Nick Sinai
‘Every Person I Hire Keeps Getting Put to a Bigger and Better Use’: Nick Sinai on Recruiting and Mentoring Talent During the Formative Years of the U.S. Digital Service
| Nick Sinai was U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from 2012 to 2014, joining OSTP as a senior advisor in 2010. Prior, he led a team at the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan. Before his time in government, he was a venture capitalist and management consultant. Nick is the co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy. |
The pieces for the U.S. Digital Service came together while Nick Sinai was U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Nick spent four years in OSTP, working for all three U.S. CTOs in the Obama Administration: Aneesh Chopra, Todd Park, and Megan Smith. In addition to contributing to digital government policy via Executive Order and OMB policy memos, Nick helped start and manage several White House initiatives, and recruited some of the people who went on to create and build USDS.
Below, Nick discusses the importance of recruiting, mentoring, and learning from technology talent within the federal government.
July 10, 2019
Kathy Pham:
Nick, how did you get involved in this work?
Nick Sinai:
Before the Obama Administration, the office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) did not exist in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). There was a bit of experimentation as each CTO stressed different aspects of the job. Generally speaking, the CTO’s office was given a broad mandate around fostering technology and innovation in important national areas (healthcare, energy and environment, etc.), in addition to being a policy advisor to the President on technology.
Before the Obama Administration, OSTP had four assistant directors and a director, but now there was also a CTO office. OSTP dates back to 1976. There’s a funny story about President Nixon ignoring or firing his science advisor. Congress decided that there needed to be scientific and technical expertise inside the White House and set up OSTP as a statutory office in the presidency. So there’s all this history.
Aneesh Chopra was the first CTO, but the role was designed for Julius Genachowski. The original transition had challenges because so much of the team was focused on Julius — and then Julius decided late that he was interested in the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That started a scramble to vet and recruit candidates for CTO, with Aneesh landing the role. Aneesh then recommended Vivek Kundra as Chief Information Officer (CIO) who was the CTO of Washington, DC. Aneesh had been the Secretary of Technology for Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, and had worked with Vivek in that Administration.
You had this interesting dynamic: Two guys who were personally close, both from the Virginia/D.C. area, relatively young Indian-Americans, as the CTO and CIO. For the most part, their staff also had a good working relationship. OSTP and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), like any policy councils in the Presidency, have natural friction points. But in the original incarnation of a CTO and a CIO, the CTO was more focused externally and the CIO was very much focused on internal U.S. government IT. Obviously, OMB controls the money and has the statutory authority, whereas OSTP has technical expertise and soft power.
Over the years, the Office of the CTO had more West Wing juice and freedom to operate. We had less budget and people, but more opportunities to travel to Silicon Valley and around the country. There was this interesting difference where Vivek was working on various policies and Aneesh was out there doing hackathons, but also coauthoring policy. I was at OSTP from the end of 2010 to the end of 2014. I spent four years in OSTP, initially as a senior advisor and then as the U.S. Deputy CTO.
President Obama signed a memo about open government and open data on the first day in office, and Vivek led the creation of Data.gov. In the early Obama-era technology policies, you can see elements of user-centricity, APIs, open data, mobile, etc. In some sense, you see the precursors of the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA), the federal website and digital services legislation signed by President Trump.
21st Century IDEA codified digital government work over the last decade, requiring that federal government websites should be simple, designed with the user in mind, secure, personalized, and mobile-friendly. Those are unobjectionable objectives — but it set unreasonable timelines and wasn’t funded.
Aneesh was very effective at brainstorming across disciplines and getting people to think differently, but he wasn’t particularly focused on execution. It was so much fun to work for him, given his tremendous energy and continuous idea generation.
Kathy:
Can you talk more about the next CTOs?
Nick:
So Aneesh left to run for lieutenant governor, and Todd was the obvious candidate. The open data efforts were inspired by Tim O’Reilly, Carl Malamud, Jen Pahlka, and all these people who were publishing about government as a platform, and how government can be more transparent. But we were inspired by what Todd was accomplishing at Health and Human Services (HHS), in terms of setting up open Data workshops and conferences; the Data Jam and Datapalooza model was a method to get the agencies to convene with non-traditional actors (entrepreneurs, academics, etc.) and use government data for the national good. One structural outcome was the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) setting up an analytics office with Niall Brennan leading it.
I remember Tom Kalil and I sitting with Todd one evening, trying to convince him to take the U.S. CTO job, and he said, “No way.” He was going to move back to Silicon Valley and he had young kids. Tom is super effective, and the story goes that he would say to candidates, “Would your answer change if President Obama called you and asked you to do it?” That’s one of Tom’s favorite escalation techniques: To see if the President calling and asking would make a difference. Because once a candidate says yes to that prompt, if they stop and think about it, they don’t really want the President to call. The last thing you should want is to take up five minutes of the leader of the free world’s time making a recruiting call.
Kathy:
That’s how it’s supposed to be used. When someone asks, “If the president asked you to come, would you join?” then you agree to join. But it has now become USDS legend that people wouldn’t come. The Silicon Valley engineer-types were like, “Yeah, get the President to call me.” That probably speaks a lot to the hubris of tech engineers in Silicon Valley.
Nick:
When the President said, “What else can I do to help?” to Todd, Todd replied, “Why don’t we use you in recruiting?” Now you can see how it could create a culture of expectation of access.
Kathy:
Right. It started out so good, but then it applied to a different set of people. You don’t really want people who are only motivated by being close to those in power.
Alright, so Tom and you convinced Todd to come.
Nick:
Well, I had very little to do with it; I was just at the meeting where Tom was working to recruit him. After Todd accepted the job, he sat down with each direct report. My first meeting with Todd started at 6:00 p.m. and went to 8:30 p.m. He missed the reception at the Vice President’s house that he was invited to because he was so fascinated by all the things that I had been helping with. (That’s a reflection of how Todd is a great listener, and secondarily, how I clearly wasn’t a succinct briefer.)
At team CTO, we had been trying to coordinate and help on the Blue Button effort across the VA and HHS, which started at the VA with Peter Levin’s prescription information in text format. It spread to HHS, and we were working on Green Button, something that Aneesh and I spent a lot of time on, which was getting the utilities to make energy data available back to consumers and large customers — even government customers.
Kathy:
I didn’t know much about Green Button.
Nick:
Aneesh and I started that in 2011. One of my first jobs in OSTP was smart grid policy and grid modernization policy, because I had led a small team as part of the National Broadband Plan on smart grid, smart home, and smart transportation. One of my first hires was Charles Worthington, by the way.
From that work, one of the recommendations was that consumers should have access to their data in standard, machine-readable formats, so they could use apps and services and could better switch between retail providers where you have competition in deregulated markets like Texas. That was originally an FCC recommendation, and then we wrote it as national policy. Team CTO got the three California utilities in a room and convinced them to do a pilot of Green Button. The joke was that we locked these three utility CIOs in a room with Aneesh for two and a half hours, and they would agree to do anything just to get out of the room.
After 90 days, two of the three utilities had a pilot going to give customers data access. Something like 60 utilities have adopted it and one-third of the country has access. There’s a whole nonprofit that promotes it. There are Canadian utilities and Italian utilities providing access — it’s a global standard.
So anyway, Todd decided that’s where he wanted to focus the office: open data as well as access to your own personal data, which we later called MyData. I inherited the open government portfolio, as well. Todd made me a deputy, and it was pretty clear what Todd wanted to do. 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.
In 2012 we launched the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF). Todd had recruited John Farmer and Arianne Gallagher. I had known John socially and had introduced him to Todd, and Arianne Gallagher was a former Presidential Management Fellow (PMF). John and Arianne were responsible for setting up the PIF program, and Todd wisely went around and got approval in record time, but he also made it a joint thing across the Presidency. He invited Steve VanRoekel (Federal CIO) and Jeff Zients (OMB Director) to be cofounders and got buy-in from innovation leads in the cabinet agencies.
I trace a lot of the USDS and 18F movement to the PIFs. I credit Todd for coming in and focusing our office. He was inspired by Code for America and their original fellows program, although there were things that we copied and there were things that we wanted to deviate from.
In the first PIF program, we had about 18 PIFs, and many of them were working on open data or MyData projects. Agencies proposed projects, and we had a process of seeing which ones we would choose and pair with a PIF or a team of PIFs. That early history of the PIF program is relevant because a lot of USDS and 18F came from PIFs that stuck around after their fellowship ended.
Todd, Steve VanRoekel, and Jeff Zients were the formal sponsors of the program. John Farmer, Arianne, and people like me were the operational leads, and Haley Van Dyck helped from Steve’s office.
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.
Kathy:
This is so important. If somebody were to stand up a digital service team and think that they can hire a few engineers amid a disaster and then have them save it, they won’t be successful. Because it took a lot of groundwork before and afterward and a lot of people involved in different ways.
Nick:
What I found fascinating was that I would scout and hire people like Ryan and Marina in OSTP to work for me, and very quickly they would get redeployed. I was like, “Hey boss, every person I hire keeps getting put to a bigger and better use.” Which is totally fair. I’m middle management, and I work for Todd. But originally, Marina and Ryan were helping me with the open data and MyData portfolio, and that included a reboot of data.gov, which was required in the 2011 digital strategy and part of the open government memo from early on. But data.gov needed to be rebuilt to be more user-centric, and Marina and Ryan were helping. When the actual HealthCare.gov fiasco happened, Marina was asked to be a part of it.
Marina spent some time on HealthCare.gov, but ended up directing her time to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). There was this backlog crisis at the VA, and all these special meetings were held inside the White House to try and figure it out. Todd kept taking Marina to them, and Marina stayed up several nights in a row and did a discovery, trying to understand what the real source of the backlog was — because a lot of the answers coming from the VA didn’t make any sense.
She wrote it up and gave a presentation in the Roosevelt Room, and it was one of the few meetings that got a standing ovation. It gave Todd the political capital to put her up as a 28-year-old CTO to the VA, which was atypical. Marina hadn’t worked in big tech or startups, and had under 2 years of government experience. And yet she was exactly what the VA needed at the time.
Kathy:
That story is so important: Marina’s whole journey of being a PIF, being called in while Todd was CTO, and then seeing a need for work, doing the work, and ultimately being in this leadership position. When I started, I was told by so many people that Marina had built this level of trust with a lot of executives — both in the White House and at the VA, particularly secretaries Bob McDonald and Sloan Gibson — that many others did not have, and how critical that was to USDS.
Nick:
She built that level of trust in the White House by being able to execute on a rapid discovery, explain things, and chart a path forward. She was able to build an authentic relationship with Sloan and with Bob, and also with all the various people and offices. She didn’t have budget for years. She didn’t have headcount for years. There’s the whole story about her working with people like Mollie Ruskin and Emily Tavoulareas to develop the vision document. That document was a way to convince people where the VA should go. Marina and I wrote a book about stories like this, it’s called Hack Your Bureaucracy.
Kathy:
Several people have talked about that already: the lack of headcount, and then the influx of 75 people. We were like, “Oh, crap. We don’t even have a hiring process. How are we going to find 75 people?”
Nick, what were you doing in early to mid-2014, when all the HealthCare.gov stuff was happening and USDS was spinning up?
Nick:
First, some important context: We decided to recruit Jen Pahlka to start USDS in late 2012 or early 2013. I was in London visiting the Government Digital Service (GDS) and Jen was, too, so we went out for a drink. I remember Jen saying, “Todd is just relentless in trying to hire me. But it can’t work, I have an eight-year-old daughter.”
When I think about my tiny, tiny piece in this, it was convincing Charles to come to federal government, not once but twice. It was mentoring Marina and convincing her to stay, when she had a tough start to her fellowship. It was recruiting Erie Meyer from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to OSTP. I fought battles to get CFPB to release her and pay her detail to the EOP. All that talent stuff wasn’t sexy but important.
Kathy:
There was momentum growing from the new office in CFPB that Erie helped start. That fed into the invention of USDS, too.
Nick:
Yeah. There was an OSTP colleague of mine, Eugene Huang, who was at the FCC prior. He technically was in OSTP, but he spent all of his time working with Elizabeth Warren, and then Richard Cordray, helping set up the Office of the CIO. He was excited by that, and I didn’t understand why he was never around, but it all makes sense now.
CFPB very quickly developed an independent regulatory agency ethos, as good independent regulatory agencies do. I had met Erie at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. I saw her speak and I immediately started recruiting her: “I love what you’re doing. You should come work for us.”
Kathy:
That’s so funny. Mollie Ruskin heard Erie talk at that event too, and it left this huge impression on her.
Nick:
So Erie came and worked for me, with Todd, before she moved over to USDS. 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.
I saw Jen recently, and she said that when she had complained that Todd was being relentless in trying to hire her, I turned to her in London straight-faced and said, “Like water on stone, we will eventually be successful.” She recalled I said it so ominously that she was actually afraid. I was not trying to be creepy or anything like that, I was just so certain Todd was going to convince her to join. “Water on stone” is one of our sayings in the OSTP Team Kalil whiteboard.
Sure enough, we got her. She came in not just to take over the PIF program, but to launch USDS. She was very clear with Todd that she was not just coming for a fellows program. She wanted to do digital transformation work and create the U.S. Digital Service. To help her, Charles came over to OSTP, moving early from his year-long PIF fellowship at DOE.
Some context: Charles initially came to government in 2009, as part of the National Broadband Plan at the FCC. He then went back to the consulting firm I had recruited him from. From there, he left to become an entrepreneur and taught himself to code. He also applied to the PIF program, which got him to the DOE.
Casey Burns joined Team CTO, too. They were all working on this digital services unit concept, and at a certain point, Jen came to me and said, “Nick, I need help. Will you co-run the PIF program with me?” I said, “Sure.” For the second round, we had recruited around 40 PIFs. Because of my policy priorities, I was already actively managing some of the PIFs. Part of this was simply giving Jen more bandwidth to set up USDS.
USDS had a ton of different names initially. We were calling it GovX for a long time, and it was supposed to be the same thing as 18F. There was a split between the organizations you should probably get all the details of. That’s important lore.
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.
Kathy:
We need to dive into that more at some point: the budget, where it sits, and why it is so critical. That comes up over and over again. It’s funny: Folks will talk about digital service at the high level all day long, but the moment they’re on the ground doing the work, the first thing they start asking is, “Can you tell us how you structured things and where you got money from?”
Thank you, Nick.