Jen Pahlka

‘The Highs Were Very High and the Lows Were Very Low’: Jen Pahlka on the Genesis of the U.S. Digital Service

Jen Pahlka was U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to June 2014, during which she played a pivotal role establishing the U.S. Digital Service. Jen is also the founder and former Executive Director of Code for America, and the author of Recoding America.

Jen Pahlka came into government with a high-level vision for the U.S. Digital Service, shaped in part by her transformative experience visiting the UK’s Government Digital Service. 

The months preceding the formal creation of USDS were marked by starts and stops, highs and lows, and also a government shutdown and the HealthCare.gov crisis. Below, Jen discusses this tumultuous period; piloting the USDS concept inside the Department of Veterans Affairs; and the relationship between USDS and 18F.

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July 3, 2024

Kathy Pham: 

Jen, tell us how you got started with USDS.

Jen Pahlka:

Two days after Obama’s reelection, I was in London visiting the Government Digital service for the first time. GDS’s founder and leader, Mike Bracken, had come to visit Code for America in its first year, along with Cabinet Minister Francis Maud, and we’d developed a bit of relationship with them, but I hadn’t really understood the scope and ambition of what they were doing until I visited their offices. There were rows and rows of developers and designers making visible, tangible progress on the new gov.uk, right there in front of us. They were using a modern tech stack and user-centered approaches. They had a piece of butcher paper with the center torn out and the word USERS scrawled on it stuck to a window, creating an invitation to look out on the street below and see people walking by and remember that’s who the team was making this website for. Each time someone would finish a task, often taking content from a legacy site, redesigning and rewriting it, and posting the slimmed-down, clearer version on the new domain, they’d get up from their seat, and take the sticky note representing the old site, and move it over to a massive “Wall of Done.” You could feel the energy and excitement.  

While I was there, I received this an email from Todd Park that read

Hi Jen, hope all is terrific with you, and fantastic again to see you here in DC a couple of weeks ago!  I believe you’ll be in London over the next couple of days? Might it be possible for you to drop by DC on your way back?  I’d love to talk with you about your future plans, and one potential trajectory in particular 🙂 If you can’t drop by DC, may I arrange to visit with you in SF at some point soon? 

All of my very best,

Todd

My first thought was, I’ve got to tell Todd about the GDS and what they’re doing! The U.S. could do this, and Todd is the person who could make it happen! I couldn’t accommodate Todd’s request to stop by D.C. on the way home, so we arranged a phone call for the next day.

Monday, November 12, however, was a day that changed my life. That night, the event I was attending  convened participants at a bar, and Nick Sinai was among them. Nick was Todd’s Deputy CTO.  I cornered Nick and asked him about Todd’s email. “He’s going to ask you to join as Deputy Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and run the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program,” he told me. I was as surprised as I have ever been in my life, and more honored than I’ve ever been. But I was certain that I couldn’t do it. I had a 10 year old at home who couldn’t move to DC. Nick was certain I would say yes in the end, because Todd was such a force of nature. “Like water on stone,” he warned me, “we will wear you down.” It sounds creepy, but it wasn’t. We laughed about it.

Emily:

So you get this email while you’re at GDS? 

Jen:

That email came in literally while I was in those GDS offices for the first time. It’s the only time in the world I would not have immediately replied to his email. If you get an email from Todd Park, you reply right away – but I was having my mind entirely blown. We ended up talking the next day. He said, “We’ve done the first year of the PIF program. We’re really excited about it and we want you to come run it.” 

I replied, “I’m incredibly flattered. I can’t believe that I’m receiving this call. I cannot come to D.C. with my daughter, but since you’re calling me, let me tell you about this place I was just at. I think you need an American GDS. Will you please come over here and see it?” We didn’t actually get him to come over and see it then, but there was a contingent that went over.

I wish that I had succeeded in getting senior level people to come over in that year and see it. It’s a great lesson: I thought, “We’ll do it later,” but then HealthCare.gov happened.

Kathy: 

Can you tell us more about the time leading up to USDS’s creation?

Jen:

When Todd and I talked the next day, he did in fact ask me to come be the new Deputy CTO for government innovation, and I told him I couldn’t come, but that I had a great idea that he should pursue, and that I’d support it from the outside: the US needed its own GDS. 

Todd didn’t tell me this at the time, but he and several others were already working on something similar. It was code-named Project X, and Haley Van Dyck from OMB was leading it. Critically, it had the strong support of Dan Tangherlini, who was the GSA Administrator. Dan felt that an agency dedicated to “general services” for the federal government should be providing technology services, and he had agreed to house Project X at GSA. 

Though I had told Todd I couldn’t come to DC, we continued to talk, and eventually he called to say he wanted me to come run the PIF program and start the “American GDS.” In April of 2013, I came out for a meeting, where I met Haley and started to understand that she’d already been working on the project. We immediately connected around this common vision. 

Haley and I worked with Lena Trudeau and Casey Burns, both at GSA, on a budget for both the PIFs and a delivery unit, and we were largely settled on a budget when a critical moment came: HealthCare.gov failed and we had a government shutdown at the same time. All of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was furloughed except for Todd. 

But Tom Sharpe, then Administrator of the Federal Acquisition Service, felt that Project X, as it was still called then, was illegal and threatening, and while Haley and I were furloughed, he cut the entire budget for the delivery unit, leaving money only for the PIF program. Dan still wanted to do it, but Tom’s decision meant we couldn’t use FAS money. Haley and I always thought there should be a technology presence at the OMB and White House. I’m a student of Mike Bracken of the UK’s GDS. I learned from him that there are some things you can do by asking nicely, but others that you need the authority to do. Only in the White House would this office have real authority.

October 17, 2013 was the end of the government shutdown and the last day of the Code for America Summit. Mike Bracken had come over from the UK to give the closing keynote, and he got a huge standing ovation. Our plan was that he and I would then go to DC together and I would have him speak with many of the deputy secretaries who were part of the Presidents’ Management Agenda, in order to share what GDS was doing and build support for our Project X. Luckily, while Mike was on stage, Congress passed a budget and got the government back to work. 

So we did go to D.C.,  but because it was one of the first days the agencies were back in action, all of our planned meetings with Deputy Secretaries got canceled. We did get Mike to give a public talk in the auditorium, where he inspired the then-Presidential Innovation Fellows, including those who went on to found 18F, like Hillary Hartley and Aaron Snow, and others, but otherwise his schedule was open. So Tim suggested a media roadshow, and set him up with a few reporters. The biggest win from that effort was that Ezra Klein eventually wrote a cover story for Bloomberg on the HealthCare.gov tech failure  and said, “Turns out this is a solved problem: Just look at what they are doing in the UK.” 

That article had a big impact. By the time it came out, it had been two weeks since the shutdown ended and a month since healthcare.gov had launched with such trouble, and you’d have thought that support for this new unit would have been far higher than before we’d been furloughed. On the contrary, it felt like everything was stalled. We were facing having to start all over at GSA. I couldn’t believe it. The end of October was a low point and felt like a failure. We had this little council of people with endless meetings where we made no progress or decisions. I almost lost it in a meeting. I went home that night and thought: Not only am I failing, but becoming shrill and upset.

But Ezra’s piece got people talking again. If the UK could do it, maybe we could too. We could have a core competency in digital inside government.  

Kathy: 

What happened next? How did you officially get started in government?

Jen:

I said, “Look, we should reconsider the notion that this isn’t something we can do at the White House.” GSA was challenging to work with. Dan really wanted it to happen, but Tom was such a blocker, and it is really hard to get something set up right under those conditions. At the time, GSA was giving a massive cloud contract to CGI, the lead contractor on healthcare.gov, and I took that as a sign that it was very hard to get stuff right in GSA, and I used that as an example with Todd, who of course was seeing the effects of HHS having hired CGI. So we made the case to put Project  X in OMB instead of GSA, and it wasn’t an easy road, but we eventually convinced Todd and OMB to do it. We had  settled on the name United States Digital Service in homage to the Government Digital Service. but GSA still wanted to stand up their own unit despite the resistance and despite the White House decision. I had to ask Lena at GSA not to use the name USDS so that we could use it. So then GSA needed a name for their unit, and that’s how 18F came about.  

Kathy: 

Who else was involved at the start?

Jen: 

In addition to Haley Van Dyck, the core team included Casey Burns — whom we brought over from GSA — Charles Worthingon worked on it too, and Nick Sinai had his own portfolio but was hugely supportive in many ways. Ryan Panchadsaram did a lot of work on the USDS playbook.

Marina Nitze, who was by then the CTO at the VA, was a big collaborator and helped us understand the hiring barriers. She needed a web designer. We tried working through the VA hiring process, but the certification list had zero designers on it. Zero design people could get through the standard process. We were learning that the current process doesn’t work. I thought we’d never figure it out, but Casey Burns said “I got this.”

At that point, we were not great at articulating that USDS was not about technology. People thought we were saying, “Technology will solve the problems.” We were not. I wish they had asked more questions. Haley found all the stuff that matters — she found funding with the “Information Technology Oversight and Reform” account, did the budget, and convinced others. 

In November, Todd agreed to do this with the White House. Todd kept people going; I would have given up. It moved from that moment of deep doubt to momentum. Casey, Haley, and I had these text threads and we were so pumped. The highs were very high and the lows were very low. I was entirely new to the government. I had no idea how to build a budget in the government. Casey and Haley made it happen. 

It was slow and frustrating to get OMB to agree to this new concept of USDS. I also had to get back to Code for America. I was on a one year leave of absence as Executive Director. I needed to find someone to lead USDS.

There was a meeting in the Roosevelt Room at the White House with tech executives. I had never met Mikey Dickerson. Mikey got stuck in traffic and ran 12 blocks to the White House. It was so obvious from that meeting that he had the President’s trust. 

Emily: 

What was the distinction between USDS and 18F at this point?

Jen:

USDS and 18F were like siblings, bonded over their passion for the same things. They had distinctive personalities, and distinctive financing and legal structures. But both are necessary.

Emily:

What got you from that April meeting to an actual “yes, I’m joining”? 

Jen:

Todd was very persistent. You just can’t say no. I was running an organization that asked people to give a year of their lives to public service. At some point, I felt like it was hypocritical to ask that of others if I wasn’t willing to do it myself. I realized that it would be a great experience for me to walk in the shoes of an actual public servant. All of the things that you can criticize from the outside then feel very real and emotional and high stakes. 

Marina had also sent me a quote: “I used to think somebody should do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.” I really wanted to see this American GDS happen and Todd kept saying, “It has to be you.” It certainly could have been somebody else, but you don’t want to regret that decision. You don’t want to look back and go, “Oh, well, too bad. Nobody did it.”

Kathy:

Ryan Panchadsaram said in his interview that there are some people without whom this organization would be so drastically different. I feel confident that if I hadn’t shown up, yes, it’s different, but pretty much the same. But I think without you, it would’ve been drastically different. Your role, your background with Code for America, your understanding of GDS is so significant. Those are pieces no one else had.

Jen:

Seeing the GDS in action and becoming friends with those people was so important. And the fact that I could call Mike Bracken all the time that year meant that we got a lot of learnings and inspiration from the GDS. I do think that I was the wrong person in a lot of ways, but that relationship of trust and mutual help actually mattered.

I left a month before USDS even launched. It was Todd who recruited Mikey, not me, though I was very supportive. The main thing I’d come to do was get the right person – someone more technical and with more product experience than me – to run it. Set the foundation and find someone else. And I didn’t even accomplish that!

Kathy:

None of this happens in a vacuum. If you’re looking to create your own digital service, leaning on another group and having those deep relationships are pivotal. The fact that you connected us with GDS made it less lonely. They’re a different government, obviously, but we’re both part of this powerful movement.

Jen:

It’s very easy for ideas to get watered down in government. You can put words on a slide deck that say “delivery” or “transformation,” but it can still result in the status quo. GDS avoided that. They were very transformative. They stuck to their guns about disrupting the ecosystem, disrupting the status quo, and pushing for a different way. I’m not saying that they were perfect, but people in that country notice a difference in the level of service delivery and the respect that the service delivery shows them. That is a real success. 

There were times when I felt defeated and had to call Mike Bracken. He would say, “This is really hard and you can’t give up. You can’t concede on these fronts.” I wanted to go home. I was so convinced that I wasn’t succeeding and that I wasn’t the right person. Mike is the one who said, “It’s not complicated, it’s just hard.” I called him on July 4, 2013. I was near tears and said, “I can’t do this.” He said, “Shut up. Yes, you can.”

Emily:

Jen, you have this extraordinarily unique view into GDS, and it’s such a huge part of the genesis story. Can you tell us more about how you got to know them and how they influenced your perspective? 

Jen:

Getting to know them can be summed up in two points. One: In 2011, when Code for America was quite young and in our first year of the fellowship, we got a random email that a minister from the UK was coming to town and wanted to meet. Our one conference room had a repurposed garage door and broken IKEA chairs. How were we going to host a minister from the UK? 

It wasn’t just the minister, Francis Maude – who was also a total hero, by the way, and a Tory — who showed up for this meeting. There was this guy, Mike Bracken, from the other party, but they were working very closely together. Mike was his normal, slightly mumbly self. So you have this tall, very put-together minister and this sweet but sort of grumpy guy who’s mumbling and funny. It was great. 

Anyway, they came in for this meeting. They had decided to take Francis Maude on a tour of Silicon Valley companies. They left saying, “We’ll talk to you in the future” and gave me a very brief idea of what it was they were trying to do. I thought, “That’s cool, but I will never hear from these guys again.” In 2012, we were asked to attend an event in the UK and Mike reached back out. He said, “I hear you and your husband are going to be here. We would love to host you.” We said, “That sounds lovely.” 

They had my husband Tim on a panel with Mike about government as a platform. In the afternoon, we visited the GDS office, and I cannot tell you how crazy it felt. It was electric. You take this little elevator up. As you get off the elevator, there’s all this signage signaling something very different from a normal government office. Then you walk into this little waiting room and there’s a big red wall that reads, “Trust, Users, Delivery.” When I was waiting to go in I received an email from Todd. I thought, “I can’t respond to that right now.” 

When you walk into the office, it’s like no government tech office you have ever seen. They had what they called the “Wall of Done.” They were working on gov.uk at the time, taking some enormous number of fragmented, unclear, gobbledygook government websites and simplifying the language. Taking out all of the stuff that’s about government instead of users. The energy was just amazing, an office buzzing. You’d see somebody get up, go over to one of the walls, pick off a sticky note, and stick it on the Wall of Done. You could see in real time as people were making progress from something that was crappy to something that was good.

At that time, I got so much grief about Code for America. Folks would say to me, “Great tech talent will never work in government.” But when you walked into this place, it was 250 of the best tech talent in the UK. In my mind, the Overton window just swung way off to the other side. This is what could happen. 

The GDS office had the piece of butcher paper stuck to the window with the middle torn out. When you looked out through the little hole, you saw people on the street. Someone wrote “users” and an arrow pointing to the view hole as a reminder of who all this work is for. You had an office that was just so clearly focused on serving people, serving user needs, instead of government needs. It was right around the time that GDS put out the original design principles, the first of which was “start with needs,” but with an asterisk. The asterisk at the bottom of the 26 principles read, “User needs, not government needs.” This office was actually doing that. It was one of the moments I will never forget.

Kathy:

The physical space matters. 

Emily:

Is there anything in particular about GDS that shaped the way you thought about USDS?

Jen:

They are very good at keeping things simple. That’s why I keep going back to Mike’s line, “It’s not complicated. It’s just hard.” We make things much more complicated than they need to be. That was one of the frustrating things for me that year: All the documents and artifacts we created were really wordy at first. That’s why I fought so hard to make the principles (what became the USDS playbook) short and simple. (There’s a story in my book about the fight to reduce it from a seventy page document.) The GDS team had this incredible ability to say things in plain language and insisted that that mattered. But it’s not just the plain language. It’s the reminder that we make everything harder than it needs to be and that you don’t need to buy into that. The important thing is, “Can users use this service? Does it make them feel respected?” 

Emily:

Why in the UK could they elevate that simplicity, yet it was so hard in the U.S. system?

Jen:

It’s not that the UK system embraced GDS. It fought GDS with every ounce of effort it could. It happened to have Francis Maude saying, “Nope, Mike’s right,” over and over again. So it’s not just the U.S. It’s government in general. If you want users to be the thing that we’re working for, you have to fight, always.

Emily:

Do you think USDS did that successfully?

Jen:

It’s true that we – and I mean “we” in a broad sense here, like the U.S., UK, and individual states – have learned to be more focused on priorities. More able to pull back to what’s important without showing disrespect to public servants who have other goals. That balance, again, is not complicated, just really hard. If you want to criticize the early approach that GDS took, it was that they broke a lot of glass and they made enemies. There was no way for them to succeed without doing that at the time, but each successive effort can be a little bit less disruptive. Mike’s attitude was, “You have to break glass.” And Todd’s attitude was, “Let’s not break as much glass.” They’re both right in a certain sense.

There have been teams at USDS and 18F that struggled to keep the important things central. Not by their own fault, but because they had to work through existing infrastructure that didn’t value that. You’re going for good enough to do it again, and then good enough to do it again. You just want more chances at bat. One team steps up to the plate and knocks it out of the park, and that gives another team a chance to do it again.

Kathy:

There’s so many stories like that from the last 10 years. But there are also so many pre-USDS stories  that paved the way to do that, too.

Emily:

Having seen how USDS went from concept to reality, are there any turning points or milestones that stand out?

Jen:

On October 1, HealthCare.gov launches and sputters. I‘m back in California. The government shutdown happens, Todd’s team is furloughed, and we’re not allowed to talk to each other. We’ve been told that if we use our BlackBerrys or our laptops, we will be violating the Antideficiency Act.

Meanwhile, the Code for America Summit is happening. Mike is the closing keynote of the summit, and the applause won’t stop. I’m backstage listening to his talk. It’s electric. People are so inspired. While I’m waiting backstage, the government comes back online. Dan Tangherlini calls me seven times. I finally got away and called Dan back. He tells me that the budget for what we were calling “Project X” has been zeroed out and we are back at square one. 

I was demoralized. The original plan was to go from California to D.C., where I had set up a meeting with the deputy secretaries of the agencies. The idea was that Mike would sell the idea of GDS in America to them, and that’s how we’d get support for the new project (what became USDS). But all those meetings were canceled because it was now the first full day of the government being back online. But my husband got Ezra Klein to interview Mike and it ended up on the front page of Bloomberg. Ezra basically wrote, “This thing that would have stopped the failure of HealthCare.gov exists in the UK. It’s called the GDS.” 

Nobody said anything for a week, and it felt like the plan was stalled. I was back in D.C. reworking the USDS deck and feeling hopeless. I thought, “I don’t know why I’m here. I have left my child back in California for nothing…I’m utterly failing to make this happen.” Even with the failure of HealthCare.gov, the work was going at a snail’s pace. It was not a priority. Most people in the White House seemed to think that this was a crazy, stupid idea and really didn’t want to see it happen. I thought, “I am sitting here in a foxhole with no ammo.”

A week later, I’m waiting in Steve VanRoekel’s office for yet another appointment. He walks in from another meeting and he’s white in the face. He looks at me and he says, “POTUS read that article. We need that deck.”

That moment was a turning point. I was like, “Game on. Maybe I won’t go home tomorrow.”

Kathy:

It shows that no work is wasted. It might feel that way, but sometimes you’re just chugging along and your thing is ready at the right moment. Our last question: Jen, what are some of the things you’re most proud of? 

Jen:

I think the only thing I’m proud of is that I didn’t just give up and go home. In a certain sense, I didn’t have the right skills for this job. Most of the time I felt like I was failing. But people like Mike and of course Todd wouldn’t let me give up.

But the biggest reason I didn’t leave was Haley Van Dyck. I don’t think Haley gets the credit she should. She fought like hell. If it had not been for her, I probably would have ignored Mike. I would’ve given up at some point. People don’t realize how much USDS exists because of her. It’s not just that she kept me going. It’s that she was there before I got there, and she stayed after I left. And like I said, she fought for it every step of the way.