What alarms me is the level of negligence with which technology is being built and adopted right now. It’s an approach Silicon Valley has grown famous on. “Move fast and break things.”

That might work when you’re building a subpar social media platform but not to build tech for govt.

Govt tech is not flashy, it helps make government more accessible. Some positive examples include:
💰 IRS Direct File System
✒️ SSA’s integration of e-signature

Each of these involved a clear challenge, time to get it right, and a constant feedback loop. All things currently being abandoned by DOGE.

When we think of government and tech, we might jump to the debacle that was the rollout of Healthcare.gov.

You might not know is that the precursor to DOGE (US Digital Service) was born out of this failure. Since then federal techies have worked to make using tech to access govt services easy.

TOMORROW (Friday) I’ll be talking with ALVARO BEDOYA about Trump's (attempted) firing of him and his FTC Commissioner colleague Rebecca Slaughter.

We’ll be going live on MediaJustice’s Instagram page at 4p ET/1p PT.

instagram.com/mediajustice?i…

Hope to see you there!

Not surprising the FTC was targeted. They proactively held unchecked corporate power, particularly in tech, accountable.

Of note, FTC does more than work on tech. They’ve gone after grocery stores that price gouge. Kept medicines low. This will hurt everyday people, including Trump’s core base.

This action should be seen as part of broader efforts at expanding executive power. Trump is doing this by testing the boundaries of what he can get away with.

The FTC is an independent agency. He doesn’t “hire” commissioners and therefore can’t “fire” them either. But he will try.

Sharing Rebecca Slaughter’s statement here.