Last year was traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called United States Digital Service (USDS). The team’s former developers, designers, and UX experts watched in horror as Donald Trump renamed the service DOGE, effectively forced out its staff, and hired a strike force of juvenile and reckless engineers to take down government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of Trump’s initiative has made tech reformers envious: the Trump administration’s fearlessness in the face of upending inaction and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used this determination and strength to serve the people, instead of following the dim agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE master Elon Musk?
A diminutive but influential team is proposing an answer to that question, working on a solution they hope to implement during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Technological Viaductand its goal is to create a complete plan to restart the way the United States delivers services to its citizens. Viaduct’s cadre of experienced federal technology officials is in the process of developing details of the government overhaul, with initial recommendations expected to be issued in the spring. By 2029, if the Democrat wins, he hopes his plan will be adopted by the White House.
Technological Viaduct advisory panel includes former Obama chief of staff and Biden Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough; Biden’s deputy chief technology officer, Alexander Macgillivray; Marina Nitze, former VA CTO; and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. But what gets the most attention is senior advisor and spiritual leader Mikey Dickerson, the grumpy former Google engineer who was the first leader of the USDS. His practical ethic and unfiltered distaste for bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama’s technological surge. No one is more familiar with how government technology services are failing American citizens than Dickerson. And no one is more disgusted by the various ways in which they have been at fault.
Sam Dickerson unknowingly launched the viaduct project last April. He was packing up the contents of his Washington apartment to move as far away from the political noise as possible (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet with Mook. When the two met, they lamented the DOGE initiative, but agreed that the impulse to destroy the dysfunctional system and start over was a good one. “The basic idea is that certain tasks are too difficult to complete,” Dickerson says. “They’re not wrong about that.” He Admits Democrats Wasted a Huge Opportunity “For 10 years, we had small victories here and there, but we never downgraded the entire ecosystem,” Dickerson says. “What would that look like?”
A few months later, Dickerson was surprised when Mook called him and said he had found the funding Searchlight Institutea liberal think tank dedicated to creative policy initiatives to bring this idea to life. (A Searchlight spokesman says the advisory team has budgeted $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, like Al Pacino in The Godfather IIIwas he pulled it back in. Ironically, it was Trump’s reckless approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were seriously outgunned. We had 200 people trying to improve websites,” he says. “Trump has knocked down all the hives – the Beltway thugs, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex.”
The Tech Viaduct has two purposes. The first is to develop an overall plan to overhaul government services—establishing an impartial procurement process, creating a merit-based hiring process, and providing oversight to make sure things don’t go wrong. (Welcome back, inspectors general!) The idea is to develop ready-to-sign executive regulations and legislative projects that will determine the recruitment strategy for the revitalized civil service. Over the next few months, the group plans to develop and test a framework that can be implemented immediately in 2029, without building consensus that kills momentum. In Viaduct’s vision, this consensus will be reached before the elections. “Coming up with brilliant ideas will be the easy part,” Dickerson says. “No matter how hard we work in the next three to six months, we will have to spend the next two to three years, during the primary season and elections, advocating as if we were a lobbying group.”