White House launches “U.S. Digital Service,” with HealthCare.gov fixer at helm

If they pay a big federal contractor at twice that rate, who then pockets half and pays its people market rate, then that's private sector efficiency at work.

That said, I think there are enough people that a) find $155k enough to meet their needs and b) believe in the mission that we'll be able to make a big impact.

(One thing that's important to remember—"the government" doesn't really act like a unified, coordinated entity. Different branches and agencies have different incentives and behave in different ways. It's often better to think of the government as a marketplace rather than an organization.)

I would say yes.

Getting paid is not the big challenge in Government work.

It's the lack of urgency, political infighting and general stigma.

The rotations described here and the leadership position / division described in the article both skirt those issues.

* Urgency: Healthcare.gov had it. It was a firestorm visible from a continent away. Most Government IT failures don't work that way, they're smoldering trash fires that generate a meeting to figure out who's going to fill a bucket with a follow-up meeting to decide who's actually going to carry it.

* Infighting: As described, the Digital Service 'will be focused on providing consultation' not 'a group that we parachute in to write code'. They're coming in from a position of authority - above the level of typical jockeying.

* Stigma: None. Finish your rotation and go back to Google. Finish your stint as a head of an elite Federal service and name your title.

The essential problem of the US government is there is no accountability. Poor performing employees are never fired and poor performing contractors are never penalized. If a project is a massive failure there are never any consequences for the people or companies involved. Over time anyone with any sort of skill whatsoever tends to leave and what's left are the poor and mediocre employees.

I'd like to say creating the US digital service is a positive step but unless the basic problem of accountability is solved it too will be just as bad at IT as every existing organization in a few years time.

In the real world this problem of organizational calcification would be solved when the incompetent company goes out of business because they are over taken by competitors. In the government since there is no competition there is no natural accountability mechanism.

Use it as an opportunity to shame the government into action.

Talk about missed opportunity for the Administration to rally citizens around their landmark legislation. "Built By America's Best for America's Best" sort of thing. Instead, it was built by a no-bid process outsourced to a Canadian firm. The rest is history.

I don't want my work gmail and my personal gmail to have different interfaces. I do insist that the content be different.

From an interaction design point of view, people don't maintain different masks.

We have a working title of this documentary.

The main thing healthcare.gov does, which esurance and others don't, is to tell the user which government programs they're eligible for and what their subsidy will be. The law makes that calculation is actually surprisingly complex, for example:

  * there are at least eight different state- and federal-level healthcare programs (advanced premium tax credit, medicare, medicaid, children's health program, children's rehabilitative service, Tricare, VHA, IHS)
  * which programs you're qualified for depend on your state
  * the subsidy is based on which plans are available in your specific area and their cost, your household size, the ages of each person in your household, whether each person smokes, and whether you want a dental plan
  * for calculating subsidies, different sources of income are treated differently. E.g., tribal income for Native Americans is subject to different tax treatment, earned income is treated differently than capital gains in some cases, etc.
  * insurance is usually bought for a household, and there are precedence rules among different state/federal programs, so if any member of a household qualifies for a non-APTC assistance program, it affects the subsidy received for the whole household
  * to get the tax credit, your immigration status needs to be verified with the Department of Homeland Security and your income needs to be verified with the IRS. This is the work done by the "Data Services Hub."
  * by law, open enrollment starts in November but taxes are due the following April, so you can't compute the subsidy as part of the tax filing.

(You could also argue that this complicated eligibility calculation should be exposed as an API, which would unlock innovation in the private sector. We want to do that, but need more help. :) )

This guy did the "show up and try" thing, which he then parlayed into the title of Official White House Tech Fixer. That's the sort of résumé-enhancing title that will bring you literally as much money as you want for the rest of your natural life.

What can you do with it? Do your stint in government, then hang out your shingle as a private consultant. That very day, Fortune 500s will start pointing firehoses spewing money at you in exchange for "consultations" where you parachute in to tell them all their problems are due to their IT staff being idiots. Your White House title will give you unimpeachable (heh) credibility in their eyes. This credibility will last for decades, long after your specific tech knowledge has become obsolete, and will draw you business regardless of political affiliation. (CEOs don't follow politics, all they know is that you're Trusted By Big Shots.) You will also be invited to places like Davos and TED to wax rhapsodic on the Importance of Technology, further prolonging your marketability. It's a meal ticket for life.

It's possible that Mr. Dickerson was financially secure enough already that he didn't need the future payout this title will bring. If anything, that just argues more that such an opportunity would be better for someone who hasn't already made their pile, because for that person, such an opportunity is how a pile is made. Trading a little present-day income for a huge payout down the line is a career approach that should be familiar to those who work in and around VC-backed startups.

Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it only really works best for the first person to pull it off. Everyone after that gets less luster from their association; there will be many Tech Fixers who will come out of programs like the USDS, but none as prominent as the original Fixer. It's a risk/reward thing -- it was not obvious when Mr. Dickerson tried it that "showing up and trying" could lead to glory; so when he tried it, and it worked, he didn't have to share the glory with an army of others. Now it is obvious, so lots of people will pile on to try doing it themselves, and they'll divide the prestige between them. So it goes.

I can't see how the average joe would even be allowed to show up and try. And if they were, what would that say about project security?

Notably, the SEC is exempt from the usual Federal government pay scales, so they do actually pay a lot better than other parts of the government. Still not really enough to compare to equivalent private sector salaries though.

You can see Bracken's talk at http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/586156... from about 2:14:50

These .GOV dept don't really need to worry about finances and they seem to be willing to hire contract workers and let them get heavily involved in the project. In the UK contractors will happily earn double your perm staff and that's before counting the fact they can bypass the 40% tax bracket.

Compare that to the private sector, they tend to prefer that all decisions are made by perm staff who are often outdated and are happy to sit there at half the contractors salary, paying double the tax and costing the company over 1.5x their headline salary.

Doesn't really make sense to me, you're not gonna find the best and brightest by paying them in a terrible way when they have an easy, more lucrative, alternative.

I mean, even if we were, how could we be? That's actually a great lesson in The Guns of August: Every general is fighting the last war.

The problem is one of governance. Unless this new group can cancel contracts and ban organizations from participating in future projects I see very little reason to think they will succeed.

They can suggest all they want but if they can't cold stone stop an agency from entering an agreement then they can't change existing behaviors.

For example, left-leaning Americans frequently allege that the current GOP policy is precisely based on that. Rather than (only) trying to convince people ideologically that small government is good, Norquist-style, the allegation is that their policy is to actively try to sabotage the government's ability to deliver social services, so people see it as inefficient/broken and therefore stop supporting it. Also occasionally a debate in Europe, especially around infrastructure projects (local/provincial politicians from the opposite party are sometimes accused of trying to actively cause a big infrastructure project of the ruling party to turn into a boondoggle, so the party can seem incompetent). In the other direction, officials are sometimes accused of cooking the books to make something that isn't running efficiently seem like it is. I think a lot of this kind of terrain is where modern politics is fought once you get beyond the first layer.

Right.

I think that possibly the greatest value in something of this sort is to be able to point to the team, the playbooks and the free guidance as a unassailable proven formula.

Offering a safe, defensible choice of this sort for the people at the top of these agencies is very important.

Everyone knows the saying 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM'.

A legitimate source of excellence within the Government could supplant 'IBM' in that notion as the as a 'go to', safe source for solutions that actually has the best interests of Government in mind alongside technical excellence.

No idea.

I'm thinking 'small team made up of our country’s brightest digital talent' suggests something that people would be recruited for and appointed to moreso than traditional positions to be filled. There's of the sort posted for OMB today at least.

>'As there's no chance I'd want to take on the risk of getting a regular government IT/developer job and being enmeshed in the nightmare that is my conception of government bureaucracy but I would like to contribute to make a difference.'

Your conception is pretty accurate.

I think the best shot most of us have at 'making a difference' would be to develop solutions to specific, self-contained (if possible) problems.

To look not at what central Government is doing, but at the community-level agencies/programs and what they need.

Clinics, libraries, rec centers, public schools and whatnot all have problems which can helped with technology, but you'll need to spend a lot of time, effort and a degree of sneakiness to get anything done.