This conversation is part of the Shorenstein Center’s explanatory series Unlocked: How Government Works.
You can also watch or listen to Mina Hsiang and Nancy Gibbs’ conversation.
Nancy Gibbs:
We are talking today about how government works, specifically how to make it work better and more efficiently. And my guest is Mina Hsiang who is most recently the administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, which was a mighty force of technologists, designers, product managers, established about 10 years ago, and maybe largely unknown compared to how well known it is now since it changed its name to the Department of Government Efficiency. So I actually want to start there. What’s in the name? U.S. Digital Service was about service as opposed to efficiency. So does that make a difference or how do those two things play off of each other?
Mina Hsiang:
So lovely to be here and that is such a great opening question. How I think about it is a business or any organization has objectives of what you’re actually trying to achieve from an outcomes perspective. And there’s how you do it. And I think of the outcome objectives as why you start the thing and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. So government agencies, Social Security is here to fulfill our collective social promise to each other that we will support older Americans. And then how efficiently you are able to execute against that mission is just sort of how you operationalize it. And so nobody starts a company and says, “What I’m going to do is I’m going to be efficient.” That’s like I was a VC
Nancy Gibbs:
It’s a means to an end.
Mina Hsiang:
It’s a means to an end, exactly. It’s an optimization around a specific objective. There are companies that deliver healthcare, you want to do it efficiently. And so efficiency is just sort of a little bit operating on the margins of trying to optimize the thing that you’re doing. And it’s incredibly important and I think there is a real reason why it has a lot of [inaudible 00:02:14] in the current moment, but at the end of the day, government is here to fulfill our societal obligations to each other and to provide services to individuals and to make those services simpler and more intuitive for people to access and so that it’s towards something instead of sort of how do you just optimize what route you’re taking. And so to me that feels much more along the point of why government exists in the first place.
Nancy Gibbs:
So some of the examples, when you were leading USDS, mobile app for veterans so that they could access benefits, making filing your taxes easier, making sure Medicare payments got paid, were all of these basically leveraging technology to streamline the delivery of services or how did you think about where USDS had its specific mission to make government work better?
Mina Hsiang:
Everything in the modern world relies deeply on technology, whether that’s to run the back office, to interact with your customers, nobody in any organization in any company tries to run it without any technology now. And so it’s kind of the infrastructure and the core underpinning of everything. And government actually, a long time ago, so in the seventies and eighties, had a lot of people who were good at building and managing technology and over the last 30 years actually lost a lot of those capabilities as part of the effort towards privatization and moving everything, this sentiment publicly, that became very popular that the private sector always does it better so we should just outsource everything. And so government really lost the capabilities as a core capability to say we can manage the technology that underlies all of our primary business processes.
Nancy Gibbs:
So wait, so just when every private organization was moving to be more and more incorporating and innovating around new technologies, the government was doing that less?
Mina Hsiang:
Yes. I mean in their core, absolutely. I think it’s more … maybe it’s more complicated.
Nancy Gibbs:
It’s always more complicated.
Mina Hsiang:
Yeah, exactly. There’s this question about whether government was still doing it but they were doing it in all these private companies they were contracting innovation out to. But no company says, “Oh, we’re just going to outsource everything about our core functions.” So ultimately if you consider building internal leadership capability and internal knowledge about how to use technology, manage operations using technology, absolutely government was at that very moment when everyone else was investing in it, divesting in it.
Nancy Gibbs:
Is it hard to make government more efficient or specifically obstacles to that?
Mina Hsiang:
I love that question. I have every possible answer to that. It is easy to make it more efficient in some ways because it is inefficient in many ways and so you can make lots of incremental improvements. But I think there are a lot of structural things that make it hard to change quickly.
Nancy Gibbs:
And is that cultural? Is that bureaucratic? Is it political? Is it about institutional? Where does the resistance come from? Because presumably everyone wants to provide better services and spend less money doing it and do it more quickly and efficiently and effectively. Who could be against that?
Mina Hsiang:
We pay a lot of lip service to wanting those things, but most of the structural incentives that get built up over time in government push you in a direction that is towards less efficiency.
Nancy Gibbs:
Like what?
Mina Hsiang:
So a simple and obvious one, federal budgeting is an extremely inefficient process. So you get a budget for one year, you have no degree of certainty about what your budget will look like next year. And so your ability to make strategic investments … In a company, you have projections of revenue, but you’re betting based on your own knowledge. It’s not at the whims of this very ultimately, often surprising political process and horse-trading. If you save money in one year, Congress takes away that money. So if you say, “Okay, I want to make an investment and I think I can save money now to build a more efficient system,” Congress doesn’t say, “Oh, this year’s dollars you saved so next year you get double those dollars so that you can make an investment in building efficiency.” So every time you make something more efficient, you’re penalized for it. 100%.
Nancy Gibbs:
Something you did, I’m sure, all the time when you’re working in the private sector-
Mina Hsiang:
Totally.
Nancy Gibbs:
… Of assessing priorities and reallocating assets, is a liability to do that in government,
Mina Hsiang:
Correct. So that’s a huge one, your people’s incentives to take risks that might yield outside. So all of your incentives are sort of to minimize negative consequences. And so trying to do something new can get you in trouble and almost never gets you recognition, glory, and definitely doesn’t get you a raise or a promotion. And this operates at many different levels in thousands and thousands of interactions all the time. So there’s just a lot of incentives to try and avoid doing anything that might put you at risk, risk avoidance. That plays out a lot in hiring. So it’s incredibly hard to hire someone. Let me rephrase that. It is totally possible and actually pretty straightforward to hire someone if you have leadership that decides that that’s a priority and clarity about what you’re looking for. But if you use a very … So bureaucracies are sort of designed to try and get rid of all of the things that make each of us individual people and just automate a lot of things.
And a lot of times that incentivizes people to do the least risky thing. And so hiring, you can do it kind of the same way you would do it in the private sector, but by and large most parts of government don’t. And because there isn’t a promotion schedule that’s related to doing great things, there ends up being some real challenges in terms of human capital and it’s really hard to bring in people and retain people who have expertise in building tight and streamlined operations because they don’t have great incentives to stay. They can get paid a lot more other places. And so it’s incredibly important work. But it ends up … So your hiring process, sorry, I was not being super clear about what specifically the issues are. So frequently agencies try to make sure that they do not have any liabilities in their hiring process and you can, like I said, run a regular private sector hiring process pretty much. But there are a few key differences. One is you get extraordinarily large numbers of applicants for a lot of posts-
Nancy Gibbs:
That suggests there are a lot of people who are interested in working in government.
Mina Hsiang:
Yes. Both yes and it suggests that there’s a little bit of spray and pray that happens and cutting and pasting. But I think there’s a lot of people who are interested in government and instead of at a company you would have someone who is highly knowledgeable about the job you’re hiring for, evaluating all of those applications and pulling in people for interviews. You can do that in government, but by and large, there’s this agency called the Office of Personnel Management, which is like a hiring compliance office in a company. So it’s not their job to hire for you. They will tell you if you’ve done something wrong and they set the policies and procedures, but ultimately your department has authority to decide what you actually want to do and within legal policies and procedures and then it’s their job to make sure that you’re doing it correctly.
Unlike a company, they don’t report to the chairman of the board or to the CEO, there aren’t the same incentives to make sure that we can accomplish the work that needs to be done. And within the agency there’s an HR department that decides your internal policies and procedures and they’re always worried that this compliance org, OPM, is going to come and yell at them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. And so many agencies follow weirdly onerous policies. So for example, most agencies when they get thousands and thousands of applications, the people who look at those applications are not specialists at all. They’re HR professionals, very broad-based. And they go through and the way that they evaluate in order to never be in trouble is they look at the job description and they look at the resume and they do a keyword search.
And so if you cut and paste the entire job description into your resume, you’ll probably get selected to be interviewed. You’ll make it to the first panel because that’s the process. And if you’re a normal person who has applied for jobs in the past, you’ll obviously not do that, and very likely you’ll fall out of the process so it doesn’t look … So government resumes are like 10 pages long and they need all sorts of keywords. And so that is one step in the process where you’re hurting yourself. Plus these people are reviewing thousands and thousands of resumes with very low knowledge. And so that takes a really long time. Then you do a down select where probably in most agencies, some people who are not specialists also, more HR professionals, do the first round of evaluations to get it down to a final cut that is what the hiring manager might get to do as a resume.
Nancy Gibbs:
Those who haven’t already gone and taken another job while waiting for that process [inaudible 00:13:06].
Mina Hsiang:
So all of this can take 180 days at a minimum, at which point anyone who’s applying for a job who is competitive in the marketplace is like, this was a really good idea and a thing I wanted to do, but now I don’t. I mean I have to feed my kids. And so they can’t take the job. And you get down to your down select where you get your list of 10 people and many hiring managers get that list and it’s so not at all the people that they wanted. Many of the people you know are applying for the job. So it’s not the right group of people. And so a lot of hiring actions then just get canceled and you start all over again. And it’s not like you can go dig through all the different down select levels and figure out where you went wrong. It’s just easier to start over.
Nancy Gibbs:
So listening to you, it makes me think that a new administration coming in with a radically different way of thinking about hiring and deploying and providing the political air cover to not put risk management as their top priority, is a necessary corrective.
Mina Hsiang:
I think it’s a tremendous opportunity and yes, I agree. I mean I think that is a thing that is sorely needed.
Nancy Gibbs:
So what is the trade off then? So one of the things that we have been hearing a lot in recent weeks is about less experienced people coming in and having access to very sensitive data, who do not have training in managing sensitive data in the systems that control sensitive data. And so there are massive privacy implications for citizens about whom the government knows an enormous amount. Is that a problem?
Mina Hsiang:
Probably, I mean, what are the trade-offs? So to answer your specific near-term question, I do think, I mean we have a social contract about how government should use and protect our data. We may think it needs an update. I happen to think it does need an update. It is mostly governed by the Privacy Act of 1974, which largely hasn’t been updated since 1974.
Nancy Gibbs:
A lot has changed.
Mina Hsiang:
A couple of things have changed yeah, but I think one of the big trade-offs and one of the challenges in the current moment is there’s a question of how we do things, how efficiently we accomplish things, whether we bring in people who have expertise in doing those things and what we should even be doing. And I think at the moment they’re kind of getting conflated and mixed together. Efficiency is largely just about the how. And I think if it takes a lot of political will and capital to change the how, but then you have to really bring in folks who are both committed to the actual what the social contracts that we’ve all agreed on.
And I don’t know that we all feel that that is the playbook that’s being followed right now, but I think you want to be very clear on what you’re trying to accomplish and sort of transparent about that and then work on the how and for sure the people that can lead the work on the how need to have a lot of expertise in accomplishing those things. And I don’t see that either. But I think there’s a huge opportunity if you bring in the right set of people to take that on.
Nancy Gibbs:
So what would it look like to marry, let’s say, a commitment to focusing on service and fulfilling that social contract and doing it in a way that is not allowing the weight of bureaucracy or cultural resistance or risk aversion to be an impediment? If you brought those two things together, what would that look like?
Mina Hsiang:
That is a amazing question. I think I’ve seen glimpses of it in work that we have had the opportunity to do.
Nancy Gibbs:
So give me an example.
Mina Hsiang:
But it’s not like the whole agency all at once and a lot of pieces of it still aren’t there. So we’ve had the opportunity to run certain programs in that way. For example, at the VA, you talked about the mobile app, we, USDS, has been working at the VA for over 10 years now.
Nancy Gibbs:
And famously the VA had systems that did not talk to each other of your healthcare system, your benefits system.
Mina Hsiang:
They didn’t talk to the DOD systems. Absolutely. And even just different pieces of your benefits didn’t talk to each other. And so we started working at the VA in a moment of crisis, which is often the time that you can really catalyze change. So there was a lot of news about veterans being unable to get appointments and being on long waiting lists, A lot of very real challenges. Trust in the agency was very low. And the secretary who came in at that time [inaudible 00:18:24] secretary Bob, and he had been the CEO of, I think, Procter & Gamble, experienced credible, understands how to align an organization and drive operations against outcome objectives. And we put a team in place there who worked very closely with Bob and his deputy secretary Sloan, who was also a very strong leader and had a lot of experience in leading organizations.
And by the way, P&G is an incredibly data-driven and technologically-enabled organization. And I think that is a key piece of this that is frequently missing is strong leadership that really understands how modern organizations have to run. And so we, over the course of a decade, started with small wins and first fixed a piece of the benefit system and understood more about where things were broken, did a lot of user research, then maybe a year and a half in launched a website called vets.gov. So there was va.gov, which was a website that, in theory, if you were a veteran you might go to handle any of these things that we’re talking about. But mostly what it said was like “Here is the secretary and here’s what Congress says.” And it was like a meet the VA, which is not really what anyone needs.
And so vets.gov was like reorienting around being a transactional website and saying, “You’re a vet, what do you need? What can we do for you?” And first we launched it as this other website so that we wouldn’t totally subsume and take over everything and freak everyone out. And that was alive for a few years and it started out with ability to manage your benefits online and being able to check on things. Over the years it expanded and then a few years after that, actually during the first Trump administration, that team basically took over va.gov and became the main website.
And so you don’t change anything all at once in building and optimizing and improving an organization, but it requires sustained commitment. And over time doing that, they had to go to many, many teams across the VA and work with them to say, “We need to get your stuff integrated with this. It’s not just about the front door, it’s integrating the business processes.”
A lot of the forms at the VA were these fillable PDFs. That is a really bad experience. It doesn’t work on the computers that most people end up wanting to use. There’s lots of problems. So they came up with a form builder that allowed different departments to build a better form. They supported them, they integrated the back ends, they launched va.gov, the main website, much higher user satisfaction, much higher transaction rates, takes load off the call center because it’s easy for people to in-person services because it’s easier to figure out how to check on their claims. And then that continued moving. So ultimately decided to build the team over there, ultimately decided to build an app. Throughout all of this, one of the key other things is that they actually hired a team inside the agency.
So the VA has an office of the CTO. The CTO is a former USDSer, and he now has a team of about 150 people who are running and building all of these different technological platforms, capabilities, managing contracts to do all these things. And he has a lot of contractors. And like I was saying before, this outsourcing, the way the budgets are structured, he would actually, and the VA’s internal technical team would prefer to have more internal staff and fewer contractors, but OMB doesn’t support that, your incentives around to this, you get scored based on your budget request and OMB scoring favors-
Nancy Gibbs:
Favors contracts.
Mina Hsiang:
… Outsourcing things versus long-term costs, which are how they perceive people. So there’s lots of reasons that they don’t have more internal people, they just have more contracts. But they have a very strong and very large internal team that is strategically aligned with agency leadership. I don’t know about right at this moment, but over the past 10 years has worked very closely with agency leadership to deliver better services for veterans. And that requires the secretary being on board, that requires a strong leader both in the CIO and in the CTO, staying for a long time and continuing to have a vision for slowly, continually improving things.
Nancy Gibbs:
Do you feel-
Mina Hsiang:
But they still are fighting through lots of other … I was talking about the perverse incentives in lots of different ways. And you constantly have oversight from GAO, oversight from the Hill, oversight from OMB. There’s a lot of people who are trying to tell you that you’re doing something wrong and who don’t have the incentives to help understand how to make it better and who aren’t aligned with your outcomes necessarily. And so I just think it is a really challenging job for someone, having been led large tech teams and operations teams in the private sector and in government, it is materially harder in government because there are so many pieces of government that are constantly interacting with you with a little bit of a no bias instead of a yes bias. And not a how do we do it bias, but a, mmm… are you doing that right?
Nancy Gibbs:
Am I right that early, one of your first tasks was as part of the rescue team for healthcare.gov. So I think of healthcare.gov is one of the first times that the general public encountered an effort by the government to build technology that would provide a service, and it was a catastrophic fiasco. And so a bunch of brilliant technologists are brought in to save the day. Everyone heard what went wrong with healthcare.gov. It feels like when something is done well-
Mina Hsiang:
What did they hear?
Nancy Gibbs:
That it initially didn’t work.
Mina Hsiang:
Oh yeah.
Nancy Gibbs:
Fast-forward to, we want to make it easy for people to get free COVID tests at home, and that experience, as I recall it, it was effortless, seamless, intuitive, just two clicks you’re done. I don’t feel like one heard or read a lot about how, oh, here was a deployment of technology in the interest of public health that went really seamlessly. Does government do a terrible job of explaining what it does and how it does it?
Mina Hsiang:
For sure. For sure, government doesn’t do a great job of talking to people in a normal way in this, but I think our entire … I mean I’m very interested in your perspective on this. This is your expertise, but I feel like our entire societal conversation, we’ve kind of lost the way on talking about government in general. Somewhere along the way, government went from this key organizing feature for how we uphold our social contracts and decide what we all should do together and-
Nancy Gibbs:
Or defend truth, justice, the American Way and democracy at home and abroad.
Mina Hsiang:
I mean, yeah, we have gone to war, but also it maintains the roads. It makes sure that every American, our toilets are filled with clean water that you could drink. We have incredible services that it enables and we no longer personally experience or feel a lot of that in a day-to-day way. And I think a lot the conversation, and I don’t know why, this comes from the media, this comes from congressional, the way Congress and people running, politicians running, but the whole conversation is very biased towards how do we poke holes and find out the things that aren’t going well.
Nancy Gibbs:
Because it’s always fraud and abuse.
Mina Hsiang:
I think that is more recent, but I’m not sure. But I do see, I think there are many, I did this for a decade. There are many really big problems with how government works and operates, but how we experience that challenge is weird to me, is interesting. I recently went back and watched the 60 Minutes piece on Social Security overpayments and Social Security does overpay a lot of people and it’s a terrible experience for those people. So basically what ends up happening is either people don’t make all the updates to their account that they should or they make those updates, but they go at paper and somebody at Social Security doesn’t make the updates and ultimately they get overpaid and then somebody observes this and then they get a bill and are told that they have to pay back. And that’s a terrible life-wrecking experience.
But I think the way we experience it, if you watch people, it’s like the same as when a health insurance company is denying something that you need or back-bills you for something. And we think about it like companies, but nobody at Social Security is making money. Their profits aren’t enhanced by clawing back this money. In some way the conversation should be like, okay, we’re totally failing to uphold this contract that we’ve all agreed on it. It’s a solvable problem. We can make the accounts easier to manage. There’s a lot of opportunity here, but that’s not the conversation that we have. It becomes this confrontational thing where people feel like there isn’t a person on that side and we feel like there isn’t a person on this side.
And so I do think that there’s … I’m not sure if it’s because we’re so used to interacting with companies or becomes things have become very impersonal about it. But I think that the way people experience it and the way politicians frame it isn’t like we’re trying to do the thing that we’ve all agreed is an important thing to do and we’re not doing it as well as we should be, so let’s talk about how we fix that. It’s just a confrontational conversation.
Nancy Gibbs:
I mean, we’re about to learn in real time with probably a vertical learning curve, of what happens if the Social Security administration isn’t answering its phones or the IRS, and if cancer trials are suspended and if disabled kids access to education is curtailed and if immigration enforcement doesn’t follow due process, these are all government functions that are in the midst of what seems like a historic upheaval, which makes me wonder, whatever comes next, it feels like no matter what, it will be very different from the government that you were operating in with the incentives and assumptions, obstacles and opportunities that you were operating in. Do you think there’s no going back?
Mina Hsiang:
I think that’s quite likely. I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do think, to your point, focusing most on the outcomes would behoove us all. I think getting tangled in the weeds of the palace intrigue is not what I think is the most important. And I think that it would’ve suited us under an administration to focus more on the outcomes. How are we doing on all of the things that we think the public needs? And if we’re not accomplishing those things, what can we do about it?
Nancy Gibbs:
So given the fact that it feels like we’re in a place we’ve never been before, it’s no one’s fault that there’s a lot that’s hard to understand and impossible to predict. Having said that, what is it that as you are watching the coverage, reading the news every day, that you see is most consistently being misunderstood?
Mina Hsiang:
That’s a great question. Okay, things that are misunderstood. A very simple one is they have fired a lot of people who are in their probationary period, which for anyone who’s had a normal job, a private sector job, you’re on probation, it means you did something wrong. In government, it is really hard to … You don’t have the same tools that you have in that private sector to move people around. And one of the things that government has put in place is this probationary period, which is basically the first year or two years that you’re in a job, you’re in a probationary period, which means-
Nancy Gibbs:
So if you’re a new hire or if you’ve been promoted into a new role?
Mina Hsiang:
If you’re a new hire, it depends a little bit, I don’t know exactly how it works with promotions, you may know actually, wouldn’t promote a ton of people, or if you’ve moved from one agency to another, you can be put into a probationary period. And so it’s basically just new people. And so if you think, we spent a ton of time in the last two to three years, we spent a lot of time in the last four years, working with agencies to improve services. And after we made a couple steps in the right direction, helped them see how having great private sector technical people could really help them, we then convinced them to start hiring their own. And then they hired a bunch of those people, all of whom were in their probationary period. Because it was like, okay, if you continue to work on something, then you’ll move in that direction.
And so they just fired all the new people. They didn’t fire people who were doing anything wrong. They fired all the people who have recently moved into a new role or come in from the private sector. So they got rid of a lot of, so I think that maybe people understand, maybe not, I think there is not yet enough following the thread of how these upstream activities affect normal people. So you talked about the vertical learning curve, and I think that’s right, but I think more investigative reporting that could actually follow the thread to say, and I know it’s been opaque in a lot of circumstances, but to really say, “Okay, what will tying actions in the executive to, okay, what does that mean for a small community that is reliant on-”
Nancy Gibbs:
…the rural hospital.
Mina Hsiang:
State grants, that are reliant on federal grants. So I do think that following the thread and making sure that we’re really talking about a lot of these things will take a little while to play out. And so helping people connect the dots and understand what the downstream implications will be, I think is important now.
Nancy Gibbs is the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Mina Hsiang is the former Administrator (2021-2025) of the U.S. Digital Service. She has been a technology leader in both the private and public sectors.
