Former USDS Leaders Launch Tech Reform Project to Fix What DOGE Broke
Last 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 watched in horror as Donald Trump renamed the service DOGE, expelled its staff, and employed a strike force of reckless young engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of the Trump initiative has sparked the envy of tech reformers: the Trump administration’s fearlessness in upending generations of cruelty and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used their decisiveness and influence to serve the people instead of following the dark agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?
A small but influential team is offering to answer that very question, working on a solution they hope to deploy during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaduct and its goal is to create a comprehensive plan to reboot the way the United States delivers services to citizens. The Viaduct group, made up of experienced federal technical officials, is preparing details on how to reshape the government, aiming to produce initial recommendations by spring. By 2029, if a Democrat wins, they hope their plan will be adopted by the White House.
Tech Viaduct’s advisory board includes former Obama chief of staff and Biden Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough; Alexander Macgillivray, Biden’s deputy technical director; Marina Nitze, former VA CTO; and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook. But what draws the most attention is his senior advisor and spiritual leader, Mikey Dickerson, the former Google engineer who was the first leader of the USDS. His hands-on ethic and unqualified distaste for bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama’s tech boom. No one knows better than Dickerson how government technology services are failing American citizens. And no one is more disgusted by the various ways they failed.
Dickerson himself unwittingly launched the Viaduct project last April. He was packing up the contents of his Washington, D.C.-area apartment to get as far away from the political fray as possible (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet Mook. When the two got together, they deplored the DOGE initiative, but agreed that the push to destroy the dysfunctional system and start again was a good idea. “The basic idea is that it’s too difficult to get things done,” Dickerson says. “They’re not wrong about that.” He admits that Democrats missed a big opportunity. “For 10 years, we had small victories here and there, but we never terraformed the entire ecosystem,” Dickerson says. “What would that look like?”
Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called him to say he had found funding from the Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank devoted to new policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A Searchlight spokesperson says the think tank is budgeting $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, like Al Pacino in Godfather IIIwas removed. Ironically, it was Trump’s reckless and abandoning approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were seriously under-equipped, 200 people rushing around trying to improve the websites,” he says. “Trump has overturned all the hives: the beltway bandits, the entrepreneur industrial complex, the union industrial complex. »
Tech Viaduct has two goals. The first is to produce a blueprint for rethinking government services – establishing an impartial procurement process, creating a merit-based hiring process, and providing oversight to ensure things don’t go wrong. (Welcome back, inspectors general!) The idea is to design executive orders and bills ready for signing that will guide the recruiting strategy for a revitalized civil service. Over the coming months, the group plans to design and test a framework that could be implemented immediately in 2029, without reaching a consensus that could harm momentum. In Viaduct’s vision, this consensus will be reached before the elections. “Coming up with brilliant ideas will be the easy part,” says Dickerson. “Even though we’re going to work hard over the next three to six months, we’re going to have to spend another two to three years, during a primary season and during an election, doing advocacy as if we were a pressure group.”
