(Illustration by Vreni Stollberger)
If you have ever had a painful experience completing a government form, waiting for hours at a DMV during a workday, or filling out online tax or student aid forms, you have experienced what some call a “time tax,” ingrained in many government services. This “time tax” represents the burden the government puts on people to navigate services, even those crucial to their livelihood. Adding to this, the pandemic has upended life for all of us, shedding renewed light on how precarious life is for many families, especially those facing systemic inequities, and how access to government services can often tip the scales for families, making the difference between stability or uncertainty. When, for example, one missed paycheck can mean eviction or hunger, and the ability to access government services quickly can keep families housed and fed.
While the urgency of the pandemic has led federal policy makers to make unprecedented investments in unemployment benefits for people who lost jobs, paycheck support to prevent layoffs and protect food security, and more, it has also made painfully clear the challenges that our government faces in its ability to deliver these services quickly to people at scale. As antiquated unemployment systems crashed under overwhelming demand, the fallout for working families waiting months to receive critical payments were compounded by delayed food benefits payments. As federal agencies and state governments struggled to quickly meet the needs of the people, we saw trust in government drop to new lows.
A better approach is possible when we improve the role technology and technologists play in how the government delivers services. Policy is only effective if its intended outcome actually reaches the people it’s meant to serve, and thus far, our ability to deliver hasn’t always met our ambition. While the Biden administration has made positive strides toward strengthening how services are delivered, we need to fix our sights on an urgent north star: equitable service delivery designed to fulfill the government’s promise to the people. We must act now to invest in a talent pipeline of technology experts in the public sector. We cannot wait for another crisis to grab our collective attention and break through government gridlock.
Based on my experience as a founding team member and the initial head of people for the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), a group working across the federal government to deliver better services for the American people through technology and design; and my current role as the executive director of the Tech Talent Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the ability of the US government to recruit modern technical leaders, I offer examples of what more equitable government service delivery can look like and recommendations for leaders in philanthropy and government to help get us there.
The Capacity for Innovation and Change
The heroic efforts of public servants demonstrating an unexpected capacity for change and innovation during the pandemic have shown us what’s possible. The state of California issued the first digital vaccine record and provided the code to build similar platforms to any other interested state—leading to nine states with digital vaccination record services to date. The federal government expanded the Child Tax Credit and delivered payments to those eligible at an unprecedented success rate of 98 percent, compared to a rate of 60-70 percent of many other programs. The plan for expansion included modern technical leaders and technologists who understood government at many steps of the process, giving the project a greater chance of success. The federal government also moved 2 million employees closer to working fully remote than at any time in the past.
In recognition of the need to support and expand effective service delivery, government agencies have received major investments in their work. For example, in the American Rescue Plan, Congress allocated $1 billion to the Technology Modernization Fund to support federal agencies with improving their tech systems, strengthening their cybersecurity capabilities, and increasing access and equity in service delivery. Recently, the TMF invested $187 million in the government’s single sign-on service, Login.gov to increase cybersecurity protection, make it easier for agencies to use the service, and importantly, to “add equitable identity verification and in-person options for vulnerable populations.”
This newly possible north star of equitable and effective service delivery depends on a diverse workforce. Public interest technology is a growing field made up of technologists that expect and demand technologies be created and used responsibly, call out where technology can better deliver services, and question whether certain technologies should be created at all. At its best, this approach to hiring and government service continually seeks to center the perspectives of historically marginalized groups—including Black people, Indigenous communities, all communities of color, people with disabilities, women, and others.
When the USDS talent team began in 2014, we believed that we needed to attract as diverse a group of highly skilled technologists as possible. We were told by some leaders in the tech industry that it wasn’t possible to build a highly skilled tech organization in government—much less one that was diverse. Yet, by October 2016, the USDS had hired more than 200 team members, 40 percent of whom were people of color. As a result, in 2016 when former President Obama increased the number of refugees the US would admit by 15,000 people, USDS-hired technologists were able to build the systems required to process this 20 percent increase over the government’s previous capacity. The diverse perspectives on the team promoted a more comprehensive and empathetic understanding of the issues refugees were facing. A team built of technologists from different backgrounds (racial/ethnic, gender, immigrant, religion) enabled the group as a whole to bring a fresh perspective to the work. The fact that engineers on this project could build trust, ask good questions, and understand the experiences and perspectives of refugees going through the application process, led to key improvements in the process—including moving from requiring a physical ink stamp to validate an application, to creating a digital approval process.
Hiring and Supporting Technical Leaders
The Biden administration has taken important steps to strengthen HOW our government delivers services, starting by bringing technical leadership into the transition and appointing strong technical leaders within its first year. But this is just the start. By employing strategies that focus on customer experience and by leveraging effective technology, we can dramatically change the way Americans interact with government services. The administration’s executive order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, is part of what is driving agencies to seek out data leaders to assess the outcomes of programs across underserved communities and has already prompted the hiring of 47 data experts.
A more recent executive order transforming the way government delivers services gives me hope that the government will be able to effectively meet the needs so many people still face from the pandemic and beyond. So far, at least 844 people have applied and 19 subject matter-qualified people have been hired for customer experience positions. If philanthropy and government alike can fix their sights on the north star of delivering services and customer experiences effectively and equitably, there is no limit to what is possible.
Unlocking equitable and effective service delivery requires having technical and delivery leaders at the table when policy is being developed. This means that agency leads engage technologists to provide advice, guidance, and feedback for policy decisions as the policy is being designed. We recently saw technical leaders Mina Hsiang, the current administrator of USDS, working closely with Pritha Mehra, the US Postal Service’s chief information officer, to successfully pull off the smooth rollout of a website where people could sign up for free COVID-19 tests. This cross-agency collaboration is a great example of tech-informed decision-making, a core competency for the 21st-century workforce described in a report that Tech Talent co-authored with the Partnership for Public Service.
In a federal workforce of 2 million, not including the military and postal service, digital delivery expertise is limited and rarely integrated at the time that policy is developed. If government is going to follow this north star, it will require more than a few hundred technologists like Mina, Pritha, and their teams.
Taking the following steps to strengthen the hiring process and support technical leaders is crucial to ensuring a diverse technological workforce.
![[chart]](https://ssir.org/images/blog/Tech_Talent_Project_Theory_of_Change-472x470.jpg)
Tech Talent Project’s theory of change for service delivery
1. Cultivate and support diverse tech leaders for the public sector. Effective modern technologists understand how tech can be used effectively and responsibly to better deliver government services. They focus on the human experience of a service. They know when technology is not the answer. They also recognize when important data may be missing from the equation because the people most impacted by the problem are not considered in the design of the solution. Take Amen Ra Mashariki, former chief analytics officer for the City of New York as an example. As he was digging into the data collected on the city’s rat problem, he realized something strange. According to the data reported through the city government’s 311 information hotline, there was no longer a rat problem in his old neighborhood in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. As Hana Schank and Tara McGuinness from New America describe in Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology, Mashariki called a friend who still lived there to inquire about the apparent lack of rats and his friend laughed, saying they were definitely still around. “Then why doesn’t anyone call 311 to complain?” asked Mashariki. “What’s 311?” his friend replied. Because Mashariki understood the realities of the neighborhood, he was able to recognize a crucial flaw in the design of the city's data collection efforts. Hiring diverse teams of technologists who represent diverse communities throughout the United States will bring valuable insight into public interest technology. And a government equipped with a workforce that reflects the diversity of our country will be able to better serve people from all communities.
Yet, hiring processes make applying to government jobs extremely difficult. Technical executives from inside and outside of government are asked to write essays explaining their qualifications for a senior executive role—essays that are expected to take 40-80 hours to write per job application. One senior-level technical applicant spent months applying to 75 jobs and didn’t get one interview. We have leaders willing to serve, inside and outside of government, with no reasonable way to compete for the role. This is not the way it has to be. Some federal agencies have developed relatively candidate-friendly, subject matter-based processes that meet legal requirements to provide a clear entry point for interested technologists. One such approach is the Subject Matter Expert Qualifications Assessment (SMEQA), which makes the difficult process of hiring for a few technical positions much easier by qualifying batches of critical technical candidates using subject matter experts throughout the process.
2. Elevate operational processes like procurement, budgeting, and hiring. Even with the right technologists and tech teams in place, effective service delivery is often derailed by procurement processes that do not prioritize effective outcomes, making it difficult for agencies to effectively contract or purchase reliable digital and technical solutions and services. For example, DHS, Treasury, and USDA all spend more on external labor costs for IT than on internal labor costs for IT. As we found in Tech Talent for 21st Century Government, most government procurement systems support software creation the same way the federal government supports battleship or building construction—incentivizing large investments over long periods, often with rigid requirements and written by people focused on policy, not outcomes and the realities of technology. Budgets often incentivize agencies to spend large amounts for long periods of time, rather than supporting smaller, more agile pilots that are iterated on in software development. Modern leaders, including technical leaders, are more successful when hiring and procurement are levers they can use to deliver the service and fulfill the policy intent.
3. Build institutional capacity and accelerate the delivery of human-centered services. When I joined USDS, I was told that we would bring in no more than 10-20 people to help federal agencies deliver on their policy goals. Through partnership with agencies and existing civil service staff and these 10-20 technologists, USDS created a track record that brought $25 million in additional funding from Congress, leading to 10x funding growth less than two years later. 18F, which partners with agencies to improve the user experience of government services by helping them build and buy technology, grew out of an initial investment in building a limited Presidential Innovation Fellowship program. More recently, seed investments in the highly effective TechCongress, a nonprofit that places technologists to serve as technology policy advisors to members of Congress through fellowships, served as a precursor to the launch of a new digital service team in congress.
Digital service programs like 18F, USDS, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program were an investment in new skill sets and approaches to delivering government services, however we cannot overstate the importance of the existing civil service workforce. Career civil servants are the people who can accelerate and institutionalize effective delivery. Customer-focused processes, technical skills, systems, and approaches are all dependent on career civil servants that understand their programs in and out and hiring or supporting modern technical leaders within the civil service.
How Can Philanthropy and Government Support the New North Star?
While a surge in federal government service delivery work happened in 2013-2014 with 18F, USDS, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, philanthropic and government leaders can keep the momentum going in four tangible ways.
1. Philanthropy should invest in the nonprofits pushing to support strong tech and data talent within government, recruit technologists to government, and improve government hiring. As described earlier, the hiring process in government is arduous, opaque, and, in many cases, depends on applicants self-reporting their technology skills. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how self-reporting your skills will bias the process to people who think they know more than they do.
Tech Talent Project and our nonprofit colleagues like the Beeck Center for Social + Innovation, New America, the Partnership for Public Service, Coding it Forward, TechCongress, the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, Bitwise, Day One Project, Code for America, AnitaB.org are leading a growing effort made up of public interest technologists who reflect the diverse voices and perspectives of modern America. Together this group is working to bring 10,000 diverse technologists into government through a series of recommendations regarding recruiting and hiring processes, practices, and initiatives.
2. Governments should support efforts to recruit diverse, ethical technologists into tribal, local, state, and federal agencies. We need to support public servants with technological skills inside government, attract more public servants trained to interpret and leverage data to government, bring a delivery mindset to complex social problems, and ensure that technology serves to help deliver government programs consistently, effectively, and equitably. Government leaders should reduce barriers to bringing diverse, ethical technical talent into their teams.
3. Philanthropy should support initiatives to build best-in-class tech hiring within government. Philanthropies and government can work together to replicate and scale programs like SMEQA that use subject matter experts to make hiring qualified candidates easier. Philanthropies can also invest in identifying and recognizing HR teams that effectively build modern technical teams across government and help government teams utilize hiring flexibilities like Intergovernmental Personnel Agreements where staff are temporarily assigned between the federal government and state and local governments, colleges and universities, Indian tribal governments, federally funded research and development centers, and other eligible organizations.
4. Philanthropic leaders, in addition to their dollars, can help educate leaders in government about the value of recruiting, hiring, and supporting public interest technologists across all levels of government. We can draw from other moments in history like the New Deal after the Great Depression where the circumstances demanded massive investment to meet the needs of the people.
Government is at its best when constituents can access services smoothly and have renewed trust in their government. Our robust and growing movement to recruit public interest technologists into government and support those inside will enable technological expertise to advance equity, expand opportunity, and make democracy work for the people.
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Read more stories by Jennifer Anastasoff.