President Obama's US Digital Service Survives President Trump -- Quietly

The US Digital Service emerged from the technological and political meltdown of the 2013 launch of healthcare.gov. After a squad of Silicon Valley techies descended to fix the site, President Barack Obama created USDS to get tech workers helping other parts of government. Under President Obama, the group’s missions included speeding immigration processes, and expediting the acceptance of refugees. Under President Donald Trump, the unit’s current leader, Matt Cutts, admits that he’s less likely to highlight those projects. “We might talk more about how we save money,” says Cutts, a former Google executive, who took the helm after USDS’s founding director, a political appointee, departed in 2017. Cutts highlighted wins such as saving the Veterans Administration almost $100 million by convincing the agency to host a new project in Amazon's cloud instead of buying equipment.

Cutts has also had to change his unit’s pitch to potential recruits, many of whom take temporary leaves from tech companies to join USDS for short tours of duty. President Obama was popular in the left-leaning tech industry, and would sometimes invite people into the Roosevelt Room to persuade them to join the group. President Trump’s reputation among tech workers is poor, and he doesn’t offer USDS such direct support. Cutts says USDS has around 175 people, roughly the level it did at the start of the Trump administration. That’s down from the 202 the group had late in the Obama administration. “In this environment it’s very important to make arguments about service and that we’re working for the American people,” says Cutts. It’s a good line, but Cutts’ team works for Trump and his policies, too. The Obama-centric idealism under which USDS was founded has met the political reality of civil service.