Comment by bpp

I have a few friends who were involved in the creation of the US Digital Service, and as it stands it is one of the absolute best parts of our government. Formed after the Healthcare.gov disaster, the USDS brings Silicon Valley tech knowledge to the government in an attempt to ensure that we all have the online government services that we deserve. It's a tiny agency up against a massive bureaucracy that is anything but open to new ways of doing things. And they've made progress, but not enough.

I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind.

Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed.

[1] https://www.section508.gov/