Todd Park
‘Changing the Culture is Everything’: Todd Park on the Foundation of the Success of the U.S. Digital Service
| Todd Park was U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President from 2012 to 2014, during which he and others co-created the U.S. Digital Service, and served as White House technology advisor based in Silicon Valley from 2014-2017. Prior, Todd was Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, and before that the co-founder of AthenaHealth, a leading healthcare technology company. |
The U.S. Digital Service has countless builders, but Todd Park is one of its primary architects. Todd served as Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services and then the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, followed by serving as White House technology advisor based in Silicon Valley, during Barack Obama’s two terms – working on technology policy and innovation issues and the modernization of the government’s approach to technology more broadly.
Todd’s initial foray into government was supposed to be brief, but turned into over seven years of public service. During that time, he cultivated ideas and relationships that laid the foundation that USDS was later built on. And while the details of his vision shifted and evolved over the years, Todd insists the basic formula always remained the same: Bring in people with skills that the government lacks. Help them partner with the best and brightest already within the federal government. Provide them with high-level air cover. And work intentionally to create culture change.
Below, Todd discusses “the 100 founding mothers and fathers” of USDS, his most effective recruiting strategies, and the high-level relationships that allowed USDS to flourish.
Kathy Pham:
Todd, what was your journey to USDS?
Todd Park:
I’m a healthcare tech entrepreneur. When I was 24, my brother Ed, my friend Jonathan Bush, and I started a company called AthenaHealth. Long story short, we ended up building the first cloud-based software platform to run doctor’s offices, with integrated back office services. We were focused on helping doctors, nurse practitioners, and clinicians do the best work that they could on behalf of their patients. I did that for over a decade, and AthenaHealth currently runs a large swathe of American doctor offices with close to 200 million patient records.
In 2008, a year after AthenaHealth went public, I stepped down from the management team to keep a long-time promise to my wife. I met Amy when I was 17 and she was 18. Her parents live in California, and I promised her when we were young that we would move next to her mom and dad and have a family together. Once I felt that AthenaHealth didn’t really need me anymore, I joined its board and retired to Northern California. I co-founded a second company called Castlight Health, an online healthcare shopping service and benefits management platform. But that was mostly built by other people because a year-and-a-half into my quasi-retirement, I got drafted by the U.S. federal government.
Like millions of other people, I was moved to get involved in politics for the first time because of Senator Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. I volunteered to do work for the campaign, and I was in Chicago when Senator Obama became President-elect Obama. We were all delirious. He walked out on stage, and he was the only person who wasn’t delirious with excitement. He said, basically, “This is great, but we haven’t done anything yet. All we’ve done is win the chance to help people, and whether or not we actually help people isn’t up to me. It’s up to all of you, and whether you keep sacrificing for the cause of change.”
I remember not being able to sleep that night and thinking, “He’s right.” So the next day I called a friend in the campaign working on domestic policy and said, “I’d love to help on an ongoing basis in any way I can. I have to stay in California — but can I help?” I then became a volunteer fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), working part-time on health IT, healthcare payment innovation, and care delivery innovation. I became known to the Obama administration through that work, and they decided to recruit me.
One of my teammates at CAP was Aneesh Chopra. He called me one day and said, “Todd, I’ve got great news and bad news. The great news is that President Obama asked me to be his U.S. Chief Technology Officer.” I replied, “That’s fantastic news. What could possibly be bad?” And he said, “Well, I was supposed to take this job called Health and Human Services (HHS) CTO, but now I can’t. So I think you should do that job.”
I told him I couldn’t, but agreed to help find someone for the role. I found someone whom I thought would be terrific. But Aneesh told Deputy Secretary of HHS Bill Corr, “The guy you should really hire is Todd Park.” Bill replied, “I don’t want to talk to the other guy. I want to talk to Todd.”
I flew to D.C. to learn more about what Bill wanted so I could more effectively find someone to fill the HHS CTO role for him. But Bill is an incredibly compelling salesperson in the most subtle way, and over the course of a couple hours, he ensorcelled me into being interested in the role. He wanted me to be an entrepreneur-in-residence and advise the government on how to create policy that unleashes the power of tech and innovation and data to make healthcare better.
I thought that was really intriguing and asked what concretely I would do. Bill explained that HHS was sitting on all this data in the vaults of Medicare, Medicaid, CMS, NIH, FDA, and the CDC. Bill said that HHS was suboptimizing social return on taxpayer investment in this data — and could I help HHS think about what to do? I’m a data uber geek and so I started brainstorming on this. I went home, talked with Amy about the conversation with Bill about the HHS CTO role, and said to her, “I know this is not what you were expecting, but what do you think about going to D.C.?” She was so angry that she didn’t talk to me for four days. But at the end of the four days she said, “I will go back to the East Coast, for a year, because it’s your national duty to do that job.”
I was HHS CTO for two years. Then President Obama asked me to be Aneesh’s successor as U.S. CTO, and I agreed. When the President asked me to extend into the second term, he also asked Amy — and she was fine with it. Then, after five years of service in D.C., I had to move back to California, per Amy’s ironclad orders; our son was starting school. President Obama, after coming to understand that it was literally impossible to convince Amy to extend our family’s stay in D.C. any longer, said. “Todd, you have to find me a successor before you leave. And you’ve got to keep working for me from Silicon Valley.”
It turns out that it was, at that time, a non-traditional thing to have a White House employee whose duty station was not the White House, but the President’s folks figured out how to do it. So I became the White House Tech Advisor based in Silicon Valley and helped build the USDS and recruit people into the U.S. government. I also got to stay married.
Kathy:
Todd, I am struck how your own recruiting story mirrors the pitches others got to come to USDS: service and the higher calling.
Emily:
What happened between your time as HHS CTO and starting USDS?
Todd:
HHS CTO was a job with no regulatory authority, no statutory authority, no budget, and no team. You work as an advisor for the people in charge on whatever it is that’s important. They wanted me to work on data; their initial hypothesis was to have HHS build a bunch of apps with the data. But I said, “That’s not really your core competency. What we should try instead is to clone what the U.S. government very successfully did with weather data and with GPS — open it up to the public so they can take that data and come up with ideas on what to do with that data that we never would’ve in a million years come up with. And even more importantly, execute and iterate on them.”
In 2009, I did a walkabout across HHS agencies and found people who were really excited by this idea, and they started explaining how they could detail themselves to me, either formally or informally. We started something called the Health Data Initiative, which was meant to liberate the data from the vaults of HHS, publicize it, and enable it to be used by healthcare innovators everywhere to help the country in all kinds of ways.
Aneesh was beside himself with joy. He and Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), were really big into open data. They wanted to find agency-level champions, because the agencies are where all the data and the people and the money are. With me at HHS, they found an enthusiastic member of the growing open data movement. Bill Corr and Secretary Sebelius were also very enthusiastic about it and supported it from the top, which was super important.
There’s an amazing guy, Greg Downing from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who got himself detailed to me. I still don’t know how he did 80% of what he did. He would say, “You need money for that?” and come back with money. He would say, “You need people for that?” and come back with the people. He would say “You need to get that done?” and make it happen. He was one of the archetypal bureaucracy hackers, and he was absolutely phenomenal. To me, he was the heart of the Health Data Initiative.
Long story short, we realized that the true output of the Health Data Initiative shouldn’t be open data — it should be an ecosystem that uses open data to produce actual benefits for society. So we started with an MVP: a focused number of HHS data sets that either had never been released before, or that were released only as PDFs or books, not in a machine-readable format. Then, in partnership with the Institute of Medicine, we convened a brainstorming session with two dozen entrepreneurs and innovators. They were all very skeptical initially, but we said, “If you actually had this data, in machine-readable form, what would you do with it?”
A whole bunch of them didn’t even know the U.S. government had this data. They said, “This data is pretty freaking awesome” and brainstormed a couple dozen ideas. I made up a word for a gathering, “datapalooza,” and said that we’d release the data sets we’d discussed, and in ninety days, HHS and the Institute of Medicine would host a “health datapalooza,” at which we’d showcase anyone who could build what they’d just brainstormed.
Ninety days later, more than 20 of the innovators and entrepreneurs showed up with all kinds of new product prototypes and new features for their existing products that were beneficial for patients, providers, and more. So government people who had been on the sidelines said, “I’ll try this now, and make my data available,” and then even more innovators and entrepreneurs scrubbed in. A virtuous spiral began, and the datapaloozas became an annual gathering with ad hoc events in between. The datapaloozas grew to 2,000 people in a cavernous convention center and are still held to this day. There’s now an open health data ecosystem, which is really exciting to see.
At the end of two years as HHS CTO, I said, “I’m going to go home now.” But the White House wanted me to consider becoming the next U.S. CTO. Tom Kalil, who was leading this charge, asked what I would do if the President personally called me and asked. I jokingly said, “If President Obama literally called me, I would of course say yes.” And Tom said, “Well, then I’ll have him call you.” That crystallized it for me. I said, “No, no, no, he’s very busy. He doesn’t need to call me. I will do this.”
The U.S. CTO role, like the HHS CTO role, was an advisory role that had no statutory authority, no regulatory authority, and no real dedicated financial resources of its own. But if you had a partnership with a person in charge, you could create something from nothing. You could attract people and a bit of funding, and then do stuff, and then raise your next round of political, human, and financial capital. It was actually really liberating to not have a large bureaucracy to run. I was a free agent.
Aneesh wanted me to take the open data play at HHS and clone it across the entire U.S. government, so we did education datapaloozas and energy datapaloozas and liberated more and more data. That eventually turned into the open data executive order (EO), which provided formal institutional support for the open data movement.
Kathy:
So there are these grassroots movements, and then this EO ties together all these other pieces that were happening at the same time. It’s like a catalyst, which is what the White House does best.
Todd:
It’s executive level air cover from the White House for a movement with grassroots momentum across government.
The other main thing I worked on was the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program. I pitched the President on a program that would bring amazing tech innovators, engineers, designers, product people, and entrepreneurs into government for what was initially a six-month tour of duty. We would marry them with the best people already in government and put them on missions of great importance to the American people, with political air cover. I was confident that it would work because it was what I had already been doing. I was the external dude with certain experiences and skills who worked with people who knew how to make government work, and could then make something from nothing.
Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel partnered with me to create the program, and President Obama green lit it. Everyone was thrilled, but again: we had no program staff, no budget, no authority. It was just me, Steve, Haley Van Dyck in Steve’s office, and teammates John Farmer and Arianne Gallagher at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). We went to government agencies and explained that we could get them experts they normally don’t have access to, with particular tech skills. We only had room for five projects, so the agencies needed to pitch us compelling missions and projects, which had to have funding attached and the sponsorship of the people in charge of the agencies. We had this cage match in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) where agencies pitched their projects to us, and five of them won.
Then Steve and I had to find people for the PIF program. We went to TechCrunch Disrupt, and right before we got on stage, Adrian Grenier, the star of the TV show “Entourage,” was premiering a self-cooling beer keg. Steve and I had to follow that. I said, “We could not be less cool than those guys.” Nevertheless, we got on stage and said , “We’re here from the U.S. government and we are asking on behalf of our country for your help.” We pitched the audience on projects to help veterans, help our government’s efforts in Afghanistan, and more, and asked folks to apply. In the first two days, we got 700 applications. It was an overwhelming response.
We eventually brought in the first class of fellows, like Ryan Panchadsaram and Marina Martin, and they had an incredible impact. It changed patterns of thinking in government and changed assumptions. That bought us the ability to do a second class of fellows and then the third class, et cetera. President Obama loved the program. It’s an exact pattern match with how he thinks about the universe: Americans of all stripes coming together to serve their country.
At the end of the first class, one of the PIFs pulled me aside and said, “Todd, I’m going to tell you all of the ways this program is failing and doesn’t work.” He explained them all to me, and I said, “That makes a ton of sense, and we’re going to jump on all of that.” He was taken aback; he was expecting me to get defensive. Instead, I thought, “Who could fix these issues? Who could run and scale a PIF program and have maximum impact for good on America?”
The answer was Jennifer Pahlka. She built Code for America. She’s forgotten more about how to run a tech fellowship program than I’ve ever learned. I convinced Jen to join me as Deputy U.S. CTO and make the PIF program dramatically better. Over an incredibly intense, amazing lunch she said to me: “I will come and do this, and I’m very excited about it. But there’s one more thing I really want to do. I want to create something called the United States Digital Service, modeled on the Government Digital Service in the UK.”
I said, “That sounds awesome. Let’s do it.” She joined, which was one of the best days of my life. She got me and Ryan Panchadsaram and Haley Van Dyck and Steve VanRoekel and other folks fired up to work on USDS. Then the question became, “Well, what should the USDS really do?” One seed from that eventually found its realization in the creation of 18F, founded by remarkable former PIFs, and another seed led to the creation of what became known as the actual USDS.
A key episode that happened on the way to the founding of the USDS was the rescue of the HealthCare.gov Affordable Care Act marketplace after that website’s profoundly troubled launch in October 2013. To fix the marketplace website, President Obama asked Jeff Zients and me to co-lead a rescue mission. With a team of amazing folks I recruited including Gabriel Burt, Mikey Dickerson, Greg Gershman, Ryan Panchadsaram, and Paul Smith, later joined by additional remarkable technologists, we deployed to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to help the agency fix HealthCare.gov. The rescue was ultimately successful, enabling millions of Americans to enroll in marketplace health insurance coverage.
Upon returning to the White House after the rescue mission, I reflected on the experience, and the mission’s underlying pattern and success crystallized for me what I thought could be a successful overall approach for the USDS:
build small teams of change agents, like our HealthCare.gov rescue squad, including technologists with skills gained from deep experience outside government; deploy these teams on vitally important missions in which they partner with the best people already inside the agencies responsible for those missions; provide these teams and their agency teammates with strong air cover from the very top; and enable them to work at incredibly high velocity to enable mission success.
I went to Mikey Dickerson and asked what he thought about this idea for the USDS. Mikey said, “I think that could actually work.” Coming from Mikey, that’s incredibly high praise. And then he volunteered to lead the USDS, which was a huge boost.
Simultaneously, I was thinking we needed to recruit about 200 tech experts for USDS to staff a set of teams who could fan out across government to work in parallel on its most important service delivery missions. Our theory of change was: first, via these teams, help government succeed in delivering on these vital missions. And in the process of doing that, create beacons of possibility for everyone else across government, blazing high-profile new trails for how government can execute in dramatically better ways.
That’s how you really change the culture of imagination and execution in government. And changing the culture is everything.
But 200 top engineers, designers, product managers, and operators is a lot of people to recruit, particularly given that we needed to recruit the very best folks. So I talked to Jennifer Anastasoff, who agreed to be the recruiter-in-chief. And I personally committed to devoting a ton of energy and time to recruiting. Then Deputy Chief of Staff Kristie Canegallo and I pitched President Obama on the proposed creation of the USDS. He green lit it, and we had a ballgame. USDS has 100 founding mothers and fathers, including the two of you, Mikey Dickerson, Haley Van Dyck, Steve VanRoekel, Jennifer Pahlka, Jennifer Anastasoff, Kristie Canegallo, President Obama, and many more. Change takes a village.
On another note, here’s a story that illustrates how serendipitous journeys like USDS’s can be. I happened to live in the same apartment building as Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, and leased a parking space from him. After we first met in a meeting at the White House, we became friends. One day, catching up in the lobby of our apartment building, Ash asked me what I was working on, and I talked about the USDS. Ash got very excited and asked me to come to the Pentagon to talk about the USDS in more depth with him and Department of Defense teammates. So Matthew Weaver, Haley, Mikey, and I went to the Pentagon and met with Ash in his suite. Ash was surrounded by very important people, generals and aides, and he came around a large conference room table to greet us — and I gave him a giant hug. We then sat down and started talking about the USDS. Literally about seven minutes into the presentation, he said, “I’ll take 10 of these teams. I want them to work for me in the Office of the Secretary.”
That was the genesis of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) – effectively, a USDS outfit based in the Department of Defense. It illustrates how things evolve: sometimes in a highly directed way, and sometimes through what seems like Brownian motion.
Another story is that the Defense Digital Service team members wore informal clothing. One of them showed up at the Office of the Secretary one day wearing a hoodie, and the protocol officer ejected him. Ash heard about this and went apoplectic. He apparently issued a directive saying, “These guys can wear whatever the hell they want.” And thereafter, if folks saw someone walking in a hoodie through the halls of the Pentagon, they assumed that this must be a key person with the sponsorship of the Secretary, and someone to whom they should listen. So again, it’s all about culture change. Ash, may he rest in peace, was a truly incredible early champion of the USDS.
Kathy:
This reminds me of our interview with Mike Collier. He brought up this idea of Darwin’s warm pond, where a lot of tech and government ideas grew and then manifested.
Todd:
That’s what movements feel like. Movements are not centrally controlled. They’re threads of awesomeness sprouting from all kinds of sources and in all kinds of directions that then interlink and feed off each other. They inspire each other and create a growing ecosystem.
It got to a point where there was so much innovation and activity happening, across the USDS, digital service teams, 18F, Presidential Innovation Fellows, open data efforts, agency initiatives, etc., I couldn’t keep track of all of it anymore. No one could. That’s a sign of a grassroots ecosystem of innovation that’s out of control – and it’s when an ecosystem gets out of control, that’s when you realize it’s really going to have an impact.
Emily:
Todd, can you tell us more about your recruiting for USDS?
Todd:
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 probably going to change in any number of ways as your learning grows. 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.
Jennifer Anastasoff was employee number one of the USDS, and that was reflective of how important we thought recruiting was. Recruiting was also the single biggest use of my time as White House tech advisor in Silicon Valley – recruiting for USDS and other government roles. We showed up in places where people never expected the U.S. government to show up and networked throughout the community, making intense efforts to identify and seek out the very best talent, for which competition is always ferocious – everyone wants to hire those people.
I learned that the right USDS recruiting technique was to start by clearly explaining the missions that the USDS worked on. People would instantly say, “Those missions sound a lot more important than what I’m currently working on. But how could you possibly make a difference in an organization as big and complicated as the U.S. government?” In response, we would explain the USDS’s attack pattern and give proof points of success. And then, very importantly, we’d say, “This is going to be the hardest job you’ve ever had by a factor of 10.” Then the pitch would end. I’d say, “If you want to do it, here’s my cell phone number, here’s my email. Let me know if you want to talk further.” It was very important to have folks basically self-propel into further conversations and ultimately into service.
The President also personally recruited people. He’s the only tech recruiter I’ve ever met whose hit rate is 100%. Early on, we brought a group of about a dozen amazing folks to the Roosevelt Room at the White House for a roundtable on USDS. They were all in situations where they couldn’t join the government for totally understandable reasons. They were enmeshed in their current work. But they loved what they learned about the USDS at the roundtable. One then said, “This sounds really compelling, but in my experience, this kind of thing only works if you have a sponsor among the people in charge. Do you have that?”
And as if on cue, three minutes later, the side door opened and President Obama walked in. Everyone was stunned. He then sat down for 45 minutes and explained the mission, the attack pattern, and the proof points for USDS. After he left, every single person in that room signed up. President Obama sent the signal that the CEO of the U.S. government was allocating time to personally recruit the best American talent into USDS and would provide the air cover to enable USDS to succeed.
Kathy:
Todd, final questions: What are you most proud of at USDS? What has left a lasting impact? And, what USDS milestones or turning points should be cemented in history?
Todd:
What my mind and my heart retrieve from my memory bank is a montage of the faces of everyone who is part of the movement. That just overwhelms me and fills me with such profound joy. There are all kinds of milestones to note in terms of projects that were successful, changes that happened, evolutions in the operating pattern of government, and an extraordinary number of American lives touched in all kinds of meaningful ways. At the root of all of that are the people who made all of that happen.
Emily:
Todd, you’ve done something so special by bringing this incredible group of people together.
Todd:
For each of us to be part of this network of hearts for America is the most extraordinary thing.
Kathy:
Thank you, Todd.