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The fleeting existence of government digital services teams in the United States should have always been understood as something like a comet streaking across the sky. From the ground, it’s a bright, spectacular star, but in reality, it’s a flaming rock hurtling toward Earth. Much can be written about the journey that brought us here, but I’m more interested in what will be lost.
Simply put, too many people care about grand story arcs instead of smaller, sustained wins. The biggest frustration with how most internal government digital service teams are structured is the persistent myth that you just need “techies” to “do the work” while so-called leadership puts on their big-brain hats to solve the “real problems.” This myopic approach perpetuates the status quo. Combine it with the inability of CxO “shops” to collaborate effectively within the framework of digital services—IT, by necessity, cannot “move fast and break things” because they’re responsible for fixing it—and you get resentment, turf wars, and still no one fixes the damn websites.
Where does that leave us? I don’t care about bruised egos. I care about the problems—real, tangible problems—that could be fixed every day. Sometimes, that problem is just fixing a website. And fixing a website isn’t always as simple as rebuilding it, though sometimes, it is. Other times, it’s about convincing dozens of people that you need to improve an experience. That might involve a website, but improving that experience has dependencies that are hard-won, and you need to ensure you don’t inadvertently break something that’s working sort of okay.
This takes time. The digital services model hates time.
The same systems that happily pay external vendors astronomical sums to solve problems—and that have seen success largely because people less interested in taking credit actually did something—are now deeply invested in ending this moment of valorizing internal tech teams. And at the end of the day, the world will keep spinning. What’s disappointing is that it didn’t have to end like this.
For some reason, a nesting doll of leadership has been far more interested in touting the big picture than in clearing the brush to prevent fires. For years, having an internal team “sell” to internal agencies—generating endless paperwork to work within government—has been a colossal waste of time. If you want “cost recovery,” let the people doing the work collaborate with their peers and actually do it. No one seems willing to say this out loud. I don’t understand the controversy of speaking plainly about what’s wrong.
Yes, the people doing this work are often too idealistic. Too self-important. Building a website isn’t changing the world. But helping people access their government, improving systems, and creating experiences where people can say, “Oh wow, that wasn’t painful,” is indeed a big win. We can do more of this. But I don’t believe the people who say they want this, because the evidence suggests otherwise.
With sincerity, I’ll say this: the digital services moment was fleeting, and we won’t get it back. The idealism has drained from the body, leaving only the embalming fluid of a morass—people who don’t understand how this work actually works, leaving us all worse off.
What’s worse is this: the folks who showed up to do the work, who cared deeply, will scatter. They’ll leave government, looking for other ways to contribute. The hurt won’t be about lost meaning or lost jobs. It will be the quiet, persistent ache of looking at systems that could be fixed—easily, rapidly, at scale—and knowing the barriers to getting it done are still there.
This moment could have been different. It should have been different. There’s plenty of good to point to. If you could quantify what it means to invent new systems, rebuild trust in government, and foster resilience across hundreds of programs—working alongside the people who manage them—you’d see a ledger of impact that far outweighs the fallacies of cost. For some reason, that story never broke the surface. Just critiques and complaints.
New models will come. The world continues. But most of us just wanted to do the work. And now, it feels like the work is out of reach.