Kara Fitzpatrick (DeFrias)
“It’s about doing the right thing for the people who need it most. And to me, that extends beyond our work and beyond our paychecks. It’s about us being good humans to each other:” Kara Fitzpatrick on Making a Difference
| Kara Fitzpatrick was a Presidential Innovation Fellow from 2012 to 2013, helping shape the idea and ambition that eventually became the U.S. Digital Service. She was also a Senior Advisor at 18F, and later held roles in the Office of the Vice President and Executive Office of the President. Prior, Kara was a producer and designer at organizations including TEDx and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. |
Kara (DeFrias) Fitzpatrick was in the first cohort of Presidential Innovation Fellows, and had a front-row seat to the U.S. Digital Service going from an idea to a reality. While not formally a member of USDS at the onset, Kara facilitated the first brainstorm to flesh out ideas that would eventually become reality, like USDS’s high-level structure and focus. She also had a front-row view of 18F’s conception — and how the two organizations were alike and different.
Below, Kara discusses why USDS wasn’t actually a startup and what made her return to government after leaving the first time.
July 16, 2024
Emily Tavoulareas:
Kara, you weren’t formally a part of the U.S. Digital Service as it began, but helped shape it. Tell us about your relationship with the organization.
Kara Fitzpatrick:
In the summer of 2012, I had the honor of being appointed to the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIFs). We were the guinea pigs for bringing technologists to the federal government, answering the questions: Could we bring them in? Would they come? What’s the draw?
It was originally a six-month fellowship, and there were 18 of us in that first class. There were just two women: myself and Marina (Martin) Nitze. We had projects that we were working on, but were also pulled into a lot of other things. Three of us fellows scrubbed in at the FEMA command center for 15 hours when Superstorm Sandy hit New York, doing whatever we could to help.
During my fellowship, I designed a workshop with Health and Human Services (HHS) around how to increase enrollment on healthcare.gov and another at the White House on human trafficking. I became known as somebody who could facilitate workshops and design sessions. In January 2013, toward the end of my fellowship, White Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, Haley Van Dyck, and Vivian Graubard said, “We have this idea similar to the PIFs, but set up in the White House and dedicated to quick problem solving. Could you design a session that imagines what it might look like?”
For the workshop, Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Steve VanRoekel, Todd, Haley, Viv, and Macon Phillips, Jen Pahlka, and Tim O’Reilly were among those in the room. I only had an hour and a half with them. But you can get a lot done in an hour and a half. I broke it up into 15-minute rapid sessions, answering questions like: What could this entity be? What would we work on? What would we want people to say about this thing? What would success look like? Where would we start? Back then, it was code named GovX — it wasn’t USDS yet.
The point was to get all the ideas out on the table. At the end of an hour and a half, we had flip charts and Post-it notes and a really good idea of what the org could work on, and what it could look like: an administrator, a deputy, a product team, a UX team, a bureaucracy-hacking team. Everyone came out of the session totally jazzed, thinking, “Alright, how do we go out and build this?”
Emily:
Is there anything in particular that stands out from that session?
Kara:
I remember being delighted at how quickly we got from this nebulous GovX entity to “This is definitely the kind of work we would take on.” To me, an important question was, “What do we want people to say about this team?” Because that ultimately influences who you partner with and what work you take on. Even back then, we knew the team had to be fast, had to be nimble, and had to have air cover. Because you could unleash a team to do something big, but if there was no air cover from the White House, the antibodies in the agencies would overtake the team.
Emily:
Was there any clarity around what the goal or the outcome would be?
Kara:
There was a pretty solid energy that it’d be the big stuff. I remember the optimism that this body of work could be done, and it should be done.
Emily:
Are there things from those flip charts that then surfaced in another team, like 18F?
Kara:
During the same timeframe, there was a lot of excitement at the General Services Administration (GSA) around the PIFs. Dan Tangherlini, who was GSA administrator, said, “Hey, this PIF thing is moving fast and shipping things. Can we institutionalize it at GSA?” So five of us PIFs met with Dan and Macon in the EEOB in December 2012 to talk through what eventually became 18F could look like.
We tried, even back then, to partner with people in the agencies. But a lot of people were like, “Who are you? What are you? And why do we have to listen to you?” There was a lot of running into walls and getting bloody. 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. One early log line was USDS firefighting the more visible stuff, and 18F digging in and doing a lot of the deep fixing.
Emily:
Thinking back about that initial workshop: Can you now see a straight line from this brainstorm to what ended up materializing?
Kara:
For sure. When USDS launched, there was certainly a flavor of staffers who wanted to do their own thing and didn’t want a boss. But most people understand that you have to have some sort of structure and escalation paths for decisions. And when I think about the org chart that we drew that day, it eventually became USDS’s Communities of Practice (COPs), like the engineering COP and the bureaucracy hacker COP.
I’ve never bought the concept of USDS as a startup in the White House. Strategically, it makes sense, because you want to speak the language of the people you’re trying to attract from Silicon Valley. But the reality is you’re not bootstrapping for money, you’re not struggling for talent. It’s a false narrative. I mean, come on, you have the backing of the President of the United States.
Emily:
Coming out of that workshop, what happened next? Was there momentum?
Kara:
My fellowship ended three weeks after the workshop and I went back to the private sector. But I remember feeling the momentum and thinking, “This is what’s next. This is the big thing we’re going to do.” Todd had said, “We’ve got a ton of people we have to talk to to make this happen.” Which is government 101 — there’s always a ton of people to talk to and get sign off from. They did roadshows, and I remember hearing stories of people working in the background to advance the idea: Casey Burns doing hiring hacking; Vivian talking to stakeholders and key partners; and Matt Collier over at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to figure out how to get all these people in.
Then in May 2013, everything slowed down. It became about getting through all the traps. At that point, we heard that 18F was on a parallel track, and that’s when the back channel conversations started happening: “What’s the difference? Why are we building two things that are both aiming to make government better through technology?” You couldn’t get a straight answer from anybody. It was just, “Well, they’re going to do their thing. We’re going to do our thing.”
Emily:
So that workshop happens, you go back to the private sector, there are initial conversations about you coming into this team. From there, what is your memory of USDS developing? And on a more personal level, what is your journey back into government like?
Kara:
18F launches in the spring of 2014, and then a few months later USDS. And people are asking, “What’s the difference?” Not that there can’t be two awesome bodies of delivery in government, but it’s such a classic government thing that it went down this way. At the end of the day, I was proud to see the work continuing of bringing technologists to government to serve their country.
As for my journey back to government, the thing I missed most when I left in 2013 was we had the opportunity to make impact at scale. It was so exhilarating to help at the country level.
In December of 2014, I saw Todd Park at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco when he, Hillary Hartley, Haley Van Dyck, and Mikey Dickerson gave a keynote about using tech to make the lives of everyday Americans better. And I could not have been more proud, because two years earlier, I showed up at the White House with 17 other PIFs thinking, “If we can get this right, it would be cool to see it continue and get even better.” Two years later, they’re on stage talking to the world about everything that’s grown out of that little experiment.
Afterward, Todd pulls me aside and says, “We need you back in government.” And you don’t say no to Todd Park. I talked to both 18F and USDS, and ultimately accepted a role as Deputy Director of the Consulting Team at 18F. I later became the first Senior Advisor to Aaron Snow, the head of 18F.
Then at the State of the Union in 2016, President Obama announced the Cancer Moonshot. He said, “We’re going to be the country that cures cancer.” Four weeks later, I was in the Office of the Vice President as Director of User Experience. And that’s how I finished out the administration.
Emily:
What a journey.
Kara:
Working on Cancer Moonshot was the honor of my lifetime. For the Biden-Harris administration, I was on the Transition Team and then came back in to work for President Biden again. And this last time, I came in through USDS. Full circle moment.
Emily:
Kara, last question: Is there anything you’re especially proud of?
Kara:
More often than not, as chief of staff or senior advisor, I’m the person who ensures the org is healthy and runs well. My thing’s always been the work about the work. But at USDS, I got to dig in and work on launches, too, and there’s a special excitement there when you’re delivering directly to the American people in truly meaningful ways. Like the child tax credit on July 15, 2021 where I wake up to dozens of texts from family and friends saying, “There’s money in my account. Did you have something to do with this?” I’ll never forget the story of Alexis in Philadelphia, who used some of the money to take her kids to the Philadelphia Zoo for the first time.
And that’s the whole point: It’s about doing the right thing for the people who need it most. And to me, that extends beyond our work and beyond our paychecks. It’s about us being good humans to each other.
Emily:
Kara, thank you so much for your time.