The White House confirmed today the rumors that Todd Park, the nation’s Chief Technical Officer and the spiritual leader of its effort to reform the way the government uses technology, is leaving his post. Largely for family reasons—a long delayed promise to his wife to raise their family in California—he’s moving back to the Bay Area he left when he began working for President Barack Obama in 2009.
But Park is not departing the government, just continuing his efforts on a more relevant coast. Starting in September, he’s assuming a new post, so new that the White House had to figure out what to call him. It finally settled on technology adviser to the White House based in Silicon Valley. But Park knows how he will describe himself: the dude in the Valley who’s working for the president. President Obama said in a statement, “Todd has been, and will continue to be, a key member of my administration.” Park will lead the effort to recruit top talent to help the federal government overhaul its IT. In a sense, he is doubling down on an initiative he’s already set well into motion: bringing a Silicon Valley sensibility to the public sector.
It’s a continuation of what Park has already been doing for months. If you were at the surprisingly louche headquarters of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, California, one evening in June, you could have seen for yourself. Park was looking for recruits among the high-performing engineers of Silicon Valley, a group that generally ignores the government.
There were about a hundred of them, filling several lounges and conference rooms. As they waited, they nibbled on the free snacks and beverages from the open pantry; pizza would arrive later. Park, a middle-aged Asian American in a blue polo shirt approached a makeshift podium. Though he hates the spotlight, in events like these—where his passion for reforming the moribund state of government information technology flares—he has a surprising propensity for breathing fire.
“America needs you!” he said to the crowd. “Not a year from now! But Right. The. Fuck. Now!”
Indeed, America needs them, badly. Astonishing advances in computer technology and connectivity have dramatically transformed just about every aspect of society but government. Achievements that Internet companies seem to pull off effortlessly—innovative, easy-to-use services embraced by hundreds of millions of people—are tougher than Mars probes for federal agencies to execute. The recent history of government IT initiatives reads like a catalog of overspending, delays, and screwups. The Social Security Administration has spent six years and $300 million on a revamp of its disability-claim-filing process that still isn’t finished. The FBI took more than a decade to complete a case-filing system in 2012 at a cost of $670 million. And this summer a routine software update fried the State Department database used in processing visas; the fix took weeks, ruining travel plans for thousands.
Park knows the problem is systemic—a mindset that locks federal IT into obsolete practices—“a lot of people in government are, like, suspended in amber,” he said to the crowd at Mozilla. In the rest of the tech world, nimbleness, speed, risk-taking and relentless testing are second nature, essential to surviving in a competitive landscape that works to the benefit of consumers. But the federal government’s IT mentality is still rooted in caution, as if the digital transformation that has changed our lives is to be regarded with the utmost suspicion. It favors security over experimentation and adherence to bureaucratic procedure over agile problem-solving. That has led to an inherently sclerotic and corruptible system that doesn’t just hamper innovation, it leaves government IT permanently lagging, unable to perform even the most basic functions we expect. So it’s not at all surprising that the government has been unable to attract the world-class engineers who might be able to fix this mess, a fact that helps perpetuate a cycle of substandard services and poorly performing agencies that seems to confirm the canard that anything produced by government is prima facie lousy. “If we don’t get this right,” says Tom Freedman, coauthor of Future of Failure, a 61-page study on the subject for the Ford Foundation, “the future of governing effectively is in real question.”
No one believes this more deeply than Park, a Harvard-educated son of Korean immigrants. Mozilla board member and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman had secured the venue on short notice. (“I do what I can to help Todd,” Hoffman later explained. “We’re very fortunate to have him.”) Park, 41, founded two health IT companies—athenahealth and Castlight Health—and led them to successful IPOs before joining the Department of Health and Human Services in 2009 as CTO. In 2012, President Obama named him CTO of the entire US. Last fall, Park’s stress levels increased dramatically when he caught the hot-potato task of rebooting the disastrously dysfunctional HealthCare.gov website. But he was also given special emergency dispensation to ignore all the usual government IT procedures and strictures, permission that he used to pull together a so-called Ad Hoc team of Silicon Valley talent. The team ultimately rebooted the site and in the process provided a potential blueprint for reform. What if Park could duplicate this tech surge, creating similar squads of Silicon Valley types, parachuting them into bureaucracies to fix pressing tech problems? Could they actually clear the way for a golden era of gov-tech, where transformative apps were as likely to come from DC as they were from San Francisco or Mountain View, and people loved to use federal services as much as Googling and buying products on Amazon?
Park wants to move government IT into the open source, cloud-based, rapid-iteration environment that is second nature to the crowd considering his pitch tonight. The president has given reformers like him leave, he told them, “to bloweverything the fuck up and make it radically better.” This means taking on big-pocketed federal contractors, risk-averse bureaucrats, and politicians who may rail at overruns but thrive on contributions from those benefiting from the waste.
But Park is not departing the government, just continuing his efforts on a more relevant coast. Starting in September, he’s assuming a new post, so new that the White House had to figure out what to call him. It finally settled on technology adviser to the White House based in Silicon Valley. But Park knows how he will describe himself: the dude in the Valley who’s working for the president. President Obama said in a statement, “Todd has been, and will continue to be, a key member of my administration.” Park will lead the effort to recruit top talent to help the federal government overhaul its IT. In a sense, he is doubling down on an initiative he’s already set well into motion: bringing a Silicon Valley sensibility to the public sector.It’s a continuation of what Park has already been doing for months. If you were at the surprisingly louche headquarters of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, California, one evening in June, you could have seen for yourself. Park was looking for recruits among the high-performing engineers of Silicon Valley, a group that generally ignores the government.
There were about a hundred of them, filling several lounges and conference rooms. As they waited, they nibbled on the free snacks and beverages from the open pantry; pizza would arrive later. Park, a middle-aged Asian American in a blue polo shirt approached a makeshift podium. Though he hates the spotlight, in events like these—where his passion for reforming the moribund state of government information technology flares—he has a surprising propensity for breathing fire.
“America needs you!” he said to the crowd. “Not a year from now! But Right. The. Fuck. Now!”
Indeed, America needs them, badly. Astonishing advances in computer technology and connectivity have dramatically transformed just about every aspect of society but government. Achievements that Internet companies seem to pull off effortlessly—innovative, easy-to-use services embraced by hundreds of millions of people—are tougher than Mars probes for federal agencies to execute. The recent history of government IT initiatives reads like a catalog of overspending, delays, and screwups. The Social Security Administration has spent six years and $300 million on a revamp of its disability-claim-filing process that still isn’t finished. The FBI took more than a decade to complete a case-filing system in 2012 at a cost of $670 million. And this summer a routine software update fried the State Department database used in processing visas; the fix took weeks, ruining travel plans for thousands.
Park knows the problem is systemic—a mindset that locks federal IT into obsolete practices—“a lot of people in government are, like, suspended in amber,” he said to the crowd at Mozilla. In the rest of the tech world, nimbleness, speed, risk-taking and relentless testing are second nature, essential to surviving in a competitive landscape that works to the benefit of consumers. But the federal government’s IT mentality is still rooted in caution, as if the digital transformation that has changed our lives is to be regarded with the utmost suspicion. It favors security over experimentation and adherence to bureaucratic procedure over agile problem-solving. That has led to an inherently sclerotic and corruptible system that doesn’t just hamper innovation, it leaves government IT permanently lagging, unable to perform even the most basic functions we expect. So it’s not at all surprising that the government has been unable to attract the world-class engineers who might be able to fix this mess, a fact that helps perpetuate a cycle of substandard services and poorly performing agencies that seems to confirm the canard that anything produced by government is prima facie lousy. “If we don’t get this right,” says Tom Freedman, coauthor of Future of Failure, a 61-page study on the subject for the Ford Foundation, “the future of governing effectively is in real question.”
No one believes this more deeply than Park, a Harvard-educated son of Korean immigrants. Mozilla board member and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman had secured the venue on short notice. (“I do what I can to help Todd,” Hoffman later explained. “We’re very fortunate to have him.”) Park, 41, founded two health IT companies—athenahealth and Castlight Health—and led them to successful IPOs before joining the Department of Health and Human Services in 2009 as CTO. In 2012, President Obama named him CTO of the entire US. Last fall, Park’s stress levels increased dramatically when he caught the hot-potato task of rebooting the disastrously dysfunctional HealthCare.gov website. But he was also given special emergency dispensation to ignore all the usual government IT procedures and strictures, permission that he used to pull together a so-called Ad Hoc team of Silicon Valley talent. The team ultimately rebooted the site and in the process provided a potential blueprint for reform. What if Park could duplicate this tech surge, creating similar squads of Silicon Valley types, parachuting them into bureaucracies to fix pressing tech problems? Could they actually clear the way for a golden era of gov-tech, where transformative apps were as likely to come from DC as they were from San Francisco or Mountain View, and people loved to use federal services as much as Googling and buying products on Amazon?
Park wants to move government IT into the open source, cloud-based, rapid-iteration environment that is second nature to the crowd considering his pitch tonight. The president has given reformers like him leave, he told them, “to bloweverything the fuck up and make it radically better.” This means taking on big-pocketed federal contractors, risk-averse bureaucrats, and politicians who may rail at overruns but thrive on contributions from those benefiting from the waste.
by Steven Levy, Wired | Read more:
Image: Michael George
