“We have a window of opportunity-within this government, under this president-to make a huge difference,” Park says. What if Park could duplicate this tech surge, creating similar squads of Silicon Valley types, parachuting them into bureaucracies to fix pressing tech problems? Could they actually clear the way for a golden era of gov-tech, where transformative apps were as likely to come from DC as they were from San Francisco or Mountain View, and people loved to use federal services as much as Googling and buying products on Amazon?
The team ultimately rebooted the site and in the process provided a potential blueprint for reform. But he was also given special emergency dispensation to ignore all the usual government IT procedures and strictures, permission that he used to pull together a so-called Ad Hoc team of Silicon Valley talent. Last fall, Park’s stress levels increased dramatically when he caught the hot-potato task of rebooting the disastrously dysfunctional website. In 2012, President Obama named him CTO of the entire US. “We’re very fortunate to have him.”) Park, 41, cofounded two health IT companies-athenahealth and Castlight Health-and led them to successful IPOs before joining the Department of Health and Human Services in 2009 as CTO. (“I do what I can to help Todd,” Hoffman later explained. Mozilla board member and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman had secured the venue on short notice. No one believes this more deeply than Park, a Harvard-educated son of Korean immigrants. “If we don’t get this right,” says Tom Freedman, coauthor of Future of Failure, a 61-page study on the subject for the Ford Foundation, “the future of governing effectively is in real question.” So it’s not at all surprising that the government has been unable to attract the world-class engineers who might be able to fix this mess, a fact that helps perpetuate a cycle of substandard services and poorly performing agencies that seems to confirm the canard that anything produced by government is prima facie lousy.
That has led to an inherently sclerotic and corruptible system that doesn’t just hamper innovation, it leaves government IT permanently lagging, unable to perform even the most basic functions we expect. It favors security over experimentation and adherence to bureaucratic procedure over agile problem-solving. But the federal government’s IT mentality is still rooted in caution, as if the digital transformation that has changed our lives is to be regarded with the utmost suspicion.
In the rest of the tech world, nimbleness, speed, risk-taking and relentless testing are second nature, essential to surviving in a competitive landscape that works to the benefit of consumers. Park knows the problem is systemic-a mindset that locks federal IT into obsolete practices-“a lot of people in government are, like, suspended in amber,” he said to the crowd at Mozilla. Park was looking for recruits among the high-performing engineers of Silicon Valley, a group that generally ignores the government. If you were at the surprisingly louche headquarters of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, California, one evening in June, you could have seen for yourself. It’s a continuation of what Park has already been doing for months. In a sense, he is doubling down on an initiative he’s already set well into motion: bringing a Silicon Valley sensibility to the public sector. President Obama said in a statement, "Todd has been, and will continue to be, a key member of my administration." Park will lead the effort to recruit top talent to help the federal government overhaul its IT. But Park knows how he will describe himself: the dude in the Valley who’s working for the president. It finally settled on technology adviser to the White House based in Silicon Valley. Starting in September, he’s assuming a new post, so new that the White House had to figure out what to call him. Largely for family reasons-a long delayed promise to his wife to raise their family in California-he’s moving back to the Bay Area he left when he began working for President Barack Obama in 2009.īut Park is not departing the government, just continuing his efforts on a more relevant coast. The White House confirmed today the rumors that Todd Park, the nation’s Chief Technology Officer and the spiritual leader of its effort to reform the way the government uses technology, is leaving his post.
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