Adam Howard
speaker
179 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Jul
Adam Howard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Patty, thank you so much for taking time to speak to me. I really appreciate it.
So I think initially the mandate was to just go in and fix healthcare.gov because that was when it was created. And there was this kind of notion that USDS was digital firefighters, or you'll sometimes hear people say like digital SWAT team. The idea being that if a project was in trouble, if there was some kind of thing that needed immediate attention from healthcare,
people with a lot of experience in Silicon Valley or in the world of IT outside of government. They could parachute in, work on solving those immediate problems, getting the project back on track. And so like VA, for example, is one of my favorites. When USDS kind of initially started working with them, there was some real challenges with veterans getting the benefits that they're entitled to.
And USDS did a really good job of documenting the challenges that veterans were experiencing and getting some real change to happen within the VA itself. So I think that that was the direction that USDS was heading when Doge arrived.
The folks who are working for the Doge side of USDS are— They called all of the original or existing USDSers into meetings. And they were supposed to be like 15-minute long meetings. And they felt a little bit like an interrogation for the USDS folks, where they were being asked to talk about what work they were doing, why was it important, was it mission critical.
But the real challenge was that the Doge folks who came in did not identify themselves. They didn't explain who they were. They often were wearing—if the meetings were even in person, and some of them were not— the Doge folks were wearing White House visitor badges, but were saying things and acting as if they were the supervisors for USDS folks.
And it felt very confrontational, and it felt very kind of ugly. And The people who work at USDS take great pride in the work that they've done. But it's also really hard to condense something that you've done into 15 minutes or into a few sound bites. Since the Doge folks weren't interested in learning about that complexity. They weren't interested in getting into the details.
They just wanted to have some snappy two or five bullet explanation of this is what I've done in the last couple of weeks. And that's not how USDS has ever operated. We've often said the most good for the most people who need it the most. And when you have that mentality, that sometimes means that you're navigating through multiple different ways to accomplish things.
But it doesn't sound good as a bullet point.
I don't think it's done. I think that it's going to come in waves. There is still talk of a reduction in force, which is sometimes referred to as a rift. So there was talk about executing a RIF at GSA and firing 90% of the people who work there. There's talk about doing the same thing at SSA and firing 50% of the people who work there. So I think that... That's the Social Security Administration.
Yes, yes. I think that people at these agencies still believe there's a strong chance that they are going to be fired. And so to kind of go back to the question of should people stay put, I don't know. I think that people... really are afraid.
I think that people are fearful that any day that they log in, there's going to be an email that says, like, today is the day that your agency, your office, your small team has been swept up in a reduction in force, and you no longer have a job here. And I have heard it happen firsthand to people at agencies. Yeah. Sometimes they come in overnight.
Sometimes they come in first thing in the morning. There's no rhyme or reason. And in many cases, managers don't even know that it's going to happen. They're just learning at the same time as their employees that their whole entire team is being shuttered.
Sure. At this point, I think anything is plausible. There are many systems within not just Social Security, but Medicaid, Medicare, and they are... designed and maintained by dedicated, serious, thoughtful professionals.
But if you are going in and you're just turning things off or you're changing code or even changing data without understanding what is going to happen in the system, then you could very well disrupt the ability for those systems to operate and function. Yeah. Medicare and Medicaid, which we refer to as CMS.
If you look at the CMS systems, if those systems go down for a day, you're already talking about the chance for a recession. So we don't take this kind of stuff lightly, and we never have.
I think that that's probably going to happen. But I think in a lot of cases, both the beauty and the tragedy is that the work the government does is largely invisible. You don't always know that it is USDA inspectors who are working in the slaughterhouses, who are making sure that work is being done in a safe and sanitary fashion. These people are oftentimes highly educated.
They have doctorates in veterinary medicine. If they went into the private sector, they could probably be earning two or three times more. what they get working for USDA, for example, but they give a damn about making sure that food is safe. And so if that goes away, that's not immediately visible to people.
And they don't necessarily know that these people have lost their jobs or that food is going to be less safe until people get hurt or worse. And so we want to make sure that people start to understand what the cuts in these programs actually means.
Sure.
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