The past year has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team’s former coders, designers, and UX experts have watched in horror as Donald Trump rebranded the service as DOGE, effectively forced out its staff, and employed a strike force of young and reckless engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of the Trump initiative triggered envy in tech reformers: the Trump administration’s fearlessness in upending generations of cruft and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used that decisiveness and clout in service of the people instead of following the murky agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?
A small though influential team is proposing to answer that exact question, working on a solution they hope to deploy during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaduct, and its goal is to create a complete plan to reboot how the US delivers services to citizens. The Viaduct cadre of experienced federal tech officials is in the process of cooking up specifics on how to remake the government, aiming to produce initial recommendations by the spring. By 2029, if a Democrat wins, it hopes to have its plan adopted by the White House.
Tech Viaduct’s advisory panel includes former Obama chief of staff and Biden’s secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough; Biden’s deputy CTO Alexander Macgillivray; Marina Nitze, former CTO of the VA; and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. But most attention-grabbing is its senior adviser and spiritual leader, Mikey Dickerson, the crusty former Google engineer who was the first leader of USDS. His hands-on ethic and unfiltered distaste for bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama’s tech surge. No one is more familiar with how government tech services fail American citizens than Dickerson. And no one is more disgusted with the various ways they have fallen short.
Dickerson himself unwittingly put the Viaduct project in motion last April. He was packing up the contents of his DC-area condo to move as far away as possible from the political scrum (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet with Mook. When the two got together, they bemoaned the DOGE initiative but agreed that the impulse to shred the dysfunctional system and start over was a good one. “The basic idea is that it’s too hard to get things done,” says Dickerson. “They’re not wrong about that.” He admits that Democrats had blown a big opportunity “For 10 years we’ve had tiny wins here and there but never terraformed the whole ecosystem,” Dickerson says. “What would that look like?”
Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called him to say he found funding from Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank devoted to novel policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A Searchlight spokesperson says that the think tank is budgeting $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, like Al Pacino in Godfather III, was pulled back in. Ironically, it was Trump’s reckless-abandon approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were severely outgunned, 200 people running around trying to improve websites,” he says. “Trump has knocked over all the beehives—the beltway bandits, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex.”
Tech Viaduct has two aims. The first is to produce a master plan to remake government services—establishing an unbiased procurement process, creating a merit-based hiring process, and assuring oversight to make sure things don’t go awry. (Welcome back, inspector generals!) The idea is to design signature-ready executive orders and legislative drafts that will guide the recruiting strategy for a revitalized civil service. In the next few months, the group plans to devise and test a framework that could be executed immediately in 2029, without any momentum-killing consensus building. In Viaduct’s vision that consensus will be achieved before the election. “Thinking up bright ideas is going to be the easy part,“ Dickerson says. “As hard as we’re going to work in the next three to six months, we’re going to have to spend another two to three years, through a primary season and through an election, advocating as if we were a lobbying group.”
The group’s second aim is to roll back what it regards as the damage of the Trump administration. “There needs to be a task force to triage and figure out what has been done” by DOGE, Dickerson says. One challenge will be reversing the de-siloing of personal information that violated previous privacy standards. It’s a lot easier to blow up a silo than to replace spilled grain. “That was DOGE’s whole schtick from the very beginning. That’s going to take years to figure out,” says Dickerson.
Writing a plan to roll back DOGE is tricky, because there are three years left for the current White House to muck things up—or perhaps course-correct to mitigate some of the missteps made in 2025. For instance, after trashing the existing USDS, the administration recently revived the initiative’s idealistic original premise of recruiting Silicon Valley talent to revamp government operations, branding this new initiative as the US Tech Force “It’s all copy-pasted from 2014—it’s the same exact thing,” says Dickerson. “How dumb and unnecessary it was to fire everybody and then run a new flag up the pole and say, ‘Hey, everybody, come get hired.’”
Obviously, the diciest part of the project is its dependence on the election of a democrat to the presidency in 2028. (Dickerson says that it’s also possible that the plan could be executed by “a McCain Republican,” but that animal appears to be extinct.)
Even if an amenable democrat does take the White House, Viaduct’s work will be squandered if the new president doesn’t go all in on the plan. “Getting the buy-in is the key to a successful plan,” says Jenny Wang, a former deputy chief of staff under Biden who is now Tech Viaduct’s project manager. “If there’s no support, it doesn’t matter.” Republicans are usually willing to walk through coals to achieve their aims, while Democrats tiptoe over eggshells. “Surrendering to a status quo that is not working right is a natural reaction, but it would be terrible for leadership to do that,” says one longtime government reformer familiar with the Viaduct plan.
Dickerson acknowledges Viaduct’s effort might well be for naught. “I am not sure at all that there’s going to be what we recognize as a fair election in 2029, and I’m even less sure that someone who’s not crazy is going to win it. But if an opportunity comes to us as it did in 2020, let’s be better prepared for it,” he says.
If the worst happens, Dickerson is prepared for that, too. “I’m half-retired in the middle of the Arizona desert, and if the US is going to continue to collapse into chaos, there’s nothing I can do about it except be as far away from it as I can,” he says. In that case, a lot of his friends—and maybe a certain journalist—might show up on his doorstep, offering help to restore that abandoned sky observatory.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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