These former government tech leaders are prepping day-one plans for a future administration
The effort, called the Tech Viaduct, is in part a reaction to Trump’s controversial, government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, which helped the administration push out civil servants, cut spending and tap into new sources of government data, sparking lawsuits in the process.
Watching how much the team was able to get done quickly was “astonishing,” said Mikey Dickerson, a senior advisor for the Tech Viaduct.
Dickerson was the first administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, a tech team established by former President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the failed Healthcare.gov launch. Trump transformed USDS into a unit to house DOGE on the first day of his administration and placed billionaire Elon Musk in charge, though he has since departed. Many of those who were originally USDS workers have been laid off or have left.
Those behind Tech Viaduct say that Elon Musk’s team caused harm that will take years to undo, but it also showed how much can get done in government when you have the force of political will behind you.
Last summer, Dickerson started talking to other government tech experts, asking “what if we were to move with the same kind of urgency to accomplish our goals, to make things stronger instead of shut them down?”
Now, he’s working with a group at the Searchlight Institute — a Democratic think tank — to make day-one plans for a future administration to get that done.
The team includes Jacky Chang, a senior engineer who previously worked as a senior advisor at the General Services Administration; Jonathan Mostowski, a procurement expert who formerly worked at the U.S. Digital Service and Defense Digital Service; Joshua Jacobs, former head of the Veterans Benefits Administration under Biden; and Marina Nitze, who was a senior tech advisor for Obama, as well as the chief technology officer of the VA.
Nitze co-authored a forthcoming book, Crisis Engineering, with Dickerson and Matthew Weaver, who helped set up the Defense Digital Service. The three work for crisis engineering firm Layer Aleph.
Denis McDonough, former White House chief of staff under the Obama administration and Secretary of Veterans Affairs during the Biden administration, is an advisor for the effort, as are Alexander Macgillivray, former principal deputy CTO for Biden and deputy CTO for Obama, and Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager.
The group wants to reform the procurement, civil service and oversight processes undergirding the government to create the right conditions for successful, tech-enabled government service delivery.
The goal is for the team to be able to provide a new president with tactical plans, structural reform objectives, day-one executive orders, memoranda and more.
The notion of crafting a playbook to help an incoming administration more effectively accomplish policy goals is not new. Trump himself made use of many recommendations outlined in the controversial Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation to dismantle sections of the civil service and even eliminate entire agencies, although Trump distanced himself from the project while on the campaign trail.
Tech Viaduct’s plans are for the next “friendly administration,” said Dickerson, that wants to build a “better, more responsive, functional government.” He says part of the work will be lobbying to get buy-in for the project, especially since government reform isn’t necessarily top of mind for voters. It can, however, help politicians implement their ideas, he said.
What Dickerson doesn’t want to happen is a return to the status quo.
“For decades, government services have fallen short of citizen expectations. Inaction and complacency, including by Congress, have allowed budget, procurement, and oversight rules to fossilize into a system that guarantees each program complies with ever-expanding checklists while its core purpose often goes unfulfilled,” the Tech Viaduct website reads.
Jacobs is drawing on his time at the VA to help inform those plans.
During the last two-plus years of the Biden administration, he led the Veterans Benefits Administration as it was implementing the PACT Act, which significantly expanded eligibility for healthcare benefits for veterans exposed to toxic substances.
It was a big lift. The law expanded healthcare and benefits eligibility to veterans who were exposed to burn pits and other toxins during their service. Hundreds of conditions were added to the list of what is presumed to be connected to military service.
Leadership at the VA decided to implement the law faster than the phased approach Congress had outlined, in part because doing the work incrementally would have required the VA to hold claims that weren’t yet presumptive, without the ability to deny or approve them, said Jacobs.
To get it done, the VA studied the operational conditions they’d need across processes, people and technology, launching a hiring spree and using mandatory overtime to fill what was deemed the “driving force” of the project: people. The department also benefited from strong, top-down leadership and a unit set up to drive cross-department collaboration, said Jacobs.
The lesson Jacobs is bringing to the Tech Viaduct now: “Even the best policies will accomplish nothing if you don’t have effective operations.”
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