Emily Tavoulareas was a founding member of the first team at the level of the American digital service agency and was the main policy advisor to the director of American technology at the White House.
The demonstrators hold signs during a rally for federal workers at the American Capitol in Washington, DC, United States, Tuesday February 11, 2025 (Tierney L. Cross / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
I was a founding member of the American digital service, the organization which, on January 21, became the American DOGE service after a executive decree Under President Donald Trump. I have remained quite silent in recent weeks, largely because I have dealt with the reality of an organization dedicated to the improvement of government services reused in the vector of destruction of these same services.
Less than a month after the name change and the Restructuring of the USDs, many of its employees were dismissed. It includes people like The manager who was in charge of information security for the veterans websiteVA.GOV – One of the greatest successes of the USDS and a website with millions of users per month, not to mention the massive amounts of personal information from veterans.
At dizzying speed, we have seen the American service to take effective control of critical systems, data and infrastructure – in a word, power – across the federal government. While I look helpless, I appreciate the fact that the Trump administration seems to understand something that few others do: The technical infrastructure is the infrastructure of * everything. * It can accelerate or hinder policy objectives.
Me, and many of my colleagues, have spent the best part of the last ten years trying to convince legislators, universityAnd the media of this exactly. The fact that he was widely rejected would be an understatement. Now, I fear that the lesson will be taught in the most difficult (and potentially the most irreversible) possible.
For American digital service, broken websites or applications were often the point of the spear that would allow us to go beyond the visible problem, and both understand and approach the real Problems that were in the invisible layers below. These problems could be the technical system itself – or more likely supplyHiring problems, obsolete or misinterpreted policies, convoluted business processes or a combination of all these things.
Technology (and implementation more broadly) has long been rejected as a reflection afterwards by political experts inside and outside the government. Over the decades, the US government has systematically outsourced technology to the private sector through contracts of several billion dollars. Today, government employees do not design or build products or systems, they “manage” the implementation of systems developed by entrepreneurs or consultants.
In this formulation, technology is subject to political work, when the truth is that politics is inextricably tangled with technology. The separation of the technology policy on which it depends was a deep cause of a large part of the dysfunction with which we have faced the government for decades.
Technology is not an additional thing you add to government programs and services – this is the service. This is not an additional thing that you add to the institution – it is the spinal cord of the institution. A bit like how cars are no longer mechanical, they are now computers wrapped in metal. People working in technology understand this implicitly.
The American service DOGE recognizes that the technical infrastructure is not only the infrastructure of websites and applications – it is the infrastructure of everything, and they control it now.
On the basis of the decrees performing his mandate and his powers (a second order Was published last week), the objective of the American service DOGE is, at least on paper: (1) Efficiency, (2) Cost reduction, (3) Modernization of software.
Among these, the overlap of the Mission of the American Digital Service is in the modernization of software. Until now, the work of the United States Doge Service seems to be exclusively focused on cost reduction. Suppose for a moment that the American DOGE service finally continued an effort to “… Improve the quality and efficiency of software on a government level, network infrastructure and information technology systems (Ti ) ”. The quality and efficiency of technology are the goal here.
The Mission of the American Digital Service was To provide better government services to the American people through technology and design.
The home page of the former American digital service.
The emphasis in this formulation is on better government services. The objective is not focused on technology. For the American digital service, technology was a * vehicle * to resolve these obsolete policies, these supply and hiring problems, these convoluted commercial processes. To Provide better services.
It may seem a pedantic difference, but that is not the case. It is a fundamental difference. Focus on technology centers technology, systems and institutions. Focus on the service center the result and people.
This distinction is obvious in the organization’s approach and values. American digital service projects have started with a version of a Discovery Sprintemployee standard industry practices to create effective digital services, and had a sense of shared values.
Although designers have been in numerical inferiority, the role of conception cannot be overlooked. Conception is ultimately an approach to understanding and resolution of a problem for someone who is not you, and that is exactly what politics is (or should be).
A good design requires the suspension of hypotheses, listening to people and the priority of the needs of others. In government (as in any massive organization), bureaucratic requirements, arcanic policies and procedures, and institutional and political priorities tend to distort incentives in a way that deactivates people. A classic example of this is the way in which Nokia – one of the largest cell phone companies in the world –Ost the market Because the only information she appreciated was what was measurable. Design fights against incentives that detect people, in part by making the priorities more visible in a decision-making process.
Ironically, the very design methods that brought us some of the most “disruptive” products in the digital age have been abandoned and replaced by AI. Since then, the rapid inssonmitification of these products and services has followed: Google Search has degradedsocial media and Internet are exceeded with hangAnd Apple had to delete AI summaries of its news application for blatant inaccuracies.
Without the emphasis on people, who (and what) is technology at the service?
More than 10 years after the American digital service foundation, is there still work to do? “Yes” would be an understatement. The US government extends billions of dollars each year to create software that does not work or are not necessary. Anyone who has worked at USDS will tell you that there are deeply dysfunctional government. We have fought against dysfunction and mythology, sometimes embroideing for years for something that is clearly common sense. It shouldn’t take ten years – ten! – to convince the information and regulatory affairs office (OIRA) that User search is legal.
But at the heart of the American digital service through three presidential administrations, a deep and constant conviction that the government could and should – that it must – do better. A conviction that civil servants made largely of their best, often in impossible circumstances. We have understood that government employees worked in a context that prioritized procedures on the results, processes on people and the rules of mysteries on common sense solutions.
Sometimes people were uncomfortable with the difficulty we pushed, but compared to the current blitzkrieg, our approach looks more like a blow … between kittens. But all the work was motivated by an unshakable conviction that the public deserved more from his government and that the government was able to do better.
For the American digital service, technology was a way to reach an end: an effective government with which people can count and interact easily instead of having to go through a kafkaesque labyrinth of websites and telephone numbers and D ‘Applications and forms.
What is technology a way for now?