Trump’s first White House debated the role of USDS. What will Trump 2.0 do?

It’s been a decade since the Obama White House founded the United States Digital Service in the wake of the bungled HealthCare.gov rollout as a “startup” meant to bring top tech talent into the government for limited tours of duty.

USDS survived the first Trump White House — a moment when one administration’s pet project may be at risk of being abandoned — but it’s not clear what will happen after President Joe Biden leaves in January. 

There were efforts within the Office of Management and Budget during the dusk of the first Trump administration to appraise USDS’ size and model, and even whether it should be consolidated elsewhere in government. Whether those discussions are resurrected again is an open question. 

At the same time, the second Trump White House may also want to wield USDS to implement its agenda, potentially for the sake of tech-enabled efficiency in government — a priority for the advisory Department of Government Efficiency being run by billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Nextgov/FCW spoke with more than ten people who have been in the organization across its tenure, as well some with broader government experience, many of whom spoke on background both because they were not authorized to speak to the press and to allow them to speak freely.

Original intent

Jennifer Pahlka helped start USDS during the Obama administration when she was deputy chief technology officer. 

“The original intent was to create core capacity for digital expertise within the center of government,” said Pahlka, adding that USDS is helpful not only because it rescues government projects, but also seeds more transformational changes to how the government does its work.

USDS was framed as a sort of “SWAT team” to serve as an emergency service to help buoy struggling tech projects across federal agencies, in much the same way several of its founders were deployed to save HealthCare.gov. 

Since then, the USDS team has helped save the Social Security Administration over $280 million in infrastructure costs on their website, for example. It’s also helped the agency reduce their call center wait time from 42 minutes to under 12 over the last quarter, an OMB spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW. 

In recent years, the office has worked on Direct File at the IRS, helped with FAFSA redesigns at the Education Department, collaborated with cross-government teams on the Biden administration’s customer experience work and more.

“For over 10 years, USDS has focused on solving the hardest technology problems that prevent government from best serving the American people — modernizing deteriorating and confusing systems, bringing in skilled technologists from the private sector into the federal government, making systems more efficient and cost-effective and improving the delivery of critical services,” USDS Administrator Mina Hsiang told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. 

USDS during the first Trump term

The White House tech team collaborated with Jared Kushner’s Office of American Innovation during Donald Trump's first go-round in the White House. 

But towards the end of the first Trump administration, there was an effort to define the right size and operational model for USDS, according to a former Trump administration official. OMB led the effort, according to another former government official who worked in the White House during the Trump administration. 

USDS — which doesn’t have official statutory backing from Congress — shares funding with the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, which is charged with providing direction for and oversight of the federal government’s use of technology and cybersecurity. 

But it’s not the only tech assistance team in government. Federal agencies can also look to other tech teams within the General Services Administration and contractors for help.

How USDS fits into that broader ecosystem and the potential for a more defined organizational model was under discussion during the end of the first Trump White House, said the first former Trump official, noting that USDS had evolved into a larger organization over the years and expanded its focus beyond emergencies alone. 

The reporting structure for USDS also changed in 2016. It had been housed in OFCIO, but later moved to report to the deputy director of management at OMB, per its 2016 impact report. 

Those leading this deep dive into USDS during the first Trump administration also discussed the team’s funding model, they said.

Also on the table was the question of whether the organization was aligning its work with the president’s agenda or picking the projects it wanted to work on, said the second former government official who worked in the White House during the Trump years. 

Whether USDS should exist at all or be consolidated elsewhere in government was also under consideration, they said. Some thought that the team’s work could be done by tech talent housed within agencies themselves or by government contractors.

There was also pressure against the tech unit coming from some of those vendors outside the government who feared that their work would be taken away by USDS during the Trump years, said a former USDS-er who worked there during the Trump administration. 

The tech team’s administrator during the Trump administration, Matt Cutts, described the organization as nonpartisan. 

Dozens of USDS posts, including its administrator and deputy administrator roles, were tagged to be converted to Schedule F at the tail end of the administration — including them in an effort to remove merit-based civil-service protections as part of the implementation of a controversial executive order issued late in 2020. 

Although that order was repealed by the Biden administration, President-elect Trump has since named a chief architect of Schedule F, Russ Vought, to lead OMB again in the next administration.

USDS under Biden

Some worry that decisions made under the Biden administration have put the organization more at risk — to be eliminated, irrelevant or used for political whims — for Trump 2.0.

When the Biden administration took over at the start of 2021, they switched the USDS leadership position to a presidential appointee role, as it was during the Obama administration. The White House also added some new political roles to USDS — dubbed senior advisors for delivery — to detail to White House policy councils, such as the Domestic Policy Council. 

To some, these decisions are evidence that the Biden administration abandoned a more nonpartisan approach cultivated during the Trump years to the potential detriment of USDS. 

“Why wouldn’t USDS help separate families and lock down the border? Why wouldn’t it be used for that purpose since Biden used USDS for its border policies?” asked a former USDS-er who now works elsewhere in government, noting that such an ask could set up a culture clash between USDS as it exists now and the new White House. 

A political focus for the White House tech team has disconnected USDS from the real needs of agencies and from its work fixing less “sexy” problems with the guts of government, like hiring and procurement, said another former member of USDS, now on the other side of the equation as a USDS agency customer. 

They’re also worried that a focus on political priorities means the team is losing its culture of bucking the thoughts and expectations of others that made it special.

“What’s the point of USDS 10 years in?” asked a third former member of USDS, also still in government, saying that it’s unclear why and how the organization decides what projects to work on.

Some who formerly worked in USDS are frustrated with the team’s leadership and the fact that USDS is in this position at all. 

The team’s leadership under this administration has also suffered from some controversy about alleged ethics problems for Hsiang and probes into potential ethics problems around its former chief delivery officer, Ankit Mathur, after he left government.

A former Biden administration official called the idea that USDS is nonpartisan a strategic “mythology” meant to give the team more autonomy in picking its work. Like other parts of the government that aren’t explicitly independent agencies, part of the job of USDS is to implement the priorities of the president. 

A former USDS official who worked there during the Biden administration pointed to the team’s website when asked about critiques of a lack of transparency around the team’s work, and said that why certain decisions are made can be confusing in any part of government if you’re not in a decision-making role. The mission is flexible by design, they said. 

USDS has also released an impact report.

To some, USDS’ problems actually stretch beyond the office itself to a broader lack of clear strategies and specific priorities on government technology over the last four years. There aren’t enough incentives for teams to work across siloes and funding streams, said one of the former employees, and no single leader is empowered to corral others. 

USDS regularly collaborated with OFCIO and teams across GSA, said the former USDS-er who was there during the Biden administration. Clare Martorana, federal CIO, also released a federal IT operating plan in 2022 looking across OMB, GSA and USDS money and teams at the request of Congress. 

A move to cost recovery 

All this is happening as USDS is adjusting to the end of about $200 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, which it used to offer more work to agencies without requiring reimbursements and to ratchet up its employee headcount to over 200.

Now, the organization is asking agencies for reimbursement agreements, a strategy deployed in the Trump administration to cover costs in tight budget circumstances, another former USDS team member who was there during the Trump administration confirmed with Nextgov/FCW. Embedding USDS members into federal agencies was another strategy. 

Asking for reimbursement moves USDS closer to the model of other tech teams within GSA that have a mandate of cost-recoverability.

“Our recent move to a cost-reimbursable model with agency partners, as a result of congressional budget constraints, significantly hampers our ability to respond to urgent crises,” an OMB spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW, before saying that it also “has demonstrated just how critical USDS teams are to agency technology transformations.”

“Dozens of agencies have continued to request USDS engagement, even in a resource constrained environment, valuing our teams' work and expertise,” they said.

The requirement to pay for services could close access to some agencies that lack resources, making the team’s decisions about money, not impact, said one current government official who works on digital services at an agency. 

The White House’s fiscal 2025 budget request included a $55 million ask across 11 agencies for digital experience work via USDS, which caused tension for some agencies already juggling their own tight budgets and trying to build their own digital services teams, two people told Nextgov/FCW.

USDS also asked for a reimbursement authority for agencies to transfer funding to the USDS-OFCIO account — up to $30 million. That ask would give the agency the ability to cover overhead costs with that money and fund cross-agency work, said the former official who was there in the Trump years.

USDS hasn’t been good at communicating its value in recent years, the former official who worked in the agency during the Biden years said. USDS works with Capitol Hill through the OMB Office of Legislative Affairs, and leadership hasn’t been directly briefing those on the Hill regularly, they said.

At the same time, many who spoke with Nextgov/FCW still see a value for the White House tech team. 

“We continue to have robust interest from private sector technologists in joining government, and more requests from agencies for our help than we are able to support,” Hsiang told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. 

For now, USDS is a valuable resource even for agencies trying to build their own capacity internally, said the current government official working on digital services in an agency. 

“It’s going to take a long time for folks to build that capability in-house,” they said. “And probably time that they probably don’t have … with a lot of legacy systems that are going to break down before that.”