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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

Let's say it's January 2017 and President Bush or Rubio or Paul or Walker is being inaugurated. Does the 'U.S. Digital Service' actually keep getting funded? If it does, do the staff actually want to stay? Will any of them be willing to work on government objectives that might not be in line with their personal politics?

I'll believe this is actually what it claims it is when I see it and its staff persist through a change of political control in the White House. Until then, I'm more than a little skeptical.

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This was exactly my concern as well. The "party first, country second" mindset on "both sides of the aisle" is the most absurd and counter-productive thing in US politics, and the most likely thing IMO to derail any productive gains that could be made.

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."

-John Adams

Remember that there are many engineers who would love to work for a Republican administration and would hate working on Obama administration objectives that aren't in line with their personal politics

True, but as we all know, continuity has inherent value that we would lose under say, a drastic replacement of staff.

I get what you're trying to say but literally every department, bureau, and agency replaces leadership and huge numbers of staff when the White House changes parties. We can argue about whether that's a good thing, but those organizations do seem to weather the change and continue on with their core functions. The State Department is vastly more complex than a tech company yet manages to keep itself in order when one party is swept out and another rolls in. Part of their success is that continuity planning between administrations usually does rise above partisan rancor as staffers hand off their portfolios.

The State Dept can't be replaced by a federal contractor. USDS can; why not award Raytheon or L3 (or Halliburton) a contract, acquihire the best devs from the old team, and lay the rest off?

This is hard to enforce. This is supposedly the rationale already used to farm out massive IT contracts to contractors - that they can attract better talent, etc. But in reality, the contractors often don't really care about quality and instead just want to put butts in seats.

So unless you've written a really solid contract with solid, quantifiable high-quality deliverables, you're out of luck.

The rank and file and core management stay the same, at at agency, it's the political appointees at the top that change for new administrations. This can be dramatic -- at the EPA, Republican leaders tend to dismantle the agency and cease enforcement, while Democrats do the opposite. I'm not sure USDS or 18F are politicized yet, they're making government more efficient. Then again if you hate government and want to dismantle it, getting rid of the all-stars would be a good play.

The USDS leadership (and enough key staffers) are indeed appointees -- that's a concern. And if you look at their bios, many have strong & active ties to the Obama election efforts. That will not escape a party-change in the administration should it happen unless you have a "best for the country" administration philosophy come in and they take a truly non-partisan, objective view of what needs to continue.

Are there republicans actually criticizing the the Digital Service?(ignoring healthcare.gov) I certainly have no clue why they would, as everyone needs better IT infrastructure. A project like this, run well, would be in line with republican policy objectives.

I assume the OP meant the people who are passionate about building a sign-up system for universal healthcare might not be so passionate about building a sign-up system for, I don't know, national concealed carry permits or something.

But there are some of us (including me) that would love to work on both

If your goal is to see a smaller government then it isn't unreasonable to not want the government to be more effective - in the shorter term that means a more bloated government, but in the medium and long term you get what you want. If you allow the government to become a bit more effective then it may stay around for quite some time, destroying resources (or whatever ill you currently think it does).

Think of it as the difference between scrapping a legacy system and patching it up so that it can run a bit longer. If you can't get the budget to rebuild it from the ground up, you might be better of letting it lumber on until you can.

It's possible to view everything through a partisan lens of course, but most of the work likely to be done by this agency is the kinds of things that most people would support: getting better, quicker or easier access to government information.

Edit: Here's a good example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988897

I believe it was Newt Gingrich who pushed the Thomas project, the initiative to put the text of all congressional bills online.

This is true of the whole civil service

We have had political administrations change many, many times in the U.S. There is not, that I know of, any mass layoff of an entire part of the civil service that coincides with any of them.

If you get a civil service position under this program you will have a job regardless of who's President. That doesn't mean that these initializes will still be around, or will be funded at the same level, or will be given the same latitude.

It might be different if these offices/initiatives were part of cabinet agencies with functions and authorities in various statutes, but it looks like most of them are executive initiatives.

Which is not to say that the next President (Republican or Democrat) wouldn't want digital tiger teams, but there is no guarantee that one would either. If you are interested in this primarily for the advertised flexibility to cut across cumbersome government rules, January 2017 should loom large in your thinking.

The technical term for what you're asking about is "institutional autonomy". The answer depends heavily on the political competence of its leader.

Based on Mikey's G+ posts, it has bi-partisan support.

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