Erie Meyer
‘People Are Fundamentally Changed After They Serve’: Erie Meyer on the Personal Impact of Building Civic Tech
| Erie Meyer was the very first hire at the U.S. Digital Service, beginning in August 2014 and staying through March 2017. Prior, she was a founding member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and also worked on open data initiatives at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. |
Erie Meyer was the very first person hired into the U.S. Digital Service, and was integral in shaping the organization’s operations, culture, and mission.
The concept of digital transformation wasn’t foreign to Erie: Prior to joining USDS, she was a founding member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency created in 2011 and known for its cutting-edge work with digital technology. Much of the CFPB’s innovation and ways of thinking served as a foundation for USDS, from hiring practices to the use of design research.
Below, Erie discusses how USDS’s strategy shifted over time; what it was like recruiting USDS’s founding members; and how to ensure digital transformation work sticks.
June 11, 2024
Emily Tavoulareas:
Erie, tell us how you got to USDS.
Erie Meyer:
I was minding my own business at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) about a week before HealthCare.gov launched and the government shut down — simultaneously. I had shown up to publish open data about complaints against companies, which I had also done at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But within a week it went from these aspirations to realizing that no other agency had engineers, data scientists, and UX designers on staff. I was deeply naive to believe other agencies were like the CFPB. It didn’t occur to me.
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.
Eventually the site sort of got back up and the government reopened and I came back. I continued to do data jams to help agencies publish more information for the Open Government Plan. At the time I was there, Jen Pahlka, Nick Sinai, Ryan Panchadsaram, and Vivian Graubard were there — a bunch of really smart people. Todd Park had this pillow under his desk because he would regularly be sleeping there.
Vivian was first introduced to me as Todd’s confidential assistant. But what I’m actually seeing is this woman who’s essentially the acting U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO). When Todd is out there trying to save HealthCare.gov, Vivian is making really difficult decisions with integrity and bravery and grace in a way that is still totally humbling to see. She was probably the youngest person in the office, and punching so far above her weight.
Once HealthCare.gov was stabilized, Todd said, “The President is so happy and people are enrolled. Now he’s asking really hard questions about why that’s not the case across all the government. He’s so frustrated about the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). If we could do it with HealthCare.gov, why can’t we do it in other cases?” The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program was still going at this time, and Todd was fighting to preserve HealthCare.gov. So Jen and I had taken over supporting the PIFs — some of whom, by the way, understandably resigned when the government was shut down.
Then I do my year-long open data detail at OSTP. We’ve got all these incredible people at OSTP, but they’ve all been detailed in from places like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I slowly realized that nobody else had really hired technical feds into a normal agency.
Meanwhile, Todd is responding to the President’s question of “How do we never let HealthCare.gov happen again?” I sat down with Todd, Charles Worthington, and Vivian. Todd said, “I think we can get the President to ask 12 people to come serve.” Charles, Vivian, and I made lists of the smartest, most technically accomplished people we could think of. We also got recommendations from the HealthCare.gov rescue team, the PIFs, and other friends across tech. That’s where that famous Obama meeting in the Roosevelt Room came from. We told them they were just coming to the White House for a meeting. The President was supposed to pop in for five minutes and say “Hey, please come serve your country.” Instead, he stayed 45 minutes and closed the deal.
Before the failure of HealthCare.gov, the President making a hard ask on government tech capacity would’ve been unimaginable. We figured maybe once a year we would get paper to him.
I spent the back half of my OSTP detail trying to set up new Digital Service teams for success. A week before my detail was up, the hiring wasn’t going well because it was the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and they hadn’t done it before. We had hired exactly zero humans. Todd was doing crazy recruiting calls to convince people to come in. A lot of people said no.
And then Todd said he needed to talk to me. I’m like, “Oh my God, I did something wrong.” He says, “I’m going to need you to go to USDS.” I was like, “Oh, the building? Is something in there?” Todd said, “No, I need you to go work there.” I was like, no. I just used every single brain cell and ounce of energy recruiting the biggest, baddest motherfuckers to come fix this. I am not wasting a seat on me. And to this day I don’t know if what I’m about to say is true, but Todd replied, “Mikey’s in, but he’ll only come if you come.”
Emily:
That’s not a stretch, I could see that.
Erie:
Who knows? Todd is a scammer for truth and justice. At first I was mad at the ask. Again, I thought we were only going to have 12 seats. And if you could either have me in a seat or a Lisa Gelobter, she’s going to save more Veterans lives than I am. 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.
And I do have technical skills. I ultimately shipped the first line of code at USDS. I made design and product choices that were really tough. But in my mind, I hadn’t been in the private sector since 2008, and at this point it’s 2014. I thought, “My stuff is out of date. You need the best and the brightest.” But Todd pushed me into it.
Kathy:
You’re highlighting how we have to redefine what’s technical and what makes a strong technology team. We could have never done this without your expertise.
Erie:
Thank you. Because the point in government is not, “How many lines of code did you write last week?” The question is, “What was the last product you shipped?”
Emily:
So Erie, your vision for USDS staff was a person who can program a computer — but that changed over time?
Erie:
It was a naive set of assumptions. 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 Management System (VBMS). 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.
Emily:
Erie, tell us about your first day.
Erie:
It was August and it was somewhere between 200 and 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
Also, an aside: At an event shortly before my first day, I heard someone complaining about the IRS. I replied, “The government isn’t anything other than the people who show up to build it. Why don’t you come make it better? I’m hiring.” And he says, “Lady, I’m a rockstar.” It was the lead singer of OK Go.
Anyway: It was our first day and I met Mikey at the guest entrance on 17th and New York and showed him how to get into his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. We had arranged for Hope Hall, the White House videographer, and her incredible team to record Mikey’s first day. So we had a video crew following us around, which was not low-key, but it was nice — people were aware of why Mikey was there and why this was a historic moment.
I was showing Mikey to the correct rooms and whispering in his ear, “We really need the person you’re about to meet to like you a lot.” And he’s like, “I’m not sure that helps.” I’ll never forget, our press conference announcing the USDS was at 12:30 p.m. We’re in an orientation room learning about FOIA and ethics while also trying to edit the press release. It felt like The Wizard of Oz because it was just me and Mikey behind the curtain.
After the press release went out, we were all in the USDS offices on Jackson Place. They were furnished with random IKEA furniture that Steven VanRoekel had delivered in the dead of night. Charles, Nick, Vivian, and I look at each other like, “Now what?”
Kathy:
When I started four months later, it was clear that there was a lot of thought put into the mechanics of hiring. We had Schedule A. Can you talk about that process?
Erie:
We started hiring for the VA before we started hiring for USDS generally. We insisted that the names be redacted. The idea was we shouldn’t know who they are, we should just rank them based on technical capabilities. I used the Subject Matter Expert (SME) process that we used at CFPB. Essentially, you have two subject matter experts rate a resume as either qualified or not qualified. If there’s a disagreement, you convene both subject matter experts to talk about it, or you have a third person as the tiebreaker.
Emily:
Erie, a recurring theme from the folks in the Roosevelt Room was: “I was told to go to the White House and I had no idea why. And when the President walked in, I thought, ‘What am I signing up for?’” How do you remember that?
Erie:
We wanted the President to be the closer, not the draw. We called people and invited them, but did not tell them exactly what they were being invited for. I don’t even think we told them the meeting was in the West Wing, because we thought they would say no. What if you got a call from a random person who said, “Hey, you know how the news every day is how the government’s screwed up? We would like you to leave your comfortable life and come fix it.” Also, some of the people, like Megan Smith, were executives. We wanted the peer pressure of them seeing that caliber of other people in the room.
Even if people didn’t end up joining, we wanted them to know, “The leader of the free world said this is really important.” When everybody came in, we first had them talk with different people and groups and then we went into the Roosevelt Room.
Emily:
What role did the CFPB play in USDS’s story?
Erie:
CFPB was created because of the financial crisis and a big part of that was pass the buck accountability. So a mortgage originator saying, “No, it’s not my fault. It’s the mortgage servicer.” And the mortgage servicer saying, “It’s not my fault. It’s the debt collector.” Meanwhile, people were losing their homes and their economic futures were being destroyed.
In this case, 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.” The diffuse accountability, and breaking a system where people who have no other option are paying the price like veterans and seniors, felt very similar.
We took a ton from CFPB. When we were making our services at CFPB, like a complaint system, the default service standard was, “Is this good enough that you would send it to a family member without any additional instructions?” 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.
The CFPB is organized around consumers. We are not trying to make the country’s economy 10% more this way or 13% more that way. We’re protecting consumers. And for USDS, we were not there to expand the business hours of a website by three percent. We were there to ship services that worked, to get full enrollment, to eliminate wait times for veteran suicide hotlines. We also busted myths at CFPB, like that other agencies couldn’t buy modern software. There was a myth that you couldn’t use an analytics product because they had monthly billings. But when we were setting up CFPB, we had to use those services. Our lawyers worked really hard to say, “Nope, actually this is allowed. We’ll have to use a P card.” We also used open-source software. But today — June 11, 2024 — I understand that large parts of the Department of Justice think open source is illegal. So this is a myth that is still not totally busted.
Using human-centered design and figuring out things like the Antideficiency Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Privacy Act — these were also things CFPB did within the constraints of the law. We just needed lawyers to figure it out and who knew how risky it was not to do it.
Open data is another example. The CFPB publishes the complaints it receives, and not just because open data is cool. It’s so companies compete — they don’t want to be the worst one in the database. They read their complaints, they read the other company’s complaints, and then they try to make their forms easier to use. One of the first things we did at the VA was publish statistics about how things were going, because we thought public accountability was critical to making things better.
Emily:
CFPB and open data are two really important seeds in the story that are untold.
Kathy:
If one agency learns a new process and helps other agencies understand that process — whether it’s hiring, open data, open source, or any number of things — that is a way to make replication happen in government.
Erie:
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.
Emily:
Erie, how did the vision of USDS change over time if the original idea was that people would rotate?
Erie:
At first it was, “Let’s replicate the HealthCare.gov rescue.” That was plan A. But then we realized the HealthCare.gov rescue work was unique because of attention from senior leaders, press coverage. At a normal agency, you don’t have that kind of oversight and urgency. Instead it is a long, simmering, disastrous outcome that is the obvious endpoint of all of the incentives in the system. That’s when plan B and Charles really exploded onto the scene. That’s where the Digital Service Playbook came from. To this day, I’m like, “Just ask the list of questions, and you’ll know whether or not a service will be successful. Look at the systemic barriers and fix them.” 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.
That’s the part in the story where Traci Walker launched the Digital IT Acquisition Professional Training Program (DITAP), teaching people how to do agile acquisitions. USDS started by pointing agencies to places like GSA for interagency agreements, or even companies that knew how to do digital service contracts. And then the next version was like, “Okay, we need to build teams on the ground in these agencies.”
Kathy:
A theme that keeps coming up is these processes that we have to put in place. Because without them, things go back to the way they were. There’s a phrase, “The process is the product.”
Emily:
Flexibility and not predetermining the outcome are so important. That’s how good products are built. It’s also how really good teams and organizations are built. One of the big insights is this reframing from replicating the HealthCare.gov rescue and rotating people through agencies to really focusing on systemic barriers. Erie, was there something acute that led to that reframing?
Erie:
When we first started doing discovery sprints, there was the tough VA sprint where the report was constructive but landed sideways with agency staff. So we thought people would be scared of talking to us. But what really happened was that people who’d been fighting their whole career to make things better finally had someone who was asking. There were people everywhere desperate to talk to their users, desperate to use agile development or open-source software or give the keys to feds instead of contractors.
Of all the discovery sprints I did, two thirds of the content came from people already at agencies who were telling me their wish list, many of which made perfect sense. 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.
Kathy:
I have a question about power, influence, and executive buy-in. I know you see the value in it. How do you build that executive level by-in, and at what level does it matter? And then, how do you use it when you’re in a position to do so, especially for people who are looking to build out digital services?
Erie:
You’ve got three buckets of executives. One bucket fully understands without any prep. These are people like Elizabeth Warren. When we demoed our complaint system, her first question was, “Can you make it easier to use?” She didn’t need convincing. She was ready and she was really focused. Of course, that’s the same with Todd Park and former VA Secretary Bob McDonald. These are typically people who have either researched, depended on, or worked with normal people for some part of their career. Bob had to sell things to normal people. Elizabeth Warren had researched the experience of bankruptcy and spoke to people about what their lives were actually like.
The second bucket of people are executives who only get it once they have to. I would put Barack Obama here. The man’s got a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s the former leader of the free world, I love him, God bless. But, it wasn’t until the failure of HealthCare.gov when this ranked anywhere on his list of interests, it seemed to me. These are executives who if you work in their orbit, you don’t want to waste a good crisis.
The third bucket are people who are not committed or engaged, and in a crisis their inclination is to blame rather than fix. Often the only people who can address this shortfall in agency leadership are Congress, which oversees them, the Investigators General who conduct oversight of the agency, and the voters who elect the president who appoints agency leaders. I would not send somebody I love to go work for this kind of executive.
Kathy:
It’s about: Who’s transactional? What are people’s incentives? What are Congress’ incentives? What are they dealing with? It’s helpful to understand that in public service. I think that’s the case with lots of mission nonprofits, too. You lean on the mission and then it fails because there’s also the funding, the people, the resources.
So, the VA was one of the first examples of building an agency team. It was the proof of concept, including multiple streams of hiring, vetting for culture, et cetera. Can you talk about putting in a sustainable foundation for that model? One that was later used to build other agency teams?
Erie:
In our first-day video, Mikey says something like, “If everything goes great, we’re not going to exist in five years.” When we were building the VA team and even when we were building the Department of Education team, we were hoping that they would work so well that they wouldn’t need to be a permanent part of the agency. That’s just how they would do business.
Building the VA team was very hard. We had to fight the VA to get them to hire Matthew Weaver. And if we couldn’t get Weaver through, who in the world were we going to be able to get through? It was awful. One night I messaged him: “Hey. Do you have a minute? The West Wing wants to talk to you. We’re trying to get you not to back out of this hiring process.” We were just trying to help them hire a technical person who’s not in “IT,” and it was so hard.
We finally got him hired, which was amazing. We were having an offsite, and there was a knock on the door — it was Weaver. I immediately started crying because he actually made it. But it took us a long time to hire other people on that team. It would be months before people would get an answer.
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.”
At the Department of Education, when we worked to bring in Lisa Gelobter, it was a similar situation. Things were getting broken and the department said, “I thought you were going to give us this team? We’re trying to hire her but this doesn’t work and this doesn’t work and this doesn’t work.” We were legally following all the hiring regs that we could figure out, but hiring a technical person was really hard.
Finally we got her in, but we never figured out how to hire anybody else directly into the Department of Education. We never had hire number two; we just staffed exclusively from USDS. We were able to ship really incredible stuff, but that team doesn’t exist now — and you saw what happened with FAFSA. It was a hard balance because there was so much brutally important work that people were counting on. And if we were going to untangle hiring, we would’ve had to stop that work and just do hiring. This is the tension I still have today: Two weeks ago, 770 people applied for a single job posting that I put up for a role we really, really, really need. It’s tough to deal with government infrastructure while also trying to do the actual work.
Kathy:
Are you having a hard time hiring for that role?
Erie:
I’m not having a hard time getting applicants. But the hiring has been a disaster at a scale that I could not have previously imagined. It shouldn’t be this hard.
Emily:
What work at USDS are you most proud of that has stuck around?
Erie:
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.
Emily:
We’re so grateful for your time. You have had a hand in multiple things that we all benefit from, Erie Meyer.
Erie:
Thank you.