How a start-up in the White House is changing business as usual | Haley Van Dyck

Overview

The speaker argues that the U.S. federal government is failing to deliver modern digital services, disproportionately harming people who rely on them most—veterans, low-income families, students, immigrants, and others. She points to major delays and overwhelming complexity, such as:

• Veterans waiting an average of 137 days for VA benefits
• The difficulty of applying due to navigating hundreds of government websites and phone numbers

She contrasts this with the private sector’s rapid, user-friendly technological improvements, warning that government’s lag is widening a “digital divide.”

Why the Problem Persists

The situation is framed as an urgent systems problem:

• The federal government spends over $86B annually on IT.
• 94% of federal IT projects are over budget or behind schedule.
• About 40% never reach deployment.

Under current approaches, she argues, “failure” is nearly inevitable—so the only viable solution is radical disruption, not incremental change.

Proposed Solution: The U.S. Digital Service (USDS)

The speaker highlights the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) as the remedy. She describes USDS as a “team of teams” that brings private-sector product and engineering practices into government to build “world-class digital services” at dramatically lower cost.

Key elements of the strategy include:

• Recruiting top tech talent for short government tours
• Pairing them with civil servants
• Deploying them to high-impact citizen services
• Providing strong executive “air cover” up to the President

She claims the model is already working, referencing:

• The earlier rescue of Healthcare.gov
• Scaling the same approach across other services

Key Examples

Immigration Modernization

The speaker describes immigration services as historically paper-heavy and slow, often involving multi-year processes and major cost overruns (including an example of $1.2B with no working product after six years).

USDS deployed a small team (six people) to break the work into smaller “bite-sized” releases, producing results within months, including:

• Moving Form I-90 (replacement green card) to an online process without paper handling
• Releasing a more accessible civics test preparation tool in plain language to reduce user stress

Veterans Services (Vets.gov)

She says USDS helped launch a beta version of Vets.gov as a single portal to consolidate online veteran services, rather than forcing veterans to navigate thousands of separate sites.

The site’s initial focus includes:

• Education
• Disability benefits

It was built with veteran input through user research and data review, with plans to:

• Migrate additional services
• Shut down legacy systems

Conclusion

The speaker makes a moral and political argument that the problem is both possible and necessary to solve:

• Government is not an abstract concept—it is “us.”
• The real question is not whether change can happen, but whether society will choose to implement it.

Quoted theme: Change is achievable, and the decision is ultimately political and collective.

Presenters / Contributors

• Haley Van Dyck (speaker)
• U.S. Digital Service (USDS) team / members
  • Includes examples of past hires from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter
• Dedicated civil servants within agencies
  • e.g., USCIS and the VA
• President Obama (referenced in campaign/administration context)
• JFK (referenced via a quoted embroidered rug)