Reflections on Mountain Moving: The First Year of USDS
summary
Launched August 2014 and grown from ~130 people to a planned 500–600 with $20M then a $105M request, the team takes on immigration, VA, Social Security and more and focuses on small engineering wins that change throughput. Examples: I-90 online replacement cuts months of paper processing to days, bulk-download PDFs for VA saves minutes per file for ~100 claims processors, and identity management replaced for ~$4M replaces a $200–300M system and lowers ongoing costs.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:10Bureaucracy interaction
- 6:05Real projects and improvements
- 9:38Misconceptions about USDS
- 11:04Future of USDS
- 12:26Working in bureaucracies
- 17:48Tackling societal problems
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