Jared Kushner’s new initiative to fix government using ideas from business may have a fatal flaw
Last week, the White House announced the Office of American Innovation, intended to disrupt and fix ossified government agencies and procedures using ideas taken from the business world—primarily the high-tech industry. Led by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the Office of American Innovation is Trump’s spiritual, if not actual, successor to President Obama’s United States Digital Service.
Both agencies were created to cut through government red tape to get things done faster and more efficiently. And that’s a noble goal, no matter which president tries to make it happen. But the two approaches are significantly different, and I believe their widely varying approaches will lead to very different results.
Government technology history lesson
Late last year, I wrote that how the incoming Trump administration handled the U.S. Digital Service would reveal its true attitude toward technology and Silicon Valley. Well, it’s still not entirely unclear whether the U.S. Digital Service will continue to exist in any form, but the whitehouse.gov website for it goes to a page that says nothing about the service, but tells visitors to “STAY TUNED AS WE CONTINUE TO UPDATE WHITEHOUSE.GOV.”
In the meantime, the announcement of the Office of American Innovation seems to indicate a slightly different approach to using business—with “a particular focus on technology and data”—to transform government.
Top down vs. bottom up?
On the plus side, while Obama was a big fan of the U.S. Digital Service —after all, it was born out of the successful effort to save Healthcare.gov—the Office of American Innovation is headed by the President’s son-in-law and reports directly to the President. That’s a level of access and visibility that the U.S. Digital Service never enjoyed.
In fact, the Office of American Innovation appears to be all about high-level access to power. For example, the announcement notes it has “already hosted listening and working sessions with more than 100 private-sector CEOs,” and such bold-faced names as Bill Gates (Microsoft), Tim Cook (Apple), Marc Benioff (Salesforce) and Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX) are all reportedly on board.
The U.S. Digital Service, on the other hand, was primarily a developer-level operation. Notoriously disheveled Mikey Dickerson, the former head of the U.S. Digital Service, was a site reliability manager at Google before being “drafted” to untangle the mess that was Healthcare.gov. At the U.S. Digital Service, he led a profoundly hands-on organization, relying on software development methodologies, from open-source processes to cloud computing, to quickly solve difficult problems .
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Kushner, on the other hand, is a businessperson, not a technology expert. In a piece last week in the Washington Post, Elizabeth Spiers recounts her experience working for Kushner, challenging his tech savvy and suggesting that the Office of American Innovation could turn out to be “a vanity project” for him.
I hope that’s not the case, just as I hope all those high-profile tech luminaries can help bring more speed and efficiency into government. But to me, what makes the tech industry so successful isn’t just a few superstar CEOs, but the legions of smart, dedicated developers and engineers, all working hard to figure out new and better ways to get stuff done. I’d love to see that bottom-up approach take hold in Washington, D.C., not just Silicon Valley.
