Former USDS Leaders Launch Tech Reform Project to Fix What DOGE Broke
The past year has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team's former coders, designers and UX experts have watched in horror as Donald Trump renamed the service as DOGE, effectively forced out its staff, and used a strike force of young and reckless engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. Just one aspect of the Trump initiative triggered jealousy in tech reformers: the fearlessness of the Trump administration in rising generations of cruft and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used that decisiveness and power in the service of the people instead of following the dark agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?
A small but influential team sets out to answer this very question, and is working on a solution they hope to deploy during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaductand their goal is to create a complete plan to restart how the US provides services to citizens. The Viaduct cadre of experienced federal tech officials is in the process of drafting specifications on how to remake the government, with the goal of producing initial recommendations by the spring. By 2029, if a Democrat wins, he hopes to get his plan adopted by the White House.
Tech Viaduct's advisory panel includes former Obama staffer and Biden's Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough; Biden's Deputy CTO Alexander Macgillivray; Marina Nitze, former CTO of the VA; and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. But the most noteworthy is their senior adviser and spiritual leader, Mikey Dickerson, the crusty former Google engineer who was the first leader of USDS. His hands-on ethic and unfiltered distaste for bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama's tech rise. No one is more familiar with how government tech services fail American citizens than Dickerson. And no one is more fed up with the various ways they have fallen short.
Dickerson himself unwittingly set the Viaduct project in motion last April. He was packing the contents of his DC-area condo to get as far away from the political scrum as possible (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote area of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet with Mook. When the two got together, they lamented the DOGE initiative, but agreed that the impulse to tear down the dysfunctional system and start over was a good one. “The basic idea is that it's too hard to get things done,” says Dickerson. “They are not wrong in that.” He admits that Democrats had blown a big opportunity “For 10 years we had small victories here and there, but never terraformed the whole ecosystem,” says Dickerson. “What would that look like?”
Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called him to say he found funding from Searchlight Institutea liberal think tank dedicated to new policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A Searchlight spokesman says the think tank budgeted $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, like Al Pacino in Godfather IIIused to be pulled back. Ironically, it was Trump's reckless approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were badly laid off, 200 people running around trying to improve websites,” he says. “Trump has knocked down all the beehives — the beltway bandits, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex.”
Tech Viaduct has two purposes. The first is to produce a master plan to remake government services – establish an unbiased procurement process, create a merit-based hiring process, and provide oversight to make sure things don't go wrong. (Welcome back, inspector generals!) The idea is to draft signature-ready executive orders and legislative drafts that will guide the recruitment strategy for a revitalized civil service. In the coming months, the group plans to devise and test a framework that can be implemented as soon as 2029, without any consensus building that kills momentum. In Viaduct's vision, that consensus will come before the elections. “Coming up with bright ideas will be the easy part,” says Dickerson. “As hard as we're going to work in the next three to six months, we're going to have to spend another two to three years, through a primary season and through an election, advocating as if we were a lobby group.”
