A small, though impressive team is proposing to answer that exact question, working on a solution they hope to deploy during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaduct, and it aims to create an entire plan to reinvent the way America provides services to its citizens. The Viaduct cadre of experienced federal technical officials is in the process of conducting special preparations on how to restructure the government, aiming to have preliminary recommendations ready by the spring. By 2029, if a Democrat wins, he hopes his plan will be adopted by the White House.
Tech Viaduct’s advisory panel includes Dennis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff and Biden’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs; Biden’s deputy CTO Alexander McGillivray; Marina Nitze, former CTO of VA; and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook. But the person drawing the most attention is its senior advisor and spiritual leader, Mickey Dickerson, a former Google engineer who was the first leader of USDS. His practical ethics and unfiltered distaste for bureaucracy embodied Obama’s spirit of technological progress. No one is more familiar than Dickerson with how government technology services fail American citizens. And no one is more disappointed that in various ways they have failed.
Dickerson himself unknowingly set the viaduct project in motion the previous April. He was packing the contents of his D.C.-area condo to move as far away from the political bustle as possible (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet Mook. When the two got together, they lamented the DOGE initiative, but agreed that the impulse to break up the dysfunctional system and start over was a good one. “The basic idea is that it’s very difficult to get things done,” says Dickerson. “They’re not wrong about that.” While he acknowledges that Democrats have missed a big opportunity, Dickerson says, “For 10 years we’ve had small victories here and there, but never developed the entire ecosystem.” “How does that feel?”
Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called him to say he had received funding from the Searchlight Institute, a libertarian think tank dedicated 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 godfather iiiWas pulled back inside. Ironically, it was Trump’s care-free approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were overwhelmed, with 200 people running around trying to make the websites better,” he says. “Trump has destroyed all the beehives – the Beltway bandits, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex –.”
The Teck Viaduct serves two purposes. The first is to draw up a master plan to rebuild government services – setting up a fair procurement process, creating a merit-based recruitment process and ensuring monitoring to ensure things do not go awry. (Inspector Generals, welcome back!) The idea is to design signature-ready executive orders and legislative drafts that will guide the recruitment strategy for a revitalized civil service. Over the next few months, the group plans to design and test a framework that can be implemented immediately in 2029, without any momentum-killing consensus building. In view of the viaduct, consensus will be achieved before the election. “Thinking of bright ideas will be the easy part,” says Dickerson. “As hard as we’ll work over the next three to six months, we’ll have to spend two to three more years, through a primary season and through an election, advocating as if we were a lobbying group.”
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