Free Republic

The Obama administration's "18F" program to create its own version of a high-tech startup for government digital projects has foundered since its launch in 2014, losing nearly $32 million as its staff spent most of its time on unbillable work, according to a new inspector general report. ... The 10-month investigation by the GSA's inspector general found that 52 percent of 18F's work was unbillable and included an internal project to change its logo by altering its font, alignment and background color. In all, 727 staff hours, or $140,104, were spent on developing the brand, including that logo change. Staff...

Todd Park, the former chief technology officer of the United States, and Mikey Dickerson, who led a team of 60 engineers at Google and supervised the crew that fixed the Healthcare.gov website last year. Since that time, Park and Dickerson have been steadily recruiting an elite digital corps—a startup team, essentially, built mainly from the ranks of top private-sector companies—and embedding them within the U.S. government. Their purpose is to remake the digital systems by which government operates, to implement the kind of efficiency and agility and effectiveness that define Silicon Valley’s biggest successes, across everything from the IRS to...