Last year it has been painful for many volunteer technology soldiers called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The group’s former coders, designers, and UX experts watched in shock as Donald Trump renamed the agency DOGE, furloughed its staff, and used a strike force of petty and disaffected engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of cracking down on fraud. But one aspect of Trump’s initiative sparked the envy of tech revolutionaries: the Trump administration’s fearlessness of the growing generation of cruft and inertia in government services. What if government leaders used that determination and energy to serve the people instead of following the dim agenda of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?
A small but powerful team is proposing to answer that question directly, working on a solution they hope to implement during the next Democratic administration. The program is called Tech Viaduct, and its goal is to create a comprehensive plan to reinvent how the US delivers services to its citizens. Viaduct’s team of experienced federal tech officials is in the process of cooking up details on how to remake the government, with the goal of producing initial recommendations in the spring. In 2029, if the Democrat wins, he hopes to have his plan accepted by the White House.
Tech Viaduct’s advisory panel includes former Obama official and Biden Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough; Biden’s deputy CTO Alexander Macgillivray; Marina Nitze, former CTO of VA; and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook. But what draws the most attention is its senior advisor and spiritual leader, Mike Dickerson, a former Google engineer who was the first leader of USDS. His hands-off attitude and raw hatred of administration embody the spirit of Obama’s technological progress. No one is more familiar with how government technology services are failing American citizens than Dickerson. And no one is more disgusted by the different ways they fell.
Dickerson himself launched the Viaduct project last April. He was packing up the contents of his DC-area apartment to move far away from the political scrum (to an abandoned observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet with Mook. When the two met, they complained about DOGE’s move but agreed that the momentum to dismantle the dysfunctional system and start over was good. “The basic idea is that it’s very difficult to do things,” Dickerson said. “They’re not wrong about that.” He admits that the Democrats have blown a big opportunity. “What will that look like?”
Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called to say he was getting funding from the Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank dedicated to novel policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A Searchlight spokesperson says the think tank budgeted $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, as Al Pacino in Father IIIhe was sent back. Ironically, it was Trump’s way of condemning government negligence that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were hit hard, with 200 people running around trying to develop websites,” he said. “Trump has hit every beehive—the beltway criminals, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex.”
The Tech Viaduct has two purposes. The first is to produce a master plan to remake public services—establish a fair procurement process, create a merit-based hiring process, and ensure oversight to ensure things don’t go wrong. (Welcome back, inspector generals!) The idea is to design executive orders ready to sign and legislative documents that will guide the hiring strategy for a revamped civil service. In the next few months, the group plans to design and test a framework that could be implemented as soon as 2029, without the creation of a deal to kill momentum. In Viaduct’s view that consensus will be achieved before the election. “Thinking of bright ideas will be the easy part,” Dickerson said. “Since we are going to work hard for the next three to six months, we will have to spend another two to three years, during the primary season and the election, representing as if we are a mobilizing party.”
