In an interview with FedScoop, Hillary Hartley said she would use her first 100 days in the role to cement a future vision for the organization, which could include a focus on helping state and local entities adopt open-source technology.

“I am really interested in taking a step back and using my first three to six months to dig in and understand the place that U.S. Digital Response holds within the ecosystem and to cement a clear vision of what this unique organization brings to government partners,” Hartley said.

She added: “From what I can see so far, I think there’s a really unique opportunity to be a bridge from the administration out to state, local, and municipal governments. Building on the work they are doing in the grant and election space … to be that bridge back to the federal government.”

Sharing open-source technology tools between the federal government and state and local governments is a top priority for the Biden administration, which has pushed for wider adoption of the GSA-built identity authentication platform Login.gov. 

Lawmakers in Congress have also pushed for increased sharing of open-source tools with state, local and tribal entities through legislative proposals such as Senate bill S.3890, which was proposed last summer. 

Hartley earlier this month joined USDR as chief executive officer, taking over from Tina Walha who remains with the nonprofit as chief partnerships officer. Hartley is a veteran of the federal government technology community, holding senior technology roles within the General Services Administration and helping to found 18F.

The circumstances of the nonprofit’s formation during the COVID-19 pandemic remains key to its future identity,” Hartley said,

“We want USDR to be the first call for governments when they have a question. This organization came out of a crisis, and crises are important because they are catalytic moments. The founders of this organization rose to that occasion in such an amazing way, and we … want to continue to operate in a ‘we’re here to help mode,’” she said.

USDR was launched during the coronavirus pandemic by technologists seeking to pledge assistance to local agencies that were forced to undergo a rapid digital transformation after their offices were closed.

The nonprofit, which was initially led by Raylene Yung, grew to become one of the largest civic tech groups with a staff of more than 5,500 volunteers and a core group that includes former U.S. deputy chief technology officers and Silicon Valley executives.

Currently, USDR is working with federal government agencies on projects including an unemployment benefits program and the creation of federal grants tracking tools.

As part of its unemployment benefits project, USDR has worked with the Department of Labor and nine state workforce agencies to streamline processes for claimants and case workers.

Hartley added that she was committed to working with the nonprofit’s leadership team to build on its successes with those projects.

“I think there’s an incredible opportunity to think about how those [current programs ] scale,” she said.

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She takes over from Tina Walha, who has been serving in the role on an interim basis since Jessica Cole stepped down from the role in December.

Walha will remain at the organization but moves into the role of chief partnerships officer, which she takes up on April 3.

Previously, Hartley was chief digital and data officer and deputy minister for the Ontario Public Service, where she helped to create and grow the Ontario Digital Service.

Before working in Canada, her prior roles included a period as deputy executive director and co-founder of 18F within the General Services Administration, and she was also a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow.

Alongside the new CEO appointment, USDR also announced that Avni Shah joins the organization’s board,  which so far includes former U.S. deputy chief technology officer Jennifer Pahlka and founder of Bisu Leave and past Aspen Tech Fellow Janette Fong.

Commenting on Hartley’s appointment, USDR Board Chair Jennifer Pahlka said: “Her experience building world-class teams and scaling impact both inside and outside of government will be incredible assets to the mission. Our country needs USDR, and we are confident that Hillary’s leadership will help the organization to meet even more of those pressing needs.” 

USDR was launched in March 2020 to help pair governments and nonprofit organizations with experienced technologists wanting to share skills on a pro bono basis. Last year, its launch CEO Raylene Yung was appointed as executive director of the Technology Modernization Fund at the General Services Administration.

Prior projects undertaken by USDR include partnering with nine state workforce agencies and the US Department of Labor to help streamline processes for unemployment insurance claims filed following the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Editor’s note, 3/22/22: This article was updated to correct Janette Fong’s job title and the date of Jessica Cole’s departure from the role of interim CEO at USDS.

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She joins from the private sector, where she was most recently chief technology officer at business advisory firm Next Street and before that was chief technology officer at public policy advocacy group MoveOn.

Lewis takes over leadership of Technology Transformation Services at GSA following the departure of Dave Zvenyach in August. Since then, acting Deputy Director Lauren Bracey Scheidt led the unit on an interim basis.

In addition to the appointment of Lewis, Antonia Tucker has joined GSA as scheduler in the agency’s Office of the Administrator and Amelia Cohen-Levy as speechwriter in the Office of Strategic Communications.

Tucker joins the agency from the U.S. Space Force, where she supported the chief technology officer and chief information officer. Cohen-Levy also joins from the Pentagon, where most recently she was executive communications and speechwriting lead for the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security.

GSA’s Technology Transformation Services branch was launched in 2016 to help agencies across the federal government modernize their IT systems and to build, buy and share emerging technology solutions.

The TTS team houses the federal government’s IT Modernization Centers of Excellence, which focus on helping agencies to accelerate technology modernization and providing access to best private sector practices.

TTS also houses 18F, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, the Office of Solutions and the U.S. Digital Corps.

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Speaking to FedScoop, Brian Whittaker said the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) will reorient itself to become better prepared internally to supervise fintech companies, and other new tech entities in the financial services sector. The comments from the recently installed technology leader come as the agency moves ahead with the relaunch of its innovation lab.

“We now have less of an outward focus on policy and instead more about how do we modernize the FDIC to be prepared to receive crypto currency and adopt new technologies. We want to be familiar with the technologies so we’re not caught on the back foot when crypto and others hit in a bigger fashion,” Whittaker said during a Nava Public Benefit Corporation event on Thursday.

“Now our focus is on how do we improve CIOs capacity to deliver for business units. How do we test out blockchain ledger technology. How do we make sure FDIC is prepared for the direction that fintechs are going in financial services?” Whittaker added.

Whittaker, who is the former acting executive director of 18F, the digital services consulting group situated within the General Services Administration, took over as FDIC’s chief innovation officer in March.

Whittaker’s predecessor at the agency, Sultan Meghji resigned from the post earlier this year and dismissed the FDIC as “hesitant and hostile” to technological change in a blistering op-ed published by Bloomberg News in February.

According to Meghji, he received resistance from staff in response to basic modernization efforts such as ending the use of fax machines and physical mail. In the op-ed, Meghji also criticized the knowledge and open-mindedness of staff.

Whittaker added that he plans to take his time getting to know and gain the trust of staff within the agency before pushing for change in areas like robotic process automation (RPA) in order to increase capacity from manual processes. 

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Zarek joins the agency later this month and will support USDS Administrator Mina Hsiang, who was appointed to lead the organization in September last year.

“I’m proud to share that later this month I will be returning to public service to support the people and teams working to deliver services to people across our country as the Deputy Administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS),” Cori Zarek said in a blog post. 

“USDS is an eight-year-old unit of the White House whose mission is to use design and technology to deliver better services to the American people,” she added.

Zarek is currently the executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation and a professor of the practice at Georgetown University. 

Before joining Georgetown, Zarek served as deputy U.S. CTO during the Obama administration. 

While previously serving in the White House, she led work to establish digital and collaborative government initiatives including the U.S. Digital Service, 18F, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows. 

From 2009 to 2013, Zarek was also a founding member of the Office of Government Information Services.

She was a Mozilla Foundation fellow in technology policy and earlier in her career practiced First Amendment law. 

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As of writing, there appears to have been, at least from publicly available indicators, no downtime or outages of the service, even as many hundreds of thousands of users accessed the site simultaneously.

That the site would stay up amidst widespread attention was not a given. Many observers noted the parallels to the 2013 debut of HealthCare.gov: launching a new, high-profile, health-related website into a pressure-filled context with enormous scrutiny and public skepticism. (Disclosure: I was a member of the team that helped turn HealthCare.gov around and am now a contractor working on HealthCare.gov with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.)

So why did COVIDtests.gov work where HealthCare.gov stumbled? In these past eight years, the U.S. government has gained more experience building these kinds of services. Agencies have brought in the kind of guiding technical talent that can advise leadership, and teams are exercising better judgment around launches and operating websites.

It’s not perfect nor as widely spread as we’d like, as various government sites continue to struggle, but the U.S. Digital Service, 18F, a new crop of CIOs, and a cadre of modern vendors have imbued agencies with fresh perspectives and playbooks. In this case, it looks as though the web team at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has also learned the right lessons and deserves much of the credit.

What do we know about this new site? I took a deep dive into the architecture of COVIDtests.gov, and what I learned was that the team at USPS did not use their existing web properties, but built a new site for this purpose. They used products from Amazon Web Services (AWS), including content delivery networks for high-performance serving, reliable file storage for HTML and images, an API built with so-called “serverless” functions, and a database that automatically scales with demand.

What this means is that the site is designed entirely with well-known components that are proven to handle heavy loads. This is the same infrastructure that the largest platforms on the web use. The value of managed services such as these is that there are fewer knobs to turn and fewer visible moving parts to break. This reduces almost all of the burden for keeping things up and running, freeing the team to focus on providing the best user experience. Clearly, the team managing this launch planned for outsized demand, well above what a typical government site experiences, and made technology choices accordingly.

It’s also a remarkably simple site from a user-experience perspective. The user goes directly from the landing page to the order form. A few moments of entering information, a confirmation dialog box, and the order is submitted. The UI simplicity and architecture reinforce each other.

Contrast this with HealthCare.gov’s initial launch, which architecturally looked more like enterprise software than a modern digital service. Even though AWS and similar cloud hosting providers had been around by that point for years, the site was hosted in a single private data center, where members of a subcontractor team had to manage individual servers and network connections. When things got operationally dicey, it was a challenging environment in which to recover and scale. Hosting in the cloud removes this pain point.

Additionally, the UI was complex, and users were required to navigate a challenging account sign-up and an application for eligibility before they could browse health plans. This required many back and forth interactions with the servers, and many individual custom components to support, all of which created opportunities for things to go wrong.

HealthCare.gov is the website for a means-tested program, and covidtests.gov is available to a much wider swath of the public, which does make for a simpler implementation. We can’t necessarily compare government programs apples-to-apples. However, were HealthCare.gov built from scratch today, its design would more resemble covidtests.gov than not.

Ultimately, the proof will be whether the USPS can fulfill all the orders and deliver them to the public who are anxious for more tools to help get them through yet another high-stress period of the pandemic. This website, while necessary to get right, is only one part of how the public will experience the government’s pandemic-related services. As the Administration implements other tenets of the recent Customer Experience Executive Order, they’ll need to build upon reliable digital services approaches like this to improve the public’s perception of government.

Paul Smith is chief technology officer and co-founder at digital services consultancy Ad Hoc. He was a leader of the team that fixed HealthCare.gov after its troubled launch, and before that worked on the 2012 re-election campaign of President Obama as deputy director of technology of the DNC.

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Speaking Thursday at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, the administrator encouraged attendees to consider applying to the newfound U.S. Digital Corps and underscored the myriad opportunities for purposeful work within the federal government.

Women currently make up less than one-quarter of all technologists working in the federal government.

“The problems we face today are big, they didn’t materialize overnight and it’s going to take your creativity, your fresh set of eyes, and your technical skills to reimagine the future and then build the solutions that the American people deserve,” said Carnahan.

Late last month the White House launched the U.S. Digital Corps, which is a two-year fellowship designed to place early-career software engineers, data scientists and other technologists at federal agencies.

Carnahan was installed as the administrator of GSA by the Biden administration earlier this year. She founded and led the state and local government practice at 18F, GSA‘s tech consultancy, from 2016 to 2020, having previously been Missouri’s secretary of state.

Most recently, Carnahan co-founded the State Software Collaborative as a fellow at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center.

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He takes up the post at the agency after previously holding a fellowship at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University.

Prior to her appointment as GSA administrator, Carnahan also held a fellowship at the Beeck Center, where she worked with Jaquith to launch the State Software Collaborative — a practical research project designed to overhaul states’ reliance on over-complex procurements and off-the-shelf software. They also spent time together previously at GSA’s in-house tech consultancy 18F between 2016 and 2020.

Previously, Jaquith was a member of the Biden-Harris transition team, working on technology strategy and delivery, and was also a volunteer at U.S. Digital Service. Earlier in his career, he also worked at the Sunlight Foundation.

Between 2012 and 2014, he was a member of the Open Data Working Group at the White House, according to his LinkedIn.

In a note on Twitter announcing the appointment, Jaquith said that in the new post he would continue a lot of the work he undertook with Carnahan for years at 18F and then at the State Software Collaborative.

In a statement, GSA said that in the new role Jaquith will coordinate the agency’s efforts to support state, local, tribal and territorial initiatives.

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She was confirmed by voice vote, meaning there was not a final tally of yeas or nays on her nomination.

Carnahan founded and led the state and local government practice at 18F, GSA‘s tech consultancy, from 2016 to 2020, having previously been Missouri’s secretary of state. She also co-founded the State Software Collaborative as a fellow at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center.

When she was at GSA during the Obama administration, Carnahan helped state and local governments improve their digital services while cutting costs. Her practice taught non-technical officials about IT risk management, procurement and modernization projects.

As Missouri’s secretary of state Carnahan modernized online services for hundreds of thousands of customers related to both elections and securities. A Democrat, she also ran for one of Missouri’s Senate seats in 2010 but lost to Republican Roy Blunt.

Commenting on her appointment, Carnahan said: “I am grateful for the support of the Senate, and I am honored to serve as the next Administrator of GSA.

“GSA is at the heart of creating a government that effectively delivers for the people and taxpayers, and I am committed to doing all I can to support that important mission.”

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GSA holds weekly meetings with the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Digital Service, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, federal chief information officers, and industry to discuss the $1 billion added to the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) and $150 million to the Federal Citizen Services Fund (FCSF).

The TMF is a central pot of appropriations that agencies can apply for to fund impactful modernization projects under the stipulation that they’ll pay it back within five years. The FCSF, on the other hand, is an internal GSA fund that TTS can use to support interagency digital services initiatives.

While process improvements streamlining how that money is distributed to agencies will be determined in the coming weeks and months, the news that GSA teams like Technology Transformation Services and 18F will offer assistance should assuage tech companies that demanded as much in a letter last month.

“If we can be of service along the way — whether it’s through our technology expertise, whether it’s through our acquisition expertise, whether it’s through our thought leadership in certain areas,” Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, told FedScoop in an exclusive interview. “We will be available as a resource for those agencies to tap into in the most frictionless way possible.”

TTS is working with the TMF Board to bring in the right people, potentially from the Centers of Excellence and Presidential Innovation Fellows programs, said Dave Zvenyach, the TTS’s director and deputy federal acquisition commissioner.

Adding the right capabilities and skills to the evaluation side of investments is a priority, Hashmi said.

“We have to figure out our org chart behind the scenes and work with our agencies in all the many different ways that we can,” he added. “Because that has been a challenge historically that I think we have the ability to overcome.”

In addition to improving the way investments are made, government is reconsidering agency repayment requirements and how to hold projects accountable for the way funds are spent to “make the most good happen as quickly as possible,” Hashmi said.

GSA’s 10x program has had great success expanding Login.gov entity verification across government on a smaller budget than the TMF and FCSF have now, Zvenyach said.

He categorizes the uses of new funds in three ways: recovery tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, economy, racial inequity and climate change; rebuilding government services; and reimagining digital services delivery — all of which offer high-impact opportunities for investments.

“Some of them are going to be duds,” Zvenyach said. “But some of them are going to be home runs.”

Both officials declined to name specific initiatives that will likely receive TMF funds citing the many stakeholders involved in those decisions. But possibilities include immediate, tactical investments in cybersecurity in response to last year’s SolarWinds hack, new shared services, and specific systems helping people find COVID-19 vaccinations, vote or receive Social Security benefits, Hashmi said.

GSA is assisting the Small Business Administration with baking fraud detection into its loan application systems, which may have doled out as much as $105.4 billion in COVID-19 relief money to fraudsters.

“There are a range of specific initiatives we’re looking at,” Zvenyach said. “Everything from [the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program] to improving forms and digitizing paper-based services.”

Another factor in all of this is President Biden’s appointment of Clare Martorana as federal CIO last month. Martorana‘s experience with IT modernization as CIO of the Office of Personnel Management and, before that, at USDS bodes well for projects reimagining digital and shared services.

“She brings a wealth of knowledge and experience,” Hashmi said. “And new thinking around how the TMF can actually be used as an investment fund to change things at a much greater scale, across multiple agencies.”

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