Eric Maland
‘I Thought I Was Going to Program a Computer’: Eric Maland on What Was Actually Needed to Make a Lasting Impact.
| Eric Maland joined the U.S. Digital Service in November 2014 with a focus on stabilizing HealthCare.gov. He later became Director of Delivery at 18F. Eric left public service in May 2017, but rejoined USDS in January 2024. Prior to working in government, Eric held technical roles at Amazon, Google and Twitter. |
Eric Maland joined the U.S. Digital Service in pursuit of a good engineering “firefight,” and on the heels of tenures at Google and Twitter. While some of his colleagues opted for shorter stints lasting just weeks, Eric committed to over a year of service, hoping to maximize his impact.
Eric worked on a range of projects — from HealthCare.gov to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) — and also led 18F for one year. Below, Eric discusses USDS’s evolution, the need for a plan B (and C and D), and the importance of air conditioning during D.C. summers.
June 10, 2024
Emily Tavoulareas:
Eric, tell me about your journey to the U.S. Digital Service.
Eric Maland:
2009-2011 I was working at Twitter and living with a bunch of Googlers in San Francisco. I’d worked at Google previously with many of them, including Cody Smith. When HealthCare.gov happened, I knew close to half of the people who went into government to help, including Cody and Matt Weaver. I was very aware of it, but also thought, “I don’t want to look at that, it’s terrible.” People were coming back from two or three month stints with horror stories.
Around that time, I saw Weaver sharing about trying to get hired at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). I asked him, “What is this about? You’re going to go work for the government?” He said, “Yeah, the White House put together this team. We’re going to work on the VA and HealthCare.gov and immigration.” I thought: “Is this something I’m interested in? Because I love a good firefight.”
Weaver connected me with USDS Head of Talent, Jennifer Anastasoff, and then I talked to Mikey Dickerson. It sounded really interesting to me. I started talking to these folks in August 2014. I had an offer in September, and I started in November. There were maybe a dozen people there.
Emily:
Did you initially join for HealthCare.gov?
Eric:
Yeah. At that point, people were coming in and doing two-week, four-week, and three-month commitments. I told Mikey I’d do 18 or 24 months. I didn’t want to just come for a few months; I’d rather stay and get something done. I might have been the first one to really go for it long term, other than the founding team.
Emily:
And what happened in the following months?
Eric:
I was solely focused on HealthCare.gov until the end of the open enrollment period, which was the end of the year. I thought I was going to D.C. to work at the White House. But I lived in a hotel in Columbia, Maryland and went to the local operation center every day.
After open enrollment, there were a lot of conversations about what to do next with regard to HealthCare.gov. Mikey and I sat with the White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, and talked about the best plan. Mikey and I also talked a lot about how we would stand up a digital service at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). I spent a lot of time trying to get the HHS secretary to sit down and formalize that.
I spent four or five months banging my head against a wall: “Are we going to stand up a digital service at CMS? What does that look like? What does our commitment to HealthCare.gov look like long term?” That turned into a bureaucratic quagmire. I thought, “I need a break from this. I need to go work on something else for a little while.”
Emily:
And what did that end up being?
Eric:
My next project was working on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and recommendations for how to implement the executive order on immigration. That was January 2015. Immediately after that, I went to the State Department. The visa system fell over, and they couldn’t issue visas or passports for a couple weeks at all. Nick Lesiecki and I went for a few weeks to figure out what was going on and fix it.
Emily:
When you say “figure out what was going on,” what did that look like?
Eric:
The first step was me, Nick, and Vivian figuring out what was broken and who it was affecting. Second was determining who’s in charge of what systems, and also a map of those systems. Which contractors do what? What’s currently in flight to fix what’s broken?
That started with the higher management within the State Department, and then technical management within the State Department. We did a few conference calls with various contractors. Someone mentioned a group of contractors out in Rosslyn that we should talk to, so Nick and I went to their office.
We came up with plan A, plan B, plan C, and plan D. Plan A was to fix a piece of hardware that broke. Plan B was a more drastic way of fixing that piece of hardware. Plan C was to go to backups of the system. And plan D was to rebuild from scratch. It turned out this contractor in Rosslyn also had a plan, and it was very good. They had a lot of systems we didn’t know existed.
Emily:
Was that a pleasant surprise?
Eric:
For sure. 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.
Emily:
What was it about your team that helped right the ship?
Eric:
On the State side, there was a lack of urgency. No one wanted to own the problem, because they would get blamed for it. When we found this group out in Rosslyn, they were contractors who were busting their asses — but they had families, they had other stuff to deal with. Once we made their work a priority, they started getting roped into meetings, phone calls, 3 a.m. status calls. But they wanted to go in on the weekend or stay after hours to work on this stuff.
There are three things we did that really empowered them. First was taking over all the meetings. When these folks had to go home and eat or sleep, I said, “If there’s a 3 a.m. status call, I’ll take it.” I’d been dialing into these calls and listening, and these people were on the call for no reason. It was all bullshit.
The second thing was getting the air conditioning turned on, which is actually super important.
The third thing was sitting with people when they weren’t busy and understanding what they were doing on a deep technical level. I noticed people were on calls with vendors to get approval to deal with this issue or that issue. They’d have a conversation and then sit for some number of hours waiting for approval. I called someone at State and said, “Can I have the authority to approve any of the actions these people are taking?” They were more than happy to hand liability to somebody else. And so I went back to the team at Rosslyn and said, “Everything you’re about to do is approved.”
Emily:
That’s powerful. How did that land with people?
Eric:
They couldn’t believe it. And they loved it. No more meetings — they could just sit and focus on the problem and fix it.
Emily:
Did you draw on your experience with HealthCare.gov at all for this?
Eric:
Yeah, deeply. 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. And after having spent three solid months on HealthCare.gov, followed by some bureaucratic nonsense, I had a sense of how to get things done. Those first three months at HealthCare.gov were my training period — breaking into government and understanding the language and the structure. So when I went to State, I was much more prepared to deal with contractors.
Emily:
I’m interested in that HealthCare.gov bootcamp. What did that teach you?
Eric:
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.
So my original attitude was not the right attitude. The right attitude was trying to figure out how to partner with people to get work done. You have to accept the environment you’re in and then figure out how you can manipulate it, rather than change it, if you want to get anything done in the near-term. If you want to change, it’s a much longer-term issue.
Emily:
So you go through HealthCare.gov, DACA, and the State Department. What happens next?
Eric:
After State, I ended up at the Social Security Administration (SSA). We spun up a team on the Disability Claims Processing System (DCPS). In the middle of that, I was asked to run product and engineering at 18F, and I sat down with Phaedra Chrousos, Aaron Snow, Todd Park, Haley Van Dyck, and Mikey to talk over the idea. The opportunity to go to 18F and build a bigger vision for it was appealing, and everyone was gung-ho about it, so I went and did that for a year. That was August 2015 to August 2016.
Emily:
Let’s rewind to August 2014, the first year of USDS. How would you have described USDS in that first year?
Eric:
The way I thought of it when I started was as an emergency response team. After being there for a while, I viewed it as a team focused on three problems: healthcare, veterans, and immigration. Both are true.
Emily:
As an organization, how did it function in the first year?
Eric:
In those first few months, it was just finding people who can fix problems and then putting them in the right places. I got to HealthCare.gov and asked, “What are we supposed to do?” And they said, “I don’t know, figure it out.” Every now and then I would call Mikey and say, “I’m going to do this thing, and I don’t even know if it’s ok.”
Emily:
And who was deciding there was a problem that needed to be fixed? What was the workflow?
Eric:
That was not evident to me. But I had the sense it was Kristie Canegallo and Denis McDonough working with Haley and Mikey to prioritize things the first few months. Then we got about $30 million in appropriations for USDS. And that turned into a conversation of, “How do we expand this in other places?” That led to creating a Priorities document and this whole charter system.
But early on, it was just putting people where the problems were. And that didn’t just mean hiring engineers — it meant people at headquarters, blocking and tackling so we could get shit done.
Emily:
So you went to 18F from August 2015 to 2016. You’re one of the rare people who have had a lens on both organizations’ startup periods. What was the transition like, and was 18F different from USDS?
Eric:
It was completely different. The focus was more on building things than fixing things. Half the team was remote and it was much more structured. It was run like a business. It was still deeply government. It didn’t have the executive support that USDS had. And there were a lot of people in the building advocating for it to get absorbed somewhere else in GSA.
Emily:
Was there any firefighting happening there?
Eric:
Not really. I tried to get us involved in a few firefighting-type things, but because of procurement, it was difficult. The cost reimbursability made it really hard to plug in to anything on short notice. We thought, “Why don’t we find bigger, meatier projects for 18F?” So we focused on government-wide projects, which is how we ended up doing Login.gov. We were looking at government-wide notifications, benefits, eligibility, and determination. Identity management stuff.
Emily:
What did you do at USDS that has stuck around?
Eric:
Well, it’s interesting. I came back to USDS in January 2024, and there’s almost a mythology about what happened before. A lot of people don’t remember what happened in the past because no one was there, but there are stories lingering in the ether.
What is USDS like now? COVID happened, so it’s largely remote — which is wild to me. 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. And being remote completely changes that dynamic.
I mean, if you want to look at Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and why it’s so fucked, I think it’s largely due to that dynamic. If there was more of an in-person element and more team building and trust building and better relationships — within USDS, but also across the agencies — it’d be different. The identity that people have attached to USDS is much more fractured now. A lot of people have never been to D.C. Isn’t that crazy? It blows my mind.
Emily:
I didn’t realize it was so remote. What are some things that you’re most proud of?
Eric:
I hope that we made a good enough impression across government to keep the doors cracked open for the next people who came in. And I think we did in a few places.
Emily:
Which places?
Eric:
We jammed the door open a few times at the SSA. And the IRS is a great example; we’re on our fourth or fifth engagement now. People on the other side, within the agencies, have been there through those engagements, and now they’re more ready for us when we come. They might think, “Oh, I know how to empower you. I’ve dealt with this before.” Which is good.
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.
Emily:
What a great place to end the conversation.