One of the Trump administration’s top tech leaders says overhauling how the federal government delivers benefits and services to the public requires the same level of mission discipline instilled in Marines.
“’Your job is to kill people.’ That is the first thing drilled into new recruits at the United States Marine Corps boot camp. It’s blunt by design — not to glorify violence, but to create absolute clarity,” Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia, an Army veteran, said in his opening remarks at an industry conference Friday.
As the Office of Management and Budget’s lead on improving customer service governmentwide, Barbaccia said his top priority is to get agencies to “obsess over delivering tangible outcomes and results for the American taxpayer.”
“There should never be ambiguity about what success looks like. There should never be confusion about whether we’re making progress. If we can’t see it, we can’t fix it,” he said at a conference hosted by ACT-IAC and Dorris Consulting International.
The Trump administration is still building out the team that will carry out this work. The Office of Personnel Management, through its new Tech Force initiative, is looking to recruit about 1,000 technologists to sign up for a two-year stint in the federal government. Barbaccia told reporters that the administration is reviewing about 6,000 Tech Force applications.
“We’re putting them through code reviews. There’s going to be panel interviews. So we’re very excited for that first cohort,” he said.
About 320,000 federal employees left the government last year. Of those, about 13,000 were IT managers.
Agencies are also in the process of naming service delivery leads, as required under the 2023 Government Service Delivery Improvement Act. The same legislation required OMB to name its own governmentwide service delivery lead — a title that Barbaccia holds.
Some agencies already have a customer experience officer or a customer experience office. In some cases, agency IT shops have headed up this work. Barbaccia said he’s less concerned about how agencies are internally structured to handle this work, and more focused on results.
“The public doesn’t care how we’re organized. They care about getting an answer, completing a task, or solving a problem without friction. Start with the person we’re serving and design backward, orient around life events and outcomes, not internal boundaries,” he said.
Barbaccia said the designation of CX leaders will vary agency-by-agency, but he said too many C-suite leaders in government are “dual-hatted” and balancing multiple responsibilities. He told reporters that he would like agencies to tap leaders who will make this work their top priority.
“I will gladly take a more junior, motivated person than somebody who’s a [deputy] secretary, senior advisor that is really just going to do this as a compliance exercise,” he said.
Barbaccia said the federal government is at an “inflection point” with artificial intelligence, and that these tools are going to be a “phenomenal force multiplier” that will change the way agencies deliver services to the public.
“The technology we have available to us right now, and the pace at which it is advancing, gives us an opportunity to fundamentally change how government operations and how it serves. But that opportunity does not unlock itself. It unlocks through the people in this room,” he said.
Barbaccia said the administration is experimenting with AI to do “complete website redesigns.”
“We’re going to be able to move much faster now, which is great, because we’ve got some pretty ambitious goals,” he said.
The National Design Studio, led by U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia, is looking to overhaul about 27,000 federal websites. Barbaccia said he’s also working with the National Design Studio on delivering a “one government” approach to website design.
“It’s jarring to the public when one agency’s digital experience is completely different than another agency,” he said. “We’re now coalescing that voice that we’re giving to the public. Not only from the visual design aspect … You feel like you’re visiting the same entity when you look at different websites … It’s the same voice being spoken to you.”
Barbaccia said the administration is also focused on using AI to enable more self-service options and “minimize the amount of interactions that must take place in the first place.”
“People are calling call centers, and they’re asking the same seven types of things. This is something that artificial intelligence is really good at — going through thousands and thousands of questions worded different ways and picking out a dozen categories of questions. How do we get that immediately on the FAQ section, so people don’t have to interact with a chatbot or a human?” he said.
Agencies have begun to release updated inventories of AI use cases. Barbaccia said those inventories show many agencies are looking at AI to solve the same problems.
“We’re trying to see, instead of letting every agency build something and spend time iterating on something, what we’re doing that’s interesting is bringing everybody who’s doing the same problem into the same room, so we could do demos, see what is best, what works well, and then not recreate it a million times,” he told reporters.
Mo Earley, the director of federal customer experience at OMB, said the administration is working with nearly 40 agencies and programs deemed as High-Service Impact Providers on ways to use AI to improve their customer experience.
“There’s a huge amount of opportunity across the entire service journey of every service that we work with, and where different types of AI can plug in,” Earley said.
The first Trump administration made customer experience the focus of its President’s Management Agenda. The second Trump administration’s PMA is focused on leveraging technology to deliver faster services and building “secure, digital-first services that are built for real people, not bureaucracy.”
While several presidents have made improved customer experience a top management priority, Barbaccia said agencies still haven’t delivered on some basic accomplishments. For example, agencies too often ask people to provide the same information on the same forms over and over again.
“For years, we’ve been busy fixing visible problems. We redesign a website, we digitize a form. We shave a few days off of processing time. That work matters — it just hasn’t been enough. Because those [are] symptoms, not causes. The real problem isn’t just bad interfaces or slow workflows. The real problem is that we’ve built systems and structures that tolerate complexity, fragmentation, and friction,” Barbaccia said.
Jonathan Finch, OMB’s digital experience director, said the administration’s focus is “no longer just to fix symptoms, it’s to go after root causes.”
“We can fix a website, we can fix a form. But why was it not where it should be in the first place? Is it a question of governance, is it a question of technology — the platforms and tooling that we offer? Is it a question of policy? Are there legal blockers that are stopping us from being able to deliver the experience that we want?” Finch said.
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