CX lead at DHS announces departure from government
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Dana Chisnell, the first DHS executive director for customer experience, said March 28 was her last day with the department and “my last official day working for the federal government.”
The Department of Homeland Security official responsible for improving the agency’s interactions with the public said on Monday that she has left federal service after years of impactful modernization work across the government.
Dana Chisnell — who has served as the first executive director for customer experience at DHS since August 2022 — announced her departure in a restricted LinkedIn post and said that March 28 was her last official day with the department and “my last official day working for the federal government.”
“My job was culture change,” Chisnell wrote. “Over two and a half years, the CX team at DHS institutionalized customer experience functions that drive human-centered service design. Where in 2022 there was a scattering of designers across the third largest federal agency, in 2025, there are hundreds of technical experts on customer experience and human-centered design across the Department.”
Among her accomplishments, Chisnell highlighted more than 24,000 "training touchpoints" with DHS personnel in 2024 alone that allowed staffers to be “at least aware of what human-centered design is, how doing it makes government services better, and how easy it is to get started.”
Under Chisnell’s leadership, DHS also launched a permanent customer experience office in 2023 that has focused in large part on decreasing the amount of time it takes for the public to fill out relevant paperwork.
Following the office’s launch, Chisnell told Nextgov/FCW that the overarching goal was to shape a “human-centered Department of Homeland Security.”
Prior to working at DHS, Chisnell was also one of the founding members of the White House’s U.S. Digital Service and did an additional tour of duty with the unit from February 2021 until August 2022.
USDS was established in 2014 following the crash of Healthcare.gov to provide technical assistance to federal agencies. Under the Trump administration, USDS has been rebranded as the United States DOGE Service to assist the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting efforts.
This article has been updated to better reflect the CX team's engagement with DHS staffers in 2024.