I want to tell you about the thing I’m most proud of helping build during my public service, the thing that made the most difference in the lives of veterans, their families, and their caregivers, and how DOGE killed it.
I joined the U.S. Digital Service in mid-2023. Shortly after, I was detailed to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where I stayed until DOGE summarily fired me at 8:54pm on Friday, February 14, 2025.
At VA I worked for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer as the Information Security Lead for VA.gov and as Information Security Advisor to the CTO. Everyone I worked with and for at VA considered me a critical asset the team could not afford to lose. This fact was communicated to DOGE on more than one occasion before they decided to fire me anyway, late on a Friday night, without giving anyone in my chain of command at VA a heads-up that it was coming.
USDS helped create the Digital Services team at VA, the team of federal employees who build and maintain VA.gov, with the help of a large staff of contractors. Even after DSVA was up and running, USDS continued to help it by providing staff augmentation, i.e., by detailing USDSers to VA (like me!). Around 15 current USDSers were detailed to VA before January 20, 2025. All of them were talented, dedicated people who believed deeply in the USDS and VA missions and who were filling critical roles at VA.
One of my USDS colleagues at VA was responsible for engineering oversight over the VA Health and Benefits Mobile App, an extremely well-regarded app which provides native-mobile functionality similar to VA.gov. Another was responsible for engineering oversight over the VA.gov platform atop which all the website’s functionality is implemented.
During my time together at VA with those two colleagues, it became clear to the three of us that insufficient architectural oversight was being provided to the teams of contractors building the stuff running on VA.gov. We therefore set out to build, from scratch, a policy and process for providing that oversight. The process we built was straightforward: all teams embarking on new projects for VA.gov were asked to complete a brief questionnaire providing details about the their planned architecture, and then the three of us met with them in a usually brief meeting where we reviewed the questionnaire, asked any necessary clarifying questions, and then flagged any issues they needed to address in their implementation.
Here’s what we found when we rolled out the new process: in around 75% of the projects that went through it, we were flagging significant architecture or security issues that needed to be addressed. Here’s the worrisome logical conclusion to draw from that: around 75% of the projects built before we rolled out the new process had significant architecture or security issues that weren’t caught before release.
The three of us were detailed to VA to do this work because there was no one else with the ability and time. Well, guess what? I was fired on February 14, and my two colleagues are in the group that resigned today in protest over DOGE’s destructive rampage across USDS and the rest of the federal government. So now there is no one left to run the architecture review process which we know for a fact was dramatically improving the quality and security of code added to VA.gov.
I am certain the people who are still there will try to keep the architecture review process going despite our departures. I am equally certain they will not be able to sustain it at the same level of quality; that is, after all, why we three were at VA. The net result will be a significant reduction in the stability, performance, and security of VA.gov.
There are hundreds of stories like this across all the federal agencies that DOGE has “disrupted” by firing hundreds or thousands of people. This is what DOGE is doing: not, as they claim, improving government efficiency, but rather destroying the government’s ability to serve the American people, just to inflate Elon Musk’s ego and give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires.
If that’s not OK with you, what are you doing about it?
