Former USDS leaders launch technology reform project to fix what DOGE broke

last year It was a shock to many of the volunteer technology warriors in what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team’s former programmers, designers, and UX experts watched in horror as Donald Trump renamed the service to DOGE, effectively forced its employees out, and employed a strike force of young and reckless engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of Trump’s initiative has the envy of tech reformers: the Trump administration’s courage to overturn generations of inactivity and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used that decisiveness and influence to serve the people instead of following the vague agendas of Donald Trump or Elon Musk?

A small, albeit influential, team proposes to answer that very question and work on a solution they hope to roll out during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaduct, and its goal is to create a complete plan to reboot how the United States delivers services to citizens. Viaduct’s cadre of experienced federal technology officials is working out details on how to reshape the government, with the goal of providing initial recommendations by the spring. By 2029, if a Democrat wins, he hopes the White House will adopt his plan.

The Tech Viaduct advisory panel includes former Obama chief of staff and Veterans Affairs Secretary under Biden Denis McDonough; Deputy Biden CTO Alexander MacGillivray; Marina Neitz, former technical director at the Department of Veterans Affairs; Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook. But most notable is its senior advisor and spiritual leader, Mickey Dickerson, the gruff former Google engineer who was the first leader of the USDS. His business ethic and complete aversion to bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama’s technology boom. No one knows how government technology services fail American citizens better than Dickerson. And no one is more disgusted by the various ways in which they have failed.

Dickerson himself inadvertently took on the bridge project last April. He was packing up the contents of his D.C.-area apartment to get as far away from the political rally as possible (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet Mock. When the two came together, they bemoaned the DOGE initiative but agreed that the drive to tear up the dysfunctional system and start over was a good thing. “The basic idea is that it’s very difficult to get things done,” Dickerson says. “They’re not wrong about that.” He admits that Democrats missed a huge opportunity. “Over 10 years, we had small victories here and there, but we were never able to rehabilitate the entire ecosystem,” Dickerson says. “What would that look like?”

Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mock called him to tell him he had found funding from the Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank devoted to new policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A Searchlight spokesperson says the think tank is budgeting $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, as Al Pacino in The third godfatherIronically, it was Trump’s reckless approach of abandoning government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were so outgunned, there were 200 people running around trying to optimize websites,” he says. “Trump has hit all the beehives — the bandits, the contractor-industrial complex, the union-industrial complex.”

Tech Viaduct has two goals. The first is to develop a master plan to reshape government services – creating an unbiased purchasing process, creating a merit-based hiring process, and ensuring oversight to make sure things don’t go wrong. (Welcome back, inspectors general!) The idea is to design ready-to-sign executive orders and legislative drafts that will guide the recruitment strategy of the revitalized civil service. In the next few months, the group plans to develop and test a framework that could be implemented immediately in 2029, without any consensus building that kills momentum. Viaduct believes that consensus will be reached before the elections. “Thinking up smart ideas will be the easy part,” Dickerson says. “As hard as we will work over the next three to six months, we will have to spend another two or three years, during the primary season and through the election, advocating as if we were a lobby group.”