The past year has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team's former programmers, designers, and UX experts have watched in horror as Donald Trump renamed the agency DOGE, effectively ousted its staff, and deployed a strike force of young and reckless engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of the Trump initiative aroused the envy of technology reformers: the Trump administration's fearlessness in overthrowing generations of crass and inertia in government departments. What if government leaders actually used that decisiveness and clout in the service of the people instead of following the dark agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?
A small but influential team proposes to answer exactly that question and is working on a solution that they hope to implement during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaduct and aims to create a complete plan to restart the way the US delivers services to citizens. The Viaduct cadre of experienced federal technology officials is working out details on how to reshape the government, with the goal of making initial recommendations in the spring. If a Democrat wins in 2029, he hopes his plan will be adopted by the White House.
Tech Viaduct's advisory panel includes former Obama chief of staff and Biden's Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Denis McDonough; Biden's deputy CTO Alexander Macgillivray; Marina Nitze, former CTO of the VA; and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. But drawing most attention is its senior advisor and spiritual leader, Mikey Dickerson, the crusty former Google engineer who was USDS's first leader. His hands-on ethics and unfiltered distaste for bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama's technology wave. No one is more familiar with how government technology agencies are failing American citizens than Dickerson. And no one is disgusted anymore by the various ways in which they have been failed.
Dickerson himself unknowingly initiated the Viaduct project last April. He was packing up the contents of his D.C. apartment to move as far away from the political fray as possible (to an abandoned celestial observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet Mook. When the two came together, they lamented the DOGE initiative but agreed that the impulse to destroy the dysfunctional system and start over was a good one. “The basic idea is that it's too hard to get things done,” Dickerson says. “They're not wrong about that.” He admits that the Democrats have capitalized on a great opportunity. “For ten years we had small victories here and there, but never terraformed the entire ecosystem,” says Dickerson. “What would that look like?”
Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called him to say he had found funding from the Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank focused on new policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A spokesperson for Searchlight says the think tank is budgeting $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, as Al Pacino in Godfather IIIIronically, it was Trump's reckless, reckless approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we had a big head start: 200 people running around improving websites,” he says. “Trump has toppled all the hives – the beltway bandits, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex.”
Tech Viaduct has two purposes. The first is to create a master plan to reimagine government services: establishing an unbiased procurement process, creating a merit-based hiring process, and ensuring oversight to ensure things don't go wrong. (Welcome back, Inspectors General!) The idea is to draft executive orders and bills ready for signatures that will guide the recruitment strategy for a revitalized civil service. Over the next few months, the group plans to devise and test a framework that can be implemented immediately in 2029, without any momentum-killing consensus building. In Viaduct's vision, consensus will be reached before the elections. “Coming up with smart ideas is going to be the easy part,” says Dickerson. “No matter how hard we work in the next three to six months, we're going to have to spend another two to three years, through a primary and through elections, advocating as if we were a lobbying group.”
