What Did Civic Tech Learn in the Last Decade?

Some Insights About How to Use Tech in Government – and What Comes Next

From Don: Until Trump returned to power, a group of civic-minded technologists played a growing role in the federal government. DOGE purged them from public service. The DOGE disaster has now been memory holed, without even a final report as the Musk era of DOGE that formally ended on July 4th. Meanwhile, civic technologists have been having frank conversations about both the past and the future, asking what they did right, and wrong. Here, Merici Vinton, one of the leaders in that field, tells us what they learned.

The services and digital teams that were quietly making government work better - simpler tax filing, faster benefits access - have been or are being dismantled. What replaces them matters.

The second Trump administration has caused a major disruption to the federal government - deeply impacting the public services that Americans receive and the ways that services are delivered. This is felt particularly strongly in the civic technology field - which has sought to improve the relationship between the public and government institutions through the use of digital technology, especially for public services (“digital services”). The loss of digital service organizations has fundamentally shifted the motivations, incentives and capacities of the people designing the technology that powers government services - meaningfully affecting how and how well these services operate.

Recognizing this moment where we can challenge the old and look for the new, the Federation of American Scientists and Georgetown’s Beeck Center ran a series of retrospectives, or retros, to capture past lessons about what did and did not work in digital service delivery, and how we can chart an ambitious path forward in this new reality. We spoke to over 100 digital government practitioners from across the country.

These are the results, as well as where we think the field should move.

This is the moment for ambitious change. The digital government field has an opportunity to build a more responsive and resilient government by pushing into new frontiers, with new tools, approaches, and even organizations that don’t exist yet. While the pace of change can be overwhelming, there is something clarifying about a moment when people are questioning the value of institutions themselves.

When we set out to do the retros, we didn’t know what to expect. The field had undergone a massive rupture with the US Digital Service becoming DOGE and the shuttering of 18F, while other agency level digital teams were shuttered or reshaped at the federal level. Meanwhile, at the state and local levels of digital service delivery we’re hearing from government officials who are investing greatly in digital teams, often with excellent results and cost savings.

I am part of the digital service field, as an early employee of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and then as an architect of IRS Direct File. When engaging with this community, I had hoped for some obvious patterns or quick wins. I was surprised to discover that the primary pattern was: there are no patterns.

The core diagnosis: there Is No Shared Mental Model for what makes ‘good’ digital service teams, initiatives, and results

Across every conversation in our Digital Services Retros project, the consistent pattern was the lack of a mental model of success. For example:.

• People came to work on digital service teams and initiatives with dramatically different expectations.

• Government agencies didn’t know how to partner with digital teams.

• Digital teams didn’t know how to navigate agency bureaucracies.

• The digital government field lacks a shared vocabulary and definition of success for service delivery.

The lack of throughline connecting practitioners across organizations - in government, the private sector, and civil society - means there are not shared career pathways, methods of completing the work, or expectations for outputs. Which means it’s incredibly inefficient - people joining expecting one job, discovering one wildly different; agencies, also often immature in their own digital delivery, have no reliable patterns or expectations when partnering; and ultimately no shared vision for what good product development and delivery looks like.

The result is that a huge amount of time and effort is spent negotiating different expectations and correcting misunderstandings.

That diagnosis breaks into three interrelated findings.

Finding 1: There Must Be a Strategy and Explicit Theory of Change

There is no theory for how digital services contribute to societal outcomes, or government-wide strategy for leveraging digitalization to achieve those outcomes.

No shared strategy of work across the federal teams – USDS, 18F/TTS, OFCIO – led to confusion, competition for resources, and a focus on team goals rather than shared agency- or government-wide outcomes.

Strategy needs to exist at multiple levels: the highest level (how digital and service design contribute to outcomes — better SNAP access), the government-wide level (priorities and process), and the organizational level (the logic for how different team types work together).

The stakes of having no strategy at each of these levels are higher than ever. Without a clear position on AI for example, governments won’t get their tactics right - they’ll spend their time debating tools instead of outcomes. A strategy doesn’t require consensus, it is a signal of what you value.

The digital service community should be articulating an outcomes based strategy at each level for what we want to achieve in 5-10-20 years; and defining foundational elements that make a strategy effective: building user-centered government and how to reform our institutions to become modern, responsive organizations. Smart policymakers should look to partner with this community to codesign the future.

It’s time for the field to have a vision, articulate it, and go for it.

Finding 2: As is, the Digital Government Field Cannot Scale

Another theme that emerged was a shared concern. Individual contributions of any one team could not scale to influence how digital services were delivered throughout the rest of an agency. While teams of talented professionals could turn around quality products, ultimately teams struggled to turn their hard-won bright spots into scalable models of working across federal agencies.

The government digital services field’s M.O. is to rely on a small and scrappy pipeline of talent often via special and temporary hiring authorities. Here are three recommendations to change this:

• Make it as easy to hire technologists as it is to hire lawyers: Endless energy is spent on hiring technologists through a series of flexibilities and exceptions in lieu of real, streamlined repeatable career pathways. We have hacked ourselves into government, but have not fixed the machine.

• Make it someone’s job to scale change: Everything – from hiring, to ATO (authorization to operate) processes, to onboarding and everything in between – is a one-off, making lasting change within and across agencies near impossible. The fix: a scale team, empowered and expected to make the best practice the default practice, not the exception.

• Define success benchmarks across government: The field also lacks a shared definition of “good.” Teams need to define their own “industry standards” for service levels and delivery: benchmarks for downtime, user satisfaction, uptake among eligible populations — flexible, not rigid, but enough to let teams and leaders gauge how they’re doing.

• Expand field resources: Shared vocabulary, training, and methodology — building on bright spots like Technologists for Public Good and Code for America — would make practitioners more mobile across institutions and raise the quality of the field as a whole. We recommend further exploration to define the gaps and what should be filled by teams in government, or our recommended scale team, or forming new professional associations or non profits to support the wider field.

Finding 3: Build the Right Team for the Right Problem

Another pattern emerged across all levels of government: digital service teams were set up to add capacity to any number of solutions. The early strategy was: land the team, expand to solve new problems. The unit of success became the team itself and an agency was “mature” if it had one. Most digital service teams sit centrally under a principal, CIO, or COO, with authority that depends on political capital rather than legislation, and the same skill sets get hired regardless of the problem.

The fix: organize around the outcome of a service rather than a functional or organizational boundary. This is the Service Team, built on the UK’s Government Digital Service approach and Kate Tarling’s definition of a service: crossing silos, tied to the institution’s goals. The product operating model gives the operating mechanics - funding, staffing, day-to-day running. The service model gives the unit of organization - the user’s full journey.

Direct File is the proof of concept: a single accountable owner empowered to make day-to-day decisions, and a service team that joined up customer support and product work.

Building end-to-end service teams is not for the faint of heart – achieving this model of embedded technical and program teams, working collaboratively on an end-to-end journey, fully empowered to update processes and ways of working as they go is the mature end of the digital government delivery spectrum. But it is included here as it not only achieves better results for the end user, it also helps the agency and staff transform as they work in a new, fully digital, collaborative manner. For governments who want to make tech transformative, this is the path to take.

Different models for different problems.

Below are models that emerged from our retros, each with distinct purposes, skill requirements, and conditions for success. These aren’t mutually exclusive; a mature digital organization will need more than one at once. The service team is the north star. The others are legitimate, but they should be chosen deliberately and not defaulted into.

Additional models, include:

Table from the report, What We Recommend for Building Better Digital Service Teams, Initiatives, and Results, Federation of American Scientists

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A Forward Looking Agenda for Digital Service Delivery

Federal capacity, or “The Department of Digital”

Federal digital and delivery capacity will continue to be a necessary piece of a strong, delivery oriented government. The question is – now that the US Digital Service has become DOGE and 18F is dismantled, what should the future model be?

It’s time to explore a Department of Digital – a strong, centralized digital capacity – capacity to deliver on presidential priorities, set standards, and build shared platforms - modeled in part on Germany’s Ministry for Digital Transformation and the UK’s GDS. We need standards covering AI use, service design, budget controls, and service performance. We also need shared platforms like Login.gov, a payment platform, and income verification infrastructure that any agency can plug into instead of building from scratch.

At the agency level, there are multiple models to support service delivery and leaders should support the model that meets their needs. However, almost universally we recommend that agencies should explore the service model for their key services.

At the state level, Colorado is leading the way. It recently introduced a revamped Colorado Office of Information Technology to manage digital service delivery. Other states should follow their lead.

A Public Option Middle Layer

There are countless examples of large IT vendors building the same product, poorly, for 50 states. This model can and should be reimagined – moving towards a vision where governments can opt-in to a shared public infrastructure. We need shared public infrastructure around key legislation and universal platforms. This is a case where states, as laboratories of democracy, would benefit from co-operating with one another.

Shared platforms and infrastructure can provide government teams across the country with additional options for delivery at a national scale. This ‘middle layer’ would look at services that are required in multiple jurisdictions or infrastructure necessary to implement new legislation. Such platforms could exist as a public option – government-provided services that coexist with one or more private options.

Governments shouldn’t have to build from scratch: Modern income verification infrastructure only needs to be built once and made available to jurisdictions that opt-in and could be used in a countless number of ways, from federal scholarship applications to SNAP. Governments at all levels lose money to payment processing fees. A public option payment platform would cut costs and add a new competitor to the market, saving taxpayers money. Universal moments, such as birth and death registry, could be built centrally and deployed locally.

These delivery challenges have been too onerous to tackle. States are often reluctant to share data and platforms. Some jurisdictions have begun planning shared procurement strategies, but radically different, outcomes-based delivery will take reimagined governance and significant political will.

At the top. I said it was a time for ambitious change. This is possible. What we discovered in this research is not only brilliant ideas, a passionate movement, but also the engagement and energy needed to pull this movement forward into a more impactful, more confident future. Now’s the time to get started.

Merici Vinton is a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. She was an original architect of IRS Direct File and an early employee of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Digital Retros project was made possible thanks to the Federation of American Scientists and Georgetown University’s Beeck Center. The project team includes Faith Savaiano and Kirsten Wyatt. Thank you to Laura Sigelmann, Leya Moshin, Loren DeJonge Schulman, and Lynn Overman.