For Eric Maland, the whole thing goes back to that San Francisco wedding. Mikey wasn’t there—well, wait, actually, Mikey was there. But Eric didn’t meet him at that point. Eric met some other folks at the wedding who told him they were doing some fix-it stuff in Washington, and it sounded kind of interesting.
And now we’re chatting about it in front of the White House security gate, where we’re waiting to talk with the leaders inside about why guys like Eric are now wandering around this neighborhood with MacBooks in their shoulder bags and code in their heads. These are the “new techies,” as longtime Washingtonians tend to say, but that’s somewhat imprecise. These are people whose pedigree in Silicon Valley gives them the whispered reputations of gods and goddesses. I look at Eric. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt; his sparse hair is seriously matted down. Did he sleep lately? Exercise? Shave? All debatable. “Ever wonder what you’re doing here?” I ask him. He was the 13th engineer hired at Amazon, the first operations director at Twitter. Like everyone else on the stealth team that President Barack Obama is amassing and deploying inside the government, he never imagined he would live and work in D.C. “I guess I just like to fix things that are broken,” he says, shrugging.
Then there’s Lisa Gelobter. “Oh, you’ve gotta hear my story,” she says. It’s later that day, and we’re walking near the Washington Monument under a searing midday sun. There was this call she got out of the blue last summer in New York, inviting her to some kind of roundtable discussion in Washington for tech leaders. Lisa had just spent time on the upper management teams at Hulu and BET. She decides, reluctantly, that she’ll go take the meeting, which includes this guy named Mikey as well as this other guy named Todd, and turns out to be in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing. Then President Obama opens the door and surprises everyone, and over the course of 45 minutes gives the sales pitch to beat all sales pitches. They need to come work for him. They will need to take a pay cut, the president announces. But he doesn’t care what it takes—he will personally call their bosses, their spouses, their kids to convince them. The crowd laughs. But he gravely responds: I am completely serious. He needs them to overhaul the government’s digital infrastructure now. “What are you going to say to that?” asks Lisa.
Oh, and the stories about Weaver. “First name is Matthew,” Weaver says, sitting on a cheap couch in a makeshift office near the White House. But no one calls him Matthew, he explains, since there are too many Matthews in any given room at any given moment. Even among D.C.’s new technorati, people view Weaver as someone separate from the fray. Maybe it’s because he once lived in a camper in the Google parking lot without going home for an entire year. Maybe it’s because he was the one guy who, if he didn’t answer an emergency call, the whole search engine might go down. Or maybe it’s because in a group of brilliant engineers, Weaver, as one of his new colleagues puts it, stands out as “someone who is, like, superhero-fucking-brilliant.” Recruited from California last year by these guys Mikey and Todd to work on the broken Healthcare.gov website, Weaver decided this year to stay in D.C. and leave behind the comfort of Google and a big pile of stock options. He recalls it in terms that suggest the transfixing power of a holy pilgrimage. “That”—he says, meaning the Healthcare.gov fix-it work—”changed my life in a profound way. It made it feel like all my accomplishments in my professional life meant very little compared to getting millions of people through the hospital doors for the first time. And that made me see that I could never do any other work without a public impact.” Weaver now spends his days in the guts of the Veterans Administration, helping the agency’s digital team upgrade their systems and website—and trying to reboot the way government works. As an early test to see if he could challenge the VA’s protocol, he insisted, successfully, that his official government title be Rogue Leader. And so he is: Rogue Leader Weaver.
Todd and Mikey—the ones who helped bring people like Eric Maland, Lisa Gelobter, and Weaver down here—are, respectively, Todd Park, the former chief technology officer of the United States, and Mikey Dickerson, who led a team of 60 engineers at Google and supervised the crew that fixed the Healthcare.gov website last year. Since that time, Park and Dickerson have been steadily recruiting an elite digital corps—a startup team, essentially, built mainly from the ranks of top private-sector companies—and embedding them within the U.S. government. Their purpose is to remake the digital systems by which government operates, to implement the kind of efficiency and agility and effectiveness that define Silicon Valley’s biggest successes, across everything from the IRS to Immigration Services. “We’ve got about 140 people in the network right now,” Park says of the digital team. “The goal is to get it to about 500 by the end of 2016.” Whether Park and Dickerson can find enough superstar techies to take a flyer on this risky project is just one of many concerns. There are bigger questions, too, such as whether a small number of technologists can actually bring about vast changes within the most massive, powerful, bureaucratic regime on earth.
It helps that the two men have substantial “air cover,” as President Obama describes it in an exclusive, in-person interview with Fast Company. For the past year, the president explains, he has personally helped Park and his team hire talent and implement their ideas across a host of government agencies. While the reasons behind this initiative and its scope have not been made clear before, in the president’s view, the idea of building a “pipeline” of tech talent in Washington starts with practical appeal: Better digital tools could upgrade the websites of, say, the Veterans Administration, so users get crucial services that save time, money, and (for veterans in need of medical help) lives. “But what we realized was, this could be a recipe for something larger,” the president explains. “You will have a more user-friendly government, a more responsive government. A government that can work with individuals on individual problems in a more tailored way, because the technology facilitates that the same way it increasingly does for private-sector companies.” In other words, if Obama’s tech team can successfully rebuild the digital infrastructure of Washington—an outcome that is by no means certain yet—you might not only change its functionality. You might transform Americans’ attitudes about government too. And you might even boost their waning feelings of empowerment in an ideologically riven country of 320 million people.
In the meantime, do you also end up with a dedicated group of Rogue Leader Weavers where none existed before? Tech geniuses who embrace public service as an essential element of their careers? The president is betting on that outcome as well. Get the country’s technologists to change Washington, the theory goes, and maybe—just maybe—you end up changing the country’s culture of technology, too.
The new hub of Washington’s tech insurgency is something known as the U.S. Digital Service, which is headquartered in a stately brick townhouse half a block from the White House. USDS employees tend to congregate with their laptops at a long table at the back half of the parlor floor. If there’s no room, they retreat downstairs to a low-ceilinged basement, sprawling on cushioned chairs. Apart from an air-hockey table, there aren’t many physical reminders of West Coast startup culture—a lot of the new techies are issued BlackBerrys, which seems to cause them near-physical pain. Nevertheless, the corps at USDS tends to rely on the same jargon you hear around Silicon Valley these days. They’ll say they’re here to “iterate,” or to “deliver product,” or to “JFDI” (that is, just fucking do it). When I wander downstairs one morning in late April, Ben Maurer, a young engineer on sabbatical from Facebook, is huddling with a few colleagues on a project for the Department of Defense. “I’m not just fixing bugs here,” he informs me, looking up from his laptop for about a nanosecond before going back to his coding. He seems tired but pleased to work on something big—in this case, to map out a broad digital structure for an upcoming project at the mammoth agency.
To a certain extent, the Obama administration has always been a comfortable place for techies like Maurer; the president—whose 2008 campaign was arguably the most convincing demonstration at the time of social media potential—was the first chief executive to appoint a chief technology officer and, more recently, a chief data officer. “Government has done technology and IT terribly over the last 30 years and fallen very much behind the private sector,” Obama says. “And when I came into government, what surprised me most was that gap.” But creating high-level positions like the CTO was a route to better government technology policy, not necessarily better operations. Besides, the immediate priority was addressing the economic crisis and resolving military entanglements.
Tech moved up on the punch list in 2013 due to a new crisis: the Healthcare.gov fiasco. When the president’s key legislative achievement was mortally threatened by a nonfunctioning website, Todd Park, as CTO, was among those asked to help rescue the endeavor. Before his stint in government, Park had started two medical IT companies now valued at over a billion dollars each, and it was that experience, not policy or politics, that he called upon. Park recruited Dickerson from Google, as well as a half-dozen other engineers. This small team, working around the clock in Maryland, fixed the site in seven hectic weeks. Not only did the effort “save the president’s baby,” as one former White House staffer puts it, it crystallized within the administration the impact that just a handful of deeply talented techies could have on our government’s functionality. And it prompted Obama, Park, and their colleagues to wonder: Could an infusion of West Coast tech talent become permanent? What might that achieve?
As it turned out, there was a model to follow. The British government had demonstrated that the best digital practices from the private sector could be applied to the public realm with transformative results, through an initiative known as the Government Digital Service. (A columnist at the Guardian newspaper lamented that he couldn’t invest in the GDS, even though it seemed like the best tech startup in Europe.) Park, meanwhile, had already put some pieces in place: a program known as the Presidential Innovation Fellows, begun in 2012, which brought bright young technologists into government for 12-month stints; and a group called 18F, within the government’s General Services Administration, that deployed graduates of the fellows program to other government agencies on a project basis.
With the backing of the president, Park scaled up his recruiting efforts. His outward-facing policy job became focused on building an internal tech team. Dickerson had returned to the West Coast after Healthcare.gov—his goal was to sleep as much as possible for several weeks straight. But in May 2014, he came back to Washington for a meeting with Park, who harangued him late into the evening at the Shake Shack in DuPont Circle, the favored hangout of the West Coast techies. Park wanted Dickerson to pick up where he left off at Healthcare.gov and lead a new and more ambitious project. The two were gently kicked out of the restaurant by a manager locking up for the night. But by that point, Dickerson had decided to commit to running a new central technology bureau. The USDS opened for business a few months later.
One morning in late April I sat down at USDS headquarters for several hours with Park, Dickerson, and Haley Van Dyck, who, with Dickerson, helps run the USDS. If the president is effectively the CEO of the White House’s tech startup, Park would be its chief strategist. He is excitable and charming, with a cyclonic energy that helps explain why he’s been so successful as a talent recruiter. When he talks about two ideas, or two people, that he very much likes, he blurts out, “This is a total double-helix of awesomeness!” In describing the level of difficulty the new tech team in D.C. faces, he exhorts, “This is DARPA meets the Peace Corps meets SEAL Team Six!” (“Todd is the most enthusiastic person I know,” says Obama.) Dickerson, by contrast, does not emote. In fact, Dickerson comes off at first glance as grumpy and rumpled—someone who, in a not-too-distant era, might have made an excellent clerk in a video-rental store. Then you talk with him and wish to take your first impression back. Dickerson is an uncommonly skilled engineer with a deadpan wit and an unflappable nature. When I ask how he feels about the tech surge scaling up, he says, “Yeah, I’m losing all that free time I had.” His business card carries no title but reads, Don’t panic. Park calls him Buddha.
Outsiders often make the mistake of perceiving Washington’s technical problems as the result of a dearth of engineering talent. This makes it tempting to frame the current wave of hires from Google and elsewhere as a wartime tactical team moving in to save us from the city’s existing coding barbarians. But this is not quite correct. For one thing, the people Park and Dickerson are luring here aren’t just software engineers; they’re data scientists, user-experience gurus, product managers, and design savants. For another, these people are being matched with government insiders who can advise them on how to deploy private-sector tools like Amazon Web Services, for instance, that have long been considered forbidden within the Beltway, or how the procurement of contractors can be improved. Usually this involves cutting a jungle path through thousands of pages of overgrown government regulations. As Park says, “We need both kinds: people who can hack the technology, as well as people who can hack the bureaucracy.”
The complexity is formidable. If you put your engineer’s hat on, Dickerson says, you can look at government’s approach to tech and decide that it’s pretty much insane. But if you consider it as an anthropologist might (“If you’re studying this alien culture,” he says, “and you ask, Why do they behave so strangely?”), you see that D.C. has developed its dysfunctions for deep, structural reasons. For instance, Washington has plenty of smart people, Dickerson says. But they have been removed from the extraordinary growth—only occurring during the past decade, really—of the handful of West Coast companies that can now manage “planet-scale websites,” as Dickerson puts it.
Above all, there is the inertia of the past. One of the first lessons Dickerson learned about D.C. when he arrived was that the city traditionally conflates the importance of a task with its cost. Healthcare.gov ultimately became an $800 million project, with 55 contracting companies involved. “And of course it didn’t work,” he says. “They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to build a website because it was a big, important website. But compare that to Twitter, which took three rounds of funding before it got to about the same number of users as Healthcare.gov—8 million to 10 million users. In those three rounds of funding, the whole thing added up to about $60 million.” Dickerson believes that the Healthcare.gov project could have been done with a similar size budget. But there wasn’t anyone to insist that the now-well-established Silicon Valley practice of building “agile” software—rolling out a digital product in stages; testing it; improving it; and repeating the process for continuous improvement—would be vastly superior to (and much, much cheaper than) a patchwork of contractors building out a complete and monolithic website. In his Fast Company interview, President Obama remarks that he made a significant mistake in thinking that government could use traditional methods to build something—Healthcare.gov—that had never been built before. “When you’re dealing with IT and software and program design,” the president explains, “it’s a creative process that can’t be treated the same way as a bulk purchase of pencils.”
Which is not to say that replacing Washington’s culture with that of Silicon Valley should be the goal. Some hybrid of tech people who can innovate with patience rather than aggression may be more effective. Dickerson notes that government tech contractors, even the most skillful ones, face the arduous challenge of trying to repair an aging digital system without compromising any essential services. The method for issuing Social Security checks, for instance, relies upon old mainframe servers running on the dying COBOL computer language. “That’s fine, and it’s lasted them a long time,” Dickerson says. But the people who can maintain and operate that generation of technology are not going to live forever; indeed, many of them are past retirement age already. In this case, the West Coast mentality could be counterproductive. “There’s an attitude in the entrepreneurial private sector where we don’t care what came before us: We’re going to disrupt it,” Dickerson explains. “But we are not going to disrupt Social Security. That’s a big reason why it’s so hard to make these changes, because you can’t interrupt the flow of operations.”
Dickerson adds, “It will not work, and you will not go far, if you come here with a big attitude, saying, ‘You people are stupid, get out of the way and we’ll show you how it’s done.’ ”
Are there really people like that in the Valley? I ask.
Dickerson laughs. The people he’s directing, he says, tend to be the more humble types. And the folks interested in curated meals and big equity packages and uncompromising disruption didn’t come east to help him. This is not the place for them anyway, he says. They just wouldn’t get it.
We’re not choosing these types of people when we recruit, Van Dyck, the USDS deputy, adds. “And they’re not choosing us, either.”
Date: June 21, 2015