Old reputations are hard to shake. This speech[1], by the first administrator of USDS, is my favorite to quote on the topic: > Some of you, not all of you, are

Old reputations are hard to shake. This speech[1], by the first administrator of USDS, is my favorite to quote on the topic: > Some of you, not all of you, are working right now on another app for people to share pictures of food or a social network for dogs. I am here to tell you that your country has a better use for your talents. [...] > The Social Security Administration mails checks from a mainframe running COBOL, which might kind of be OK except that more than half of the workforce that maintains it is at or near retirement age. What happens then? The Department of Veterans Affairs has a serious backlog of disability claims. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service processes permanent resident applications and everything else on paper. If you lose your green card, it will take you 6–8 months to get a new one and in the meantime you will not be able to prove you have the right to be in the country or get a job. > All of these are design and information processing problems and all of these are matters of life or death to millions of citizens and all of them are things you can fix if you choose to. Think about the response to the hurricane this weekend - that's a government function, and we need talented people serving to make sure that people who lose their homes retain access to shelter. [1]: https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/mikey-dickerson-to-sxsw-why-we-need-you-in-government-f31dab3263a0 https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/mikey-dickerson-t...