This of course is no excuse - there is a lot of work to be done and we are working on it.
Not even the worst of the descriptions of experience with USDS hiring I've seen could possibly be reasonable viewed as exacerbating the problem (mitigating it less than an ideal process would, sure; but to be exacerbating, it would have to be worse than the average non-USDS public sector hiring process.)
I don't see how. It's usually just a sweeping policy for liability or legal reasons and that's it.
Don't grasp at straws, anyone with a brain would bring proof of prescription (or put their doctor's number down!) to the test and that gets sent along with the results.
So now it's my urine and substantial pieces of my health history, including a pretty good drug-directed guess of what the actual underlying health condition is. Hope it's not an expensive one to insure. Oh, I'll write the doctor's number down too. I'll just fill out the HIPAA authorization form granting my potential employer access to my medical history. Good thing the practice's name doesn't include "behavioral health" anywhere in it.
Why bother with this nonsense when there are so many better employment options?
If I saw an auth form for any medical records release I would nope the fuck out too. That doesn't sound typical or correct. I have only seen releases for the results of the test which yes, if come back positive and you have proof of legal use will indicate you've been getting treatment based on someone's guess. However, it should stop there. If someone from HR starts asking medical questions about why you are getting treatment, that sounds like it's crossing a serious line and I'd be looking into whether that's legal or not. That sounds like a company that is hiring some shitty people, never mind whether they are good or not because they have a drug testing policy.
>Why bother with this nonsense when there are so many better employment options?
You want to work in a specific industry
I'm certain a lot of this behavior is illegal, but people who don't know or choose to ignore the law are everywhere, and litigation is expensive and time-consuming. I just want to build stuff, so I take these sorts of policies as a warning sign and look elsewhere.
It's demeaning, and I simply will not do it.
The USDS is suppose to be addressing the idiotic "seeping policies" that allow bureaucratic thinking to drive away those interested in working to use technology to improve performance.
That they didn't bother to fix this obviously silly bureaucratic rule that disrespects people is an very valid piece of data that you will find many less blatantly disrespectful bureaucratic rules stymying your attempt to do your work.
It might be they did a decent job fixing the many many problems with how much of government IT has been done but just failed on this one very visible and thus any marketer would tell you very important to address issue. But I doubt it. Most likely if they failed to even deal with this, the situation is pretty bad in many other ways.
USDS has done some nice things, according to stories I have read, but it seems it is just this appendage to the bureaucracy that is given some leeway due to powerful allies in the bureaucracy. This has always been the case in government and lots of good IT stuff has been done by those given power to avoid the normal IT processes by powerful allies.
But the other success isn't about an improved system it is about typical power politics in a bureaucracy. Things like sticking to bad policy that is driven by command and control thinking treating workers like drones such as polygraphs or drug testing for office workers is a sign that even the core thinking around the management system is extremely poor. In that case the management system will constantly be imposing idiotic rules on you that can be ignore only due to a powerful ally preventing enforcement (or just the incompetence of the bureaucracy to enforce the rules it set in place).
Conflict: an employer demands bodily fluids, revealing medications one is taking.
In most cases, the demand for the private medical history is unnecessary, stupid, and illegal.
I likewise would pass, but would be turned off by the demand. I do not know if I would be sufficiently turned off to turn down an otherwise desirable job - it hasn't come up.
It's certainly not personal. I just think it's bad policy for all but the most safety-critical occupations, and choose to avoid employers who insist on collecting my bodily fluids or health history.
Right, its a bureaucratic policy providing a firm and strongly negative indication of the employing entity's respect for its actual and potential employees.
EDIT: To be fair to USDS, one could argue that the policy with regard to Executive Office of the President staff is an externally imposed (its statutory, not executive order, as I understand) aspect of the kind of government culture that USDS is intended in many ways to be a leading wedge for changing, at least as it applies to the IT space, so it may be worthy of some more generous consideration than would generally be the case, but its still a negative indicator.