What Did Civic Tech Learn in the Last Decade?

From Don: Until Trump returned to power, a group of civic-minded technologists played a growing role in the federal government. DOGE purged them from public service. The DOGE disaster has now been memory holed, without even a final report as the Musk era of DOGE that formally ended on July 4th. Meanwhile, civic technologists have been having frank conversations about both the past and the future, asking what they did right, and wrong. Here, Merici Vinton, one of the leaders in that field, tells us what they learned.

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The services and digital teams that were quietly making government work better - simpler tax filing, faster benefits access - have been or are being dismantled. What replaces them matters.

The second Trump administration has caused a major disruption to the federal government - deeply impacting the public services that Americans receive and the ways that services are delivered. This is felt particularly strongly in the civic technology field - which has sought to improve the relationship between the public and government institutions through the use of digital technology, especially for public services (“digital services”). The loss of digital service organizations has fundamentally shifted the motivations, incentives and capacities of the people designing the technology that powers government services - meaningfully affecting how and how well these services operate.

Recognizing this moment where we can challenge the old and look for the new, the Federation of American Scientists and Georgetown’s Beeck Center ran a series of retrospectives, or retros, to capture past lessons about what did and did not work in digital service delivery, and how we can chart an ambitious path forward in this new reality. We spoke to over 100 digital government practitioners from across the country.These are the results, as well as where…