The religious and reverent tone of this article gives away the true purpose for this initiative. Power. Make no mistake, those pushing this project are Machiav

The religious and reverent tone of this article gives away the true purpose for this initiative. Power. Make no mistake, those pushing this project are Machiavellians of the highest order. They did not spend their entire lives playing the political game and manipulating their way to the top in order to "do good" and "change government". If they truly wanted to "do good" they could very easily accomplish huge strides with a single stroke of a pen, yet this fails to happen day in and day out. Furthermore the very idea that those who control the machinations of government would want to change that system is ludicrous on face, and requires significant cognitive dissonance to believe. This is about leverage. Before the Snowden revelations the government had most of the tech companies comfortably in their pocket with no real downside to those companies. Those revelations have forced companies to choose between consumers and the government, a choice that seems to be slightly leaning towards consumers recently (rollouts of security features, encryption by default). Regardless of the vast abilities of the NSA, they still rely on Silicon Valley for an absurd percentage of their intelligence gathering. This scares the Washington elite (please note this elite is not constrained by political party), and so they go after the cornerstone of Silicon Valley's own power base. Talent. This is a warning shot, a demonstration that a 45 minute meeting with the president is sufficient to fully co-opt some of the best and brightest SV has to offer. Let's be real here. If the President really cared about the VA he wouldn't have waited until he was a lame duck to spearhead some website when the reality is the VA is woefully underfunded and highly dysfunctional as an organization from structure to implementation. No javascript front end will change those things. This lip service to building better systems to "help people" is a poor mask over the fact that they would control the people who designed and built that very system, and thus, control the system. He who has the power to destroy has the ultimate power. Everyone on this website knows Google is one of the most powerful companies on earth because of their talent. Everyone knows that startups die when the lead engineer gets poached. You don't take talent from Google to not compete with them... this is just war games on a much more abstracted level.