them to the most important problems could help, and he had an idea to scale that. One of Todd’s lessons to us was that you have to go to an agency and find the three to four other people that also have your idea, and work with them to make it come to life. Celebrate them. And give them all the credit. Because we’re going to be here for six months, and these folks are going to be here for the next five to 10 years. Todd embodies that saying, ‘No pride in authorship.’” – Ryan Panchadsaram
“What ended up happening is very U.S. government. We’re not one central place like the GDS (in the UK). Two threads formed. One was GSA saying, ‘We want to create a contracting organization called 18F, where we get people who build. We’re going to be a service company.’ At the same time, USDS says, ‘We’re going to partner with cabinet agencies and secretaries to help them in what they’re doing.’” – Ryan Panchadsaram
“It gets forgotten that, just like the HealthCare.gov project, we did not know what the story was at the beginning. It might have been a total failure.” – Mikey Dickerson
... on the realities of working on tech in the federal government.
“Tech doesn’t follow fiscal cycles, especially broken fiscal cycles.” – Steven VanRoekel
“Those laws perpetuated the inclination to leave old systems in place, rather than making incremental improvements. This is a terrible way to build technology – the private sector iterates, but government was still launching entirely new systems every couple of decades.” – Amy (Barker) Pitelka
“Healthcare.gov was the loud failure, but it wasn’t the only one.” – Vivian Graubard
“I went to my desk, met my team, jiggled my mouse, and a product that I had launched about a decade before at Microsoft was waiting for me. It was an old, old copy of Windows. The website was from the ’90s, and we had so much work to do. But I view that as some of my most valuable time.” – Steven VanRoekel
“The government just doesn’t work like the private sector. The rules of the road are different. Everyone who lives and breathes in your geographic space is your customer. The private sector is not that; you can focus on specific customers.” – Steven VanRoekel
“So it’s not just the U.S. It’s government in general. If you want users to be the thing that we’re working for, you have to fight, always.” – Jen Pahlka
“… when the technology was breaking, OMB was like, ‘It’s not our fault. It’s the CIOs.’ The CIOs are saying, ‘It’s not our fault. We don’t have the resources.’ The CFO’s office says, ‘I gave you the resources.’ And then the people working on fixing things say, ‘Well, OMB told me user research was illegal.’” – Erie Meyer
“I remember this tense conversation with the Talent team about how we needed to stop talking about tech all the time. But because the tech was the user experience, and if you can’t keep that stuff up, it doesn’t matter how good or bad the user interface is. When you start to solve the layering problems of keeping the servers up and getting a stable technology stack and making sure that the platforms all work, then you can start to think about how good or bad the software and the user experience are. It was a solid year before anybody said, ‘Okay, we probably need some designers now.’” – Dana Chisnell
“There was a big disagreement about whether technologists could review other technologists’ resumes. Everybody was like, ‘No, it’s illegal.’ But it turned out it was not illegal at all. When we unlocked that, it changed the way the VA did hiring in general. Now psychiatrists review other psychiatrists, so it totally flipped how hiring worked.” – Marina (Martin) Nitze
“I remember a guy who was probably the most senior technology leader handling this incident. He was working so hard. I could see he was so stressed and not empowered to make the calls he needed to make. He was working 80 hours a week and didn’t have the team and the talent to work alongside him. At the same time, there were definitely people in his team who were not motivated, qualified, or set up for success. It was interesting seeing such extremes in the same team.” – Parisa Tabriz
“I also thought I was going to show up and be writing code 100 percent of the time. But it was so much more valuable for me to do management consulting. The government was actually able to hire all of the talent they needed to execute successfully, but how to organize and adopt the right culture had been lost somewhere along the way.” – Brian Lefler
“Going in, I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to solve some of the technology problems since I assumed they’d have totally different stacks and it would take a long time to learn enough to be useful. But in practice, I realized it was more about navigating indecision and culture clash, and empowering the right person in the room who typically knew the answer, but didn’t feel comfortable calling it out because of rank.” – Parisa Tabriz
“The biggest outright difference was that when I advise technology companies, I am advising. I say, ‘Here’s what I think the law says. Here are some various paths forward. Here are your options and here’s what I advise you to do.’ You have to really, really believe that a thing is illegal in order to block it in the private sector as in-house counsel. The ramifications have to be so bad that it could shut the company down — you’re going to have to pay a huge fine or people are going to go to jail. In government the lawyers get to say yes or no, and that’s really rare in tech companies. We call it ‘throwing ourselves over the tracks.’ The federal government is set up such that you can’t do anything that you don’t have the authority to do. That means the default is no.” – Amy (Barker) Pitelka
“Everybody’s eyes were way too big for their stomach. And that’s something the government does over and over: find something that works once, and then immediately have the impulse to copy it 1,000 times. But USDS and breakout organizations just don’t work that way.” – Mikey Dickerson
“It wasn’t “big tech or bust,” but it was definitely, “Oh, you worked at Google on this giant complicated system? You must know how to fix complicated systems.” But there are complicated systems and then there’s Frankie — the nickname for the VA’s first system map under the Veterans Benefit System (VBS). Frankie is short for Frankenstein. When Vint Cerf, inventor of the Internet, came to USDS headquarters, we unfurled Frankie and his jaw hit the ground.” – Erie Meyer
... on the approach.
“The rescue of the Affordable Care Act Marketplace occurred, and I came back from that rescue mission and thought it could be a pattern for the USDS. One where a group of folks comes into an agency, partners with the best people in that agency with air cover from the top, and then works at incredibly high velocity to make something better.” – Todd Park
“We realized if we swoop in and fix a single thing and then leave, all the conditions are still there and you’ll be right back where you started.” – Erie Meyer
“Our fundamental focus is improving services and making people’s lives better. A report is useless unless it makes progress toward that goal. Any technical expert can easily identify the ways in which the government is bad at technology. What’s hard is fixing those problems. And that’s what our superpower can be and should be.” – Charles Worthington
“At that point, we were not great at articulating that USDS was not about technology. People thought we were saying, ‘Technology will solve the problems.’ We were not.” – Jen Pahlka
“They started to see how all of the grand ambitions of policy balance on building good, usable technology. If one component doesn’t work, we end up failing to deliver on that policy.” – Ryan Panchadsaram
“The GDS office had the piece of butcher paper stuck to the window with the middle torn out. When you looked out through the little hole, you saw people on the street. Someone wrote ‘users’ and an arrow pointing to the view hole as a reminder of who all this work is for. You had an office that was just so clearly focused on serving people, serving user needs, instead of government needs. It was right around the time that GDS put out the original design principles, the first of which was ‘start with needs,’ but with an asterisk. The asterisk at the bottom of the 26 principles read, ‘User needs, not government needs.’” – Jen Pahlka
“Congress had heard about the USDS being created and saw the potential. It was bipartisan: Government tech is bad, we can all agree on this issue.” – Traci Walker
“The need to make connections between people was the bread and butter of USDS. People who joined had an intuitive understanding of how professional networks and communication worked. I can’t think of a single person in the team that didn’t have some feel for that. You had to think very carefully: ‘How are people going to interpret the meeting? How are people who didn’t get invited going to interpret it?’ Everyone knew that was the battle.” – Albert Wong
“For the first few weeks, we went on a listening tour with various department heads, because a lot of the time the civil servants there get the short end of the stick. Nobody listens to them, but they have had the direct, one-on-one experience with constituents, with the technology, and with the products. And that allows them to surface things that need to be resolved. Listening is key to understanding the dynamics of the agency you’re operating in.” – Jessica Teal
“I remember hearing a story of this mom who had two kids, and the kids basically wet their pants because she refused to bring them to the bathroom so that she wouldn’t miss being called for her interview. You could only feel that level of tension by physically being there.” – Kate Krontiris
“Nick and I went out there thinking, ‘This is going to be complete bullshit. Be prepared.’ But we walked in and they laid out their plan, and I thought, ‘Oh, cool. Why is this not all Plan A?’ They said, ‘As far as we’re concerned, it is.’ No one was paying attention to them or giving them the power to get their work done. So that’s what we did — just give them everything they needed.” – Eric Maland
“Had I not had the experience of running the FCC for a couple years before I went to the White House, I wouldn’t have been able to do the things that I did or partner with the people I did. In that job, I learned how to empower amazing federal employees and give them permission to innovate. I learned how to really use the system against itself, to fix itself. I learned that you had to build a relationship with Congress to get budget stuff through and you had to hack the Federal Acquisition Requirements (FAR). You had to find those people buried in the basement who have had great ideas for years, but have never been given permission to do those ideas.” – Steven VanRoekel
“It was very powerful when folks from tech companies came in with their experience and knowledge, but we lacked the federal expertise the career civil servants had. So it was a good union.” – Brian Lefler
“A bunch of the teams came to the same conclusions: That this was not about doing the fixing ourselves, but helping other people learn how to fix the problems.” – Dana Chisnell
“It’s easy to say, ‘The hiring process is so slow, and the wrong people get hired.’ What’s much harder is to create a way to hire in government that does work. USDS has been effective because we learned to roll up our sleeves and fix problems.” – Charles Worthington
“I think a top-down approach is often wrong. You need to have enablement. A lot of stuff is tribal knowledge. It’s cultural, it’s how things are done. Is reporting failure swiftly rewarded or punished? You need to know what went wrong to fix it. And if people are afraid of punishment, they don’t raise their hand and say, ‘My fault.’ And then you’re going to spend four hours trying to figure out what someone already knows.” – Brian Lefler
“I think it is less about what’s written on the page and more about how you conduct yourself in the engagement, the relationships you build as you write the report, and how you make people feel like they are a part of the findings. If the report feels like an external team of smart people auditing an agency, then you’re just like every other government group of smart people. The way to do it is to find the people in the agency who also want the thing to improve, and make them be the hero of the report. Let them deliver it, even.” – Charles Worthington
“One of them is relationship building, or learning to leverage relationships when you don’t have authority, only have influence. You’re not anteing up your own career, you’re anteing up someone else’s. So you have a certain responsibility to not hurt people.” – Albert Wong
“One of my superpowers at USDS previously was being able to show up anywhere. To walk into a building or someone’s office, and get face time with them and build trust. Building relationships really is the most empowering thing.” – Eric Maland
“This was part of the original vision of USDS: that folks would rotate from agency to agency. You’d work on HealthCare.gov, then you would go work at the VA, and so on. Look at IRS Direct File and elements of student loan cancellation — these are USDS-affiliated projects across the government. It’s so urgent to stand on each other’s shoulders.” – Erie Meyer
“If I was to have a theory of change, I would focus on doing a very important thing very well, and then spreading that knowledge. I do feel in our great moments, USDS enables those virtuous cycles.” – Brian Lefler
“To build the COP, I thought: What things could be done in the community of practice? What value could we add to this group of people? I thought a big part of the value was determining that you’re not alone, that it’s not just you, that this is a very weird environment and that there are lessons to be learned from the people who were scattered about. By sharing those stories, we could increase the level of competence in the group, because they would get the benefit of hearing these things before they ran into them themselves at their own agencies. And, there would be a sense of solidarity among the team because of the sharing.” – Kim Rachmeler
“When you give a presentation of what you’d discovered to agency leadership, those are the things that they remember — not this data point and that key finding. It’s the storytelling process that makes people remember what’s important.” – Jessica Teal
“People tend to focus on the sexier stuff, but those budget and structural decisions are the things that really matter to someone setting up a digital service.” – Nick Sinai
“Up to that moment, I had seen everyone in these rooms as government contractors who were here to make money, not to do the mission. But that wasn’t true at all. In that moment, my whole mental model of government service and contracting changed. I realized that I am not special or unique in my desire to come out and do good; everyone around me is here for the same reason. So maybe we could drop some of those preconceptions and work together.” – David Nesting
“I can still recite the values: Hire and empower great people. Find the truth, tell the truth. Go where the work is. Design with people, not for them. Optimize results, not optics. And create momentum. I must still care about these, because I get mad when I think they’ve been forgotten. For example, I heard that for reasons of convenience, we have reinterpreted ‘go where the work is’ to mean ‘meet the public servants where they are.’ But I meant literally. If all the work is happening in some horrific beige office building in Iowa, then you need to go to Iowa. That’s where they’re doing work. You need to see it with your own eyes.” – Mikey Dickerson
“There was no discussion about the experience the public was having with government. It was all about tech, all about data. I was like, ‘You can talk about open data all you want, but if the data is crap to begin with and it’s not a format that can be used, it’s not going to help anybody. Silicon Valley is not going to work here. It’s just not.’ Little did I know I was about to face two years of that.” – Dana Chisnell
“Ultimately, there were not that many true emergencies USDS worked on. The overwhelming majority of USDS staff probably never worked on an emergency-type problem. There was a conflation of emergencies with rescue engagements. The example I would use is immigration: The work on the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) was not responding to an emergency in any sense. However, it was rescuing an unsuccessful project engagement. Healthcare.gov, e-QUIP, the IRS breach, the Department of State security work — those were emergency response projects.” – Alex Gaynor
“They said it was going to take years to build one of the components, which was a letter production system. Meanwhile, Alex Gaynor was sitting in the back corner writing a letter template system in Python. And when they asked us, ‘How would you do it?’ Alex went up front and said: ‘While you were talking, I built your system.'” – Jeff Maher
“One of my main theories of change is ‘going second.’ I do something first, and that creates the positive peer pressure to make the change everywhere else. The VA was a huge lever: We made changes in tiny places first, and then we influenced the customer experience of the entire federal government. Now all these state and local governments are thinking about user experience, too. That’s pretty awesome.” – Marina (Martin) Nitze
“You have to construct a different isolated culture that doesn’t assimilate. USDS needed to be an exceptional culture that did not assimilate to the rest of the government around it, or it would just act like the rest of the government. The people there need to be interested in fighting fires and responding to different incentives. […] If you can maintain that mindset, then you can have people who are happy to go to a place like Ed and work on FAFSA. But it can’t coexist with people who are worrying about maintaining their relationships because they want to get a job at Ed five years from now. I let a whole bunch of things coexist that really can’t coexist. That led to the perpetual fight over, ‘Are we here to make friends or are we here to force people to change?’ Because you can’t do both.” – Mikey Dickerson
“In order to make things move, you need to understand that system, its incentives, and how things work. To make change that sticks, the top is necessary, but not sufficient.” – Emily Tavoulareas
“Spending the time talking to people, and not just coming in and suddenly giving direction. Getting to know people, hanging out with people, going out to lunch, going out to dinner. There was a lot of skepticism or suspicion amongst the different contracting companies working on HealthCare.gov. They had pieces they owned and thought, ‘I want to make sure somebody’s not encroaching on my part.’ I was making sure I was seen as helping everybody.” – Nathan Parker
“One might think that the White House could just go into an agency and tell them what to do. But we know that’s not how you build lasting, meaningful change… that’s just how you tear things down.” – Vivian Graubard
“The motto I still use to this day and I have printed in my office is the motto I established back then: ‘Break the rules, don’t break the laws.’ Because ‘the way we’ve always done things’ mentality was holding everyone back. The fact that we went in and broke the rules is really, really fun.” – Steven VanRoekel
“There have been efforts since before Al Gore to improve service in government. But at CFPB we were doing something else — not making things a little bit easier, but in fact showing up for people who lived in this country like we loved them.” – Erie Meyer
... on the people.
“People are everything. Ideas without people don’t matter. And if you get the people and the culture right, you’re going to predispose yourselves to success. As an entrepreneur, I know that the initial business plan is the least important thing. It’s going to change 80,000 times. The most important things are, “Are you clear about your mission?” and, “Do you have the team to succeed?” I also knew it was going to be a disaster if we recruited a bunch of people from the outside and beamed them in like aliens. That would fail catastrophically. Again, the pattern for success was to bring in people with expertise and experience from outside government and marry them with the best people inside government.” – Todd Park
“We want people who have excellent technical skills, but also brilliant leadership skills. You’re going to bring your tech skills and not get to use them. You’re going to use them to teach other people how to do this work. We’re going to build capacity inside government.” – Dana Chisnell
“But what Todd was telling me, which I didn’t appreciate, is that really smart, technical people are great — but getting things done in government is really hard.” – Erie Meyer
“Another thing is finding people that would fall in love with the problem and not the solutions. Folks with this mindset are aware of the context and challenges, and find the appropriate tool for the job rather than just trying to force a solution. It’s commonplace for software engineers to want to use a shiny new technology or something overly complicated, but folks that are attuned to user needs and the delivery environment are able to choose the appropriate actions and tools needed. Some days, that’s not writing code – and lots of engineers struggle with that.” – Jeff Maher
“I learned a lot coming in and being fed the ‘You’re so special. We’re so glad you’re here,’ and then peeling back those layers: ‘Oh wait, hold on. There were a bunch of people that made it possible for me to be here.’” – Kathy Pham
“It’s not about them, it’s about the group. Not the individual, but the delivery and this incredible thing. That is what I remember about that team — everybody felt exceptional. Everybody was special, but yet none of them felt special as an individual. It felt special as this whole unit.” – Chris Lynch
“The early people that arrived at USDS self-selected to do that work. They knew that it was going to be hard. They knew that it was going to be full of ambiguity. They signed up for that.” – David Nesting
“We were looking for people for whom this was not a career, but an interlude. They would go back to the tech industry. It was deliberately taking an outside culture and putting it inside the government to see a disproportionate impact in a short period of time. They were not going to become the new agency CIO. But it got muddled immediately because we had this press attention.” – Mikey Dickerson
“One of USDS’ greatest values was deploying people back out into industry and showing that there are ways to change the world other than working on Google Search or Chrome or any other number of things that touch billions of people. I never thought about going into government. When you go to engineering school, they don’t tell you to work in government. You don’t think about it.” – Kathy Pham
“I was running an organization that asked people to give a year of their lives to public service. At some point, I felt like it was hypocritical to ask that of others if I wasn’t willing to do it myself. I realized that it would be a great experience for me to walk in the shoes of an actual public servant. All of the things that you can criticize from the outside then feel very real and emotional and high stakes.” – Jen Pahlka
“Most of us come from software companies. So let’s not buy our own Kool-Aid and believe that we’re going to save everything. Let’s find things that matter, get buy-in and support, and then work on something that we are uniquely suited to have that order of magnitude impact on.” – Chris Lynch
“When I was asked for feedback about the interview, I said, ‘I think you’re going to get the wrong people. If you’re asking people to come in and be really awesome with algorithms, you’re just not going to have the right skills.’ You need people with the ability to work within organizations that don’t understand more basic technology and get people on board.” – Jeff Maher
“To this day, we still need people who deeply understand how government works. And then we need the folks who fill the gaps where we no longer have capabilities. Or maybe there are people with those capabilities inside our government, but a new person in the right role can unlock their potential.” – Kathy Pham
“I came in thinking, ‘If you all get out of my way, I can do stuff.’ After a few months, I realized I couldn’t get a lot of people out of the room because of procurement. We can’t get rid of people, we can’t replace people. That was difficult. I also realized a lot of people were capable or skilled, just not empowered.” – Eric Maland
“I probably annoyed my colleagues sometimes, stressing that if we can get somebody that can do a simple computer task (i.e. steering away from complicated coding and Linux ops questions), but also speak bureaucracy and knock down barriers, that’s the person we want. We needed to be really clear about the competency.” – Jeff Maher
“All of Todd’s policy priorities involved people: attracting technologists, entrepreneurs, and other high-quality people. Both Todd and Aneesh would find ways to attract interesting entrepreneurs and technologists to a hackathon, to a convening in Silicon Valley, to scrub in and do some work on an open-source project for the Office of Digital Strategy. Todd wanted to make that part of the official strategy.” – Nick Sinai
“That’s a piece that’s missing in USDS storytelling. You’d think the first hires magically showed up from outside government. But that was not true. A lot of us had a couple months to years of experience in government.” – Ryan Panchadsaram
“People outside of USDS did not really buy into this idea that all of the press was necessary in order to attract top talent, because the rest of the government attracts top talent without it. It also invites this question: ‘If you need all this self-serving publicity to attract the right talent, then is that really the right talent?’ I’m still not sure I know the answer to that question.” – Vivian Graubard
“At USDS I learned you can have the best people in the world, but if you put them on a project where no one cares if it succeeds, then they may not succeed.” – Brian Lefler
... on the work and the experience.
“After the first wave of USDS hiring at the VA, people showed up for the first day and it was a really cold morning in D.C. We had plugged in heaters all over the USDS office and they short-circuited our doorbell and the lock. So we lost power. The doorbell broke and the code to get in broke. When the first person arrived, I said, ‘Welcome. Please go into the basement and find the breaker. We need you to fix the electricity here on the White House campus. That is your first task.’ I asked the second person who arrived to stand by the front door. I said, ‘The electricity is out, so today you’re the doorbell. Welcome to the government.’” – Erie Meyer
“When I showed up to USDS, I thought I was going to program a computer and improve the stability of the system. But when I walked into the XOC (The Exchange Operations Center), there were 70 contractors. I thought, ‘This is insane.’ Procurement was not a word in my vocabulary at this time. It is now.” – Eric Maland
“But the computer problem is only a small piece of it. That’s the easier part to fix, in fact. So that is a perspective that’s different post-government. I was only interested in fixing computer problems before. I would still prefer to fix computer problems, because it’s so much easier. But I know that it’s not usually what’s needed.” – Mikey Dickerson
“It was very different from what I was expecting. Going in, I felt a lack of confidence that I’d be able to solve some of the technology problems. I thought, ‘I’m sure they have such a different technology stack. I’m not going to have the answers.’ But in practice, it was more around modernizing government IT and navigating indecision and culture clash. And also empowering the tech expert in the room who definitely knew the answer, but because of rank didn’t feel comfortable saying it. It was more about people, systems, and culture than technical building.” – Parisa Tabriz
“From the minute I got off the plane, it was 14 meetings in a row per day, and I didn’t even know where any of them were.” – Mikey Dickerson
“At the time, I knew nothing about the VA, nothing about veterans, nothing about disability claims. But I went to this meeting and immediately fell in love with this problem that was a big process engineering challenge.” – Marina (Martin) Nitze
“The same things came up in every single discovery sprint. Like, ‘We’re not allowed to talk to users. We don’t have any monitoring on our systems because we’re told that it’s impossible to pay for those monitoring systems.’ It was obvious that if the same things are coming up in every single discovery sprint, let’s punch those things in the face. The playbook really was a synthesis of the signature problems and how to avoid them.” – Erie Meyer
“After HealthCare.gov happened, the Office of Federal Procurement (OFPP) convened a group of people and asked, ‘Theoretically, what would it look like if we did Agile development and put it into contracts?’ I said, ‘Theoretically, I’ve been doing it for three years and have actual results.’” – Traci Walker
“Everybody comes in and they see how slow VBMS is. They fall prey to Baumol’s cost disease and think: ‘If we save six minutes per claim in VBMS by moving it to the cloud, then that’s like 300 million minutes.’ But you can’t add it all up across a system and be like, ‘Look at our millions of minutes.’ You actually gain zero extra minutes.” – Marina (Martin) Nitze
“That was a point where I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve only been here for a few hours, but I know how to read these charts on the wall and this is not what this contractor’s claiming is happening.’ […] Eventually I did speak up. I’m like, ‘If what you’re saying is true, then this number would be high and it’s low. I really think the problem is over here instead.’ He disagreed with me very loudly, but then upon investigation, no. […] but the fact that it was possible for me on my very first day to spot something very obviously wrong with the conclusions that were being drawn in that room, that’s the point where I realized that, ‘Oh yeah, actually it is… this is a place where I could have an impact with essentially no advanced knowledge.’” – David Nesting
“I remember a product lead from the contracting side talking to a room of about 50 people. They said, ‘It’s going to take us a month to write a bash script.’ And the government leads in the room didn’t know what that meant. I thought, ‘I don’t think this is right, why isn’t anyone calling B.S. on it?’ So I asked why it would take more than a day to write a bash script. After the meeting, one of the team commented how the whole tone of the room changed once someone started asking questions.” – Albert Wong
“The VA won a Sammy for customer experience, and it was not that long ago that we were on the front page for fucking veterans over every possible way. The VA is enormous. It’s the largest integrated healthcare system in the world. It has 400,000 employees. We left a legacy, and now we influence other agencies. Other agencies reach out to me to this day, asking, ‘Hey, we want to be like the VA. What could we learn?’ That is the coolest thing.” – Marina (Martin) Nitze
“Like any high pressure working environment, it was fractious. It was difficult. The founding team was just working out how to do this thing and how to work together as a lot of Type A people. That was my impression.” – Kate Krontiris
“It was the best job I have had to date. It was very chaotic and fun and out of place. It took me at least six months from when I started to join the USDS ‘Hoody Culture’ and put on jeans and wear them to the office, because I was still so ingrained in traditional government culture. It was a really neat experience talking with some of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered and seeing their passion for government.” – Traci Walker
“I remember coming into Jackson Place and being like, ‘What the heck is this place? It’s awesome.'” – Kate Krontiris
“Yeah, if I hadn’t done that trip, I probably wouldn’t have shown up. That trip was really cool. Even though it snowed, it was still this frenetic, electric thing. It felt different, it felt real. It felt like maybe it would work. It felt like this was a moment in time that was precious and unique.” – Chris Lynch
“My first week was interesting just because I had to make that mental flip of being like, ‘Nobody’s going to tell me what to do, so I need to figure it out.’” – David Nesting
“Having to walk through somebody’s conference to get from one room to the other became the norm. So was coming in during the night and finding a bunch of people playing board games. A lot of people were transplants from other cities — they weren’t leaving like me and going back to their house out in the suburbs. Everyone was like, ‘I don’t know anybody. This is my community now.’” – Traci Walker
[On the balance between crisis-response and building user-facing products] “It was really, really hard to walk that line. I hurt lots of people’s feelings by saying that the original idea was this other thing. But the dev-type stuff needs to be done, too. At no point did I think that the government doesn’t need all of those teams. It absolutely does. My only claim is that we didn’t keep our eye on the ball on the firefighting, because the government really needs that, too. If USDS doesn’t do it, then we’re back to where we were — there’s no one who can do it.” – Mikey Dickerson
“When we first launched USDS, most of the commentary on Twitter was about the playbook. A lot of people were saying, ‘Oh, shit. This is actually good. Wow, the government actually gets this.’ That was really validating, because so much of Twitter is about dunking on the government.” – Charles Worthington
“In addition to the work with Agencies, we created Communities of Practice (COP) across disciplines, where I was the first Director of the Engineering COP. To build the COP, I thought: What things could be done in the community of practice? What value could we add to this group of people? I thought a big part of the value was determining that you’re not alone, that it’s not just you, that this is a very weird environment and that there are lessons to be learned from the people who were scattered about. By sharing those stories, we could increase the level of competence in the group, because they would get the benefit of hearing these things before they ran into them themselves at their own agencies.” – Kim Rachmeler
“No one quite knew what this was going to be or what its potential was. There was a whole lot of information and so many unknowns — they didn’t even know what questions to ask. What really struck me about the organization was how smart and talented everyone was, but also, how little experience folks had handling strong emotional disagreements in a professional setting.” – Albert Wong
“It was very exciting — a brand new thing. People were super gung-ho, like this was what they’ve been waiting for. They had been wishing for this to happen for years and that energy pulled me along.” – Nathan Parker
“What’s fascinating about USDS and 18F is that there was interest right away in different places for different reasons. USDS wanted to go out and take big swings and make things better, and 18F was about building, buying, partnering. There was a vision of USDS firefighting the more visible stuff, and 18F digging in and doing a lot of the deep fixing. That is wildly oversimplifying it, but that was the way it was thought of at the 30,000-foot level.” – Kara (DeFrias) Fitzpatrick
“We were always moving so quickly and also figuring out what it was that we were doing. There was not a lot of opportunity for sharing what we were learning. So it felt like we were all in this very fun club together, but not necessarily on the same team.” – Vivian Graubard
“Anytime you go to an organization and make any change — even if it’s a good change — then like surgery, you are going to cause some amount of damage.” – Albert Wong
“Still, when you think about the agency roadshow and, in general, our work with agencies, we really overestimated our authority in these spaces — that is, if you want to do things legally and equitably. When I think about the setbacks we had at USDS, it’s not a reflection of talent or the effort people were putting in, but the agency roadshow is yet another example of not being honest with ourselves about how we appeared to the rest of government. We were not setting people up to be successful when they went into these rooms.” – Vivian Graubard
“… we had thought USDS was going to stay a small targeted team of around 12 people. It actually caused challenges internally to now receive this funding, as we had to reset the strategy. We thought: ‘Well, what do we do now? How do we grow fast? What does this look like?’” – Traci Walker
“We started this whole thing two-and-a-half years before the end of the Obama Administration. So after year one — which is not very much time in the life of a startup — the end was in sight. We barely established the first generation of USDS, and we were already starting to have meetings about institutionalization and transfer to the next administration. By the end of the first year, I had a lot more information on what the agencies were capable of. And just to be blunt, the answer most of the time is ‘not much.’ The digital transformation everybody fantasizes about almost never happens.” – Mikey Dickerson
“There were all these layers of growth: getting things done, building infrastructure, trying to help people feel like they were supported in very stressful, very challenging situations, and trying to establish the Digital Service as a real thing that was going to last longer than the Obama Administration. It was nuts.” – Dana Chisnell
“It was all growing pains. Everything an organization goes through when the culture changes from 10 people to 100 people in a year — I don’t know if there is any graceful way to do that.” – Dana Chisnell
... on what they are most proud of.
“I’m super proud of finding and convincing people to either come work on the movement, or stay with the movement, or mentoring them as they went on and became greater stars.” – Nick Sinai
“I think the only thing I’m proud of is that I didn’t go home. In a certain sense, I didn’t have the right skills for this job. Most of the time I felt like I was failing. But friends wouldn’t let me give up. But the biggest reason I didn’t leave was Haley Van Dyck. I don’t think Haley gets the credit she should. She fought like hell. If it had not been for her, I probably would have ignored Mike. I would’ve given up at some point. People don’t realize how much USDS exists because of her. It’s not just that she kept me going. It’s that she was there before I got there, and she stayed after I left. And like I said, she fought for it every step of the way.” – Jen Pahlka
“I’m most proud of the results. As for the organization itself, I am proud of the people. We had an unusually high concentration of talented people willing to make sacrifices for the public good. There was a pent up desire in my industry to do public service. When USDS offered that opportunity, we had tremendous humans who came forward, worked hard, and supported each other. And we had external leadership that cared about those outcomes and worked with us to achieve them.” – Brian Lefler
“I’m super grateful for the friendships and the experiences that I’ve been able to have personally, but also used to influence work. Also, I still work on Chrome, and the empathy and understanding from USDS has helped me be a better leader and build better software for governments. I think a lot about how governments rely on software that we build.” – Parisa Tabriz
We found thousands of claims that had been lost in VA internal systems that could still not have been processed to this day, four years later, if it were not for us.” – Alex Gaynor
“The biggest thing for me is the legacy of the training program I created. When the new administration came in, they were able to latch onto it as a tangible thing and really appreciated it. Seeing where people who went through that are now in their career is amazing to me. That’s the legacy that I got to leave behind: People being able to step out of their norm, be strategic about the acquisition process, and get things done quicker.
We had people at the VA who said, ‘This will never happen. We’ll never do this in a thousand years.’ But now they do Cedar and Spruce, contract models that are based on the strategies and the methods we were trying to put in place all those years ago. People today don’t ask, ‘Why Agile?’ They ask, ‘How can we use it?’ Now that’s the standard, and you have to get justification for not using it.” – Traci Walker
“… the HHS General Counsel memo resulting from our work on leveraging the HealthCare.gov backbone for other social services still existed and still gave the team the legal cover it needed to move forward in some critical areas. We had to pull it out and dust it off, but it showed how each of us could contribute building blocks for the next cohort of government servants to move a little more quickly towards efficient and effective modernization.” – Amy (Barker) Pitelka
“I’m glad we got people healthcare. What was it, 16 million in the first year? And HealthCare.gov is still getting people healthcare. There’s a certain amount of entropy in every system: Everything’s always going to break, the world’s always going to change, the thing you did is not going to last forever. But hopefully we built enough good examples that people will try to keep things going.”
“At some point in 2014, I shifted to helping build the Talent Team, because as soon as our application page went live we had 1000+ applications and no clear process for sorting through them and making our next 200 hires. Our various theories of how USDS would make an impact wouldn’t amount to much if we didn’t have people to do the work! I wound up working to scale up our talent operations for almost a year before switching back to more delivery-focused roles.” – Charles Worthington
“What my mind and my heart retrieve from my memory bank is a montage, set to music, of the faces of everyone who is part of the movement. That just overwhelms me. There are all kinds of milestones in terms of projects that were successful, changes that happened, the operating pattern of government, and then an extraordinary number of American lives touched in all kinds of ways. At the root of that is the people.” – Todd Park
“I am proud of what HealthCare.gov does for people. That mission I didn’t appreciate until later. When I was there, it was a system that I had to solve. But afterwards it was clear: This is really helping individuals get healthcare who could not before.” – Nathan Parker
“I am proud that there is a pipeline for technical people who know that Americans deserve better. Before USDS, that was fits and starts. Now, even if they don’t stay in government forever, people are fundamentally changed after they serve. And whether they go on to be professors or archivists, that better understanding of what their neighbors deserve, and fighting for it for the rest of their lives, is really special.” – Erie Meyer
“Modernizing the Board of Veterans Appeals. The VA won a Sammy for customer experience, and it was not that long ago that we were on the front page for fucking veterans over every possible way.
The VA is enormous. It’s the largest integrated healthcare system in the world. It has 400,000 employees. We left a legacy, and now we influence other agencies. Other agencies reach out to me to this day, asking, ‘Hey, we want to be like the VA. What could we learn?’ That is the coolest thing.”
“I feel really proud of the work we did at USCIS and whatever role I played in launching that team.” – Vivian Graubard
“The things that got done where I could see with my eyes that they were actually done. Our number one project was always ensuring HealthCare.gov did not have any more major meltdowns, because that wasn’t a foregone conclusion. It probably needs work right now, 10 years later. We launched Vets.gov. And we did the College Scorecard. There was also the visa status tracker.
The things I feel the best about are the times where we found really broken things that were pretty easy to fix. Like the service records interface between the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. We were slogging through that process and found all these cul-de-sacs: If some set of conditions happened wrong, then you ended up with contradictory values in two different rows of the spreadsheet and you would never be picked up by the next COBOL script. It was as if your application had fallen behind the file cabinet, never to be seen again. […] It was worth the price of funding USDS even if they only did things like that a half dozen times a year. It pays for itself 10 times over. Those are the slam dunk cases to me.” – Mikey Dickerson
“I’m most proud of the fact that we left government better than we found it.” – Steven VanRoekel