We the Builders: Federal Employees Stand Up to DOGE; Plus, Celebrating 100 Years: Michael Cunningham on “Brokeback Mountain”
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What is the significance of We the Builders?
So We the Builders is a way for people who are federal workers to get their message out, to explain what's happening to people who have less access. Like, this is why this matters. This is why this is dangerous. And that idea coalesced along with another idea that we were floating, which was to tell stories directly of federal workers, like a Humans of New York, but for federal workers. And I was like, wait, what? Could we do a platform to explain these things, to share it with the public, share it with reporters, share it with activists to help them to figure out their messaging, what the next steps are? I love the idea of explaining technical concepts to everybody so that it's demystified.
You both worked at USDS, or the US Digital Service, and this has now been co-opted into Doge. I wondered if you could both speak a little bit about what the mandate of that department was when it was originally founded, and in what ways has Doge sort of departed from that?
How did federal workers respond to job losses?
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.
When you're in the private sector and you're rolling a social media app, you can just keep shipping code every five minutes, every 10 minutes. I specialize in helping people do that. But when you're in government, you can't just keep shipping and experimenting directly on people without taking great care. And making that a piece of how the work gets done makes it look slower.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the significance of We the Builders?
2:17–3:20
2
How did federal workers respond to job losses?
3:20–6:15
3
What was the original mandate of the US Digital Service?
6:15–8:15
4
How has Doge changed the US Digital Service's mission?
8:15–13:21
5
What challenges do federal workers face under the current administration?
13:21–20:31
6
Could there be interruptions in government services?
20:31–25:35