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Worth noting is that USDS actually played a critical role at a critical moment in improving the Rec.gov RFP. Charles Worthington deserves special commendation for his technical acumen in representing the people/gov't.

Most government RFPs do not get this same level of technical oversight and - short of building an entire technical branch to build the actual services themselves - the rec.gov experience led me to believe that at least having a highly technical government representative in the RFP process is critical to setting the conditions for a good outcome.

Without USDS, the National Parks Service would have been left to navigate the technical minutia through the "helpful" commentary of private contractors alone.

Is there any place I can read more about this?

USDS is United States Digital Service and 18F is part of the GSA. 18F is short for 1800 F Street, which is the address in Washington DC for the GSA.

https://www.usds.gov https://18f.gsa.gov/about

There are a slew of new digital services firms that are trying to build exactly this.

Government has a workforce challenge -- it is aging out, being starved of resources, and technology isn't core to agency mission(s). For decades they have outsourced to the same set of big companies that often failed to deliver. 18F and USDS are more than small departments -- they are bootcamps for the people who go through and then impact the the agencies and firms they move on to after. They were really inspired by the failure, then success, of healthcare.gov.

10 years ago upwards of 80% of government IT projects failed. This is improving.

I interned with the navy in college. I wanted to be a federal employee when I graduated. I even had special consideration due to my internship, and my disability. Did I? No. I did not.

The experience of trying to get a federal job was abysmally bad. First, there are precious few GS positions that actually do coding. Everything seems to be contracted out. The few positions that were there were very hard to apply for. I applied to every position I found across 5 different states, and my resume simply disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole.

After a month or so of that nonsense, I threw in the towel and looked for something in the private sector. The difference was a breath of fresh air. I got interviews in days, offers in weeks, and I've made enough money that I'm basically financially independent at this point.

The government has a long way to go with their hiring process.

They also refuse to pay market rates on the basis of skills.

This is due to the starving of resources: both in budget, and in policy to address mismatches from the market for employees.

I would say it is due to a bureaucracy that does not value those skills- they don't want developers making more than some managers.

By law, no government employee can have a salary higher than a member of congress (174,000).

I don't think this is true. GS grades are capped by the compensation of Level IV of the Executive Schedule (sometimes with locality pay they would exceed that and so they get capped), which is roughly the same as Congress salary, but definitely SES pay tops out a good 25k above that.

Grow up in the DC area and even if you never work for the Gov't directly you just absorb this information out of the air.

Exceptions are made for federally-employed physicians, which is the only reason the military is able to have its own doctors. They could easily do the same industry gap compensation bonus on top of schedule for engineers if the non-government market gets to be similar to the physician market.

You might be missing some nuance. From January 2022:

Level I: $226,300

Level II: $203,700

Level III: $187,300

Level IV: $176,300

Level V: $165,300

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Schedule

Well, but Executive Schedule people are essentially all political appointees, not individual contributors. This is the several hundred people who get appointed by the President- most of them requiring Senate approval- and come in to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs or whatever. This is not the Civil Service but the political appointees who sit on top of them and cycle out regularly back to think-tanks or industry jobs when their party loses an election.

(https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2020/ is the full list of these positions)

SES is not political appointees. SES are career executives, and generally serve through many administrations. Political appointees are usually 'Secretaries' and that ilk, which may be 'SES' equivalent, non-career/competitive appointments, but are not Career SES.

There are TONS of SES folks below the appointee level.

But SES is not on the Executive Schedule, is my point.

I agree with this. I am no fan of BAH for personal reasons having been forced to work adjacent to them, but the recreation.gov website is quite good and a good experience, coming from someone who uses it extensively for camping.

The site's UX is not at issue.

TFA focuses on the significant problem of mismanagement of US public lands, and the extent to which handing over such a large amount of control over these publicly owned resources to a private entity with a profit motive has lead to negative results.

The design and functioning of rec.gov itself is not even tangential to the subject.

The thrust of TFA addresses the misaligned financial incentives and the problems inherent in outsourcing aspects of public lands management to entities with a profit motive.

It has little to nothing negative to say about the site's UX.

> Would I love to live in a world where government employs programmers and DIYs this stuff much cheaper and more efficiently? Of course. USDS and 18F are bright spots that are trying. But they also don’t have the capacity to work on anything except high priority projects.

Appropriate more funds. If this is an issue of citizen stakeholder engagement, I ask someone point in the necessary direction besides my Congressional reps.

Other levels of gov have funding issues, but not federal. In fact, big appropriation bills often create these mega-procurements that companies like BAH latch on to.

Government's ability to attract people who could execute a project like this requires different compensation and career incentives. Base pay is capped at <$150k for the highest GS level at the highest step. There's also no real potential for bonuses or equity.

Beyond pay, government careers fundamentally optimize for low-risk decision-making. The goal is to not get fired over 20 years so that you can retire with a pension. This is why contractors like BAH gets hired: you, as a government program manager, don't get fired for going with a brand name even if they fail. If you hire some unknown development firm with great tech skills and they fail, you get canned.

There's also a lack of bold leadership and urgency that is customer-experience focused. Healtchare.gov benefitted from some amazing engineers, but the true catalyst for its comeback was that Obama realized it was a do-or-die initiative for his administration. His team moved heaven-and-earth to steamroll entrenched vendors, recruit talent, and hold people accountable.

Leadership and talent are what make the difference.

Very much aware. Have gone through the USDS hiring pipeline and was extended an offer. Your tour of duty is limited (between 6 months-2 years) due to how they hack the GS payscale, and I argue USDS/18F has the leadership and talent to deliver based on all available evidence. Matt Cutts did exceedingly well considering resourcing and his mandate, and I have similar hopes for the new USDS administrator. They produce results, full stop.

https://www.usds.gov/report-to-congress/2016/

https://www.usds.gov/report-to-congress/2017/fall/

https://www.usds.gov/resources/USDS-Impact-Report-2020.pdf

Appropriate more funds, yes, but more importantly: Fix procurement. This is where there real down-in-the-trenches work needs to happen. Fix every single agency's approach to software procurement, one by one, until the entire federal government is properly incentivized to fund high quality FOSS software for the long haul.

It's a little better than it used to be with FedRAMP and such. But even now, agencies are still relying on broken-by-design contracts for terrible proprietary software.

Sounds like a technology practitioner from USDS embedding into agencies to teach their procurement folks how to procure tech, correct?

Yeah! This happened to some extent while I was there, but only around the margins. I'd love to see it be a top priority.

To be fair, it's a really tough problem to solve. It would be a tough problem even without the help of the entrenched federal IT contractors (who would only stand to lose a huge amount of business).