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The past year<\/span> has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team\u2019s former coders, designers, and UX experts have watched in horror as Donald Trump rebranded the service as DOGE, effectively forced out its staff, and employed a strike force of young and reckless engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of the Trump initiative triggered envy in tech reformers: the Trump administration\u2019s fearlessness in upending generations of cruft and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used that decisiveness and clout in service of the people instead of following the murky agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?<\/p>\n A small though influential team is proposing to answer that exact question, working on a solution they hope to deploy during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaduct, and its goal is to create a complete plan to reboot how the US delivers services to citizens. The Viaduct cadre of experienced federal tech officials is in the process of cooking up specifics on how to remake the government, aiming to produce initial recommendations by the spring. By 2029, if a Democrat wins, it hopes to have its plan adopted by the White House.<\/p>\n Tech Viaduct\u2019s advisory panel includes former Obama chief of staff and Biden\u2019s secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough; Biden\u2019s deputy CTO Alexander Macgillivray; Marina Nitze, former CTO of the VA; and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. But most attention-grabbing is its senior adviser and spiritual leader, Mikey Dickerson, the crusty former Google engineer who was the first leader of USDS. His hands-on ethic and unfiltered distaste for bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama\u2019s tech surge. No one is more familiar with how government tech services fail American citizens than Dickerson. And no one is more disgusted with the various ways they have fallen short.<\/p>\n Dickerson himself unwittingly put the Viaduct project in motion last April. He was packing up the contents of his DC-area condo to move as far away as possible from the political scrum (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet with Mook. When the two got together, they bemoaned the DOGE initiative but agreed that the impulse to shred the dysfunctional system and start over was a good one. \u201cThe basic idea is that it\u2019s too hard to get things done,\u201d says Dickerson. \u201cThey\u2019re not wrong about that.\u201d He admits that Democrats had blown a big opportunity \u201cFor 10 years we\u2019ve had tiny wins here and there but never terraformed the whole ecosystem,\u201d Dickerson says. \u201cWhat would that look like?\u201d<\/p>\n Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called him to say he found funding from Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank devoted to novel policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A Searchlight spokesperson says that the think tank is budgeting $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, like Al Pacino in Godfather III<\/em>, was pulled back in. Ironically, it was Trump\u2019s reckless-abandon approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. \u201cWhen I was there, we were severely outgunned, 200 people running around trying to improve websites,\u201d he says. \u201cTrump has knocked over all the beehives\u2014the beltway bandits, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n Tech Viaduct has two aims. The first is to produce a master plan to remake government services\u2014establishing an unbiased procurement process, creating a merit-based hiring process, and assuring oversight to make sure things don\u2019t go awry. (Welcome back, inspector generals!) The idea is to design signature-ready executive orders and legislative drafts that will guide the recruiting strategy for a revitalized civil service. In the next few months, the group plans to devise and test a framework that could be executed immediately in 2029, without any momentum-killing consensus building. In Viaduct\u2019s vision that consensus will be achieved before the election. \u201cThinking up bright ideas is going to be the easy part,\u201c Dickerson says. \u201cAs hard as we\u2019re going to work in the next three to six months, we\u2019re going to have to spend another two to three years, through a primary season and through an election, advocating as if we were a lobbying group.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n