The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) was famously launched within the Obama administration back in 2014, created as a direct answer to the Healthcare.gov collapse, with a goal of bringing more experienced technologists into the U.S. government. When it was created, part of the USDS mission was to rebuild faltering services by focusing on what users and real people actually needed, rather than what agency charts dictated, which had been the default government approach to technology for many years.
That early mandate would go on to spark something that federal officials might not have anticipated: States would start to follow the example. Indeed, while the first incarnation of the USDS no longer exists within the federal government — the Trump administration repurposed it into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which later disbanded — some states have formed their own digital service organizations, while others have emulated pieces of the USDS’ work.
THE NEED FOR DIGITAL SERVICE TEAMS
The need for the USDS was made clear by the very public failure of Healthcare.gov. The site was well-known before launch, intended to be the platform where users would get health care through the Affordable Care Act.
Yet, nearly as soon as it went live, it crashed. It was to that point — and still might be today — the U.S. government’s most public failure with technology. It also made it clear that the country’s relationship to technology had changed, with people expecting a smooth and intuitive experience, and it was time for government to keep up.
Chaeny Emanavin joined USDS in its early days, during the second Obama administration, working on a team that helped digitize immigration applications and records. He said USDS responded to the failure of Healthcare.gov by embedding experienced technologists from the private sector direct alongside federal staff. The idea was to pair tech expertise with the people who knew how to do complex government work.
USDS also emphasized product management, human-centered design, vendor-neutral expertise and iterative development as vital for the future of how government was to use technology.
As USDS team members did the work, Emanavin recalls, they also spread its influence in two ways, first by publishing playbooks and second by the jobs their people went on to do next. Instead of returning to Big Tech after working for the federal government, Emanavin said, “a lot of them were really excited to keep doing the work, and they found opportunities at the state level or the local level.”
And at the state level, they found a similar need for the type of work USDS was doing.
In fact, the desire for something like the USDS was simmering long before the term “digital services team” entered the public-sector vocabulary. As early as the 2000s, state CIOs knew they were facing gaps in service delivery that traditional IT structures simply weren’t built to address — gaps that required a different kind of problem-solving and a different kind of team.
That early recognition set the stage for what would later emerge.
“There was no unit in the beginning,” said Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. “It was a group of passionate people who were typically in the CIO or the central IT office. And we were trying to bring together the disparate business needs and citizen interactions of all the state agencies.”
Some states — including New Jersey, Colorado and Pennsylvania — stood up their own organizations much like the USDS. The Colorado Digital Service, for example, was launched almost entirely by USDS alumni.
Emanavin says those teams “basically took the playbook, figured out what pieces made sense for the culture and the context ... and then reused it.”
But even if states did not create organizations modeled after the USDS, the group’s expertise still at times found its way to them. Emanavin himself went to work for California, serving as the first governor-appointed director of innovation within the California Health and Human Services Department under then-Gov. Jerry Brown.
“I literally took the USDS playbook and applied it,” he said.
HOW THE USDS INSPIRED COLORADO
One could easily make a case that the USDS showed what was possible, and many states were inspired to follow its example.
One clear example of this came in 2019 with the launch of the Colorado Digital Service (CDS). The CDS was inspired by USDS — it’s right there in the name — and it was also guided in part by one of its founders, Kelly Taylor, who partnered with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on the effort.
A lot of them were really excited to keep doing the work, and they found opportunities at the state level or the local level.
The team used this approach when building MyColorado, the state’s digital wallet, which was created because residents wanted an easier way to carry essential information.
Tuneberg said that people told the state, “I want to walk out of my house with my phone that has my insurance cards, that has my car registration. I want my ID, and I don’t want to carry all this plastic around.”
Not long after its creation, the team helped the state respond to COVID-19, rapidly deploying digital vaccine credentials within the digital wallet to replace fragile paper cards. This resident-centered approach has essentially guided the team’s feature delivery ever since.
MyColorado now serves 1.8 million account holders, with about 575,000 monthly active users, and the team continues to gather feedback while coordinating closely with agencies to ensure the system meets everyone’s needs.
Additionally, Colorado made a conscious decision to rebuild internal product management instead of outsourcing.
Emily Miller described the shift, using MyColorado as an example.
“What’s really unique about MyColorado is that we built it — the Colorado Digital Service team built it,” said Miller, who is the Colorado governor’s deputy director of operations and cabinet affairs. “That distinction matters because it reflects a broader shift in the governor’s operational agenda: owning our product destiny.”
HOW THE USDS INSPIRED PENNSYLVANIA
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania took a statewide approach from the outset, reflecting many of the principles of the USDS model. CODE PA, created under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration, was established as a centralized team with a clear mandate to improve the resident experience across all government services.
Bryanna Pardoe, former CODE PA executive director and current Pennsylvania CIO, said, “It wasn’t necessarily prescriptive in terms of, this is a specific problem to solve, but it was very focused on bringing human-centered design accessibility and really improving overall resident experience as a top priority.”
Starting with just three people in May 2023, CODE PA has grown to roughly 50, reflecting the breadth of demand for its work across state agencies. Pardoe emphasized the team’s positioning close to both the governor’s office and the CIO, a dual reporting structure that allowed them to work as a full delivery partner.
“CODE PA is not like this whiz-bang team sitting in the corner spinning out widgets,” she said. “They are truly instrumental, a partner and ally with the rest of the OIT organization.”
One early example of this type of collaboration was the online health insurance claim appeal tool, a legislatively mandated form that needed to be intuitive and accessible.
CODE PA worked directly with the state’s Insurance Department using the Keystone Design System, a reusable component library, to create the claims resource. That design system later became the backbone for the complete rebuild of PA.gov, consolidating 65 separate state government websites into a single, human-centered structure, thereby eliminating any need for residents to navigate agency boundaries.
CODE PA’s approach is essentially to build once and scale everywhere, creating design tools that can be applied across identity management improvements, payment optimization and even broader use of Keystone on non-CMS websites, giving them a consistent look and feel.
But the team didn’t stop at residents — CODE PA also focused on helping the civil servants maintaining these systems, understanding that employee workflows directly shape the resident experience. By combining both sides, CODE PA aims to make sure that improvements aren’t just user-friendly for the public, but that they are also manageable and sustainable for the people running the services behind the scenes.
“Hundreds of digital contributors across agencies update PA.gov every day, and we treat their experience as inseparable from the resident experience,” Pardoe said.
Features like training, bug reporting, content governance and feedback loops exist to support the people who keep state services running, ensuring continuous improvement at every level.
AN EXPANDING LEGACY
While the USDS no longer exists as it once did in the federal government, several states have shown how the concept can evolve from solving individual problems to transforming the way state government tech offices operate — by becoming strategic partners embedded across state operations.
While the core philosophy — improving the citizen experience regardless of agency or organization — remains unchanged, Doug Robinson of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers sees a key distinction between USDS and state digital service teams.
USDS focused on discrete projects within individual federal agencies. State teams, meanwhile, take an enterprise view, looking across the executive branch to identify commonalities and modernization opportunities. As Robinson described it, the goal isn’t just addressing legacy systems, but “the modernization of the business process,” making sure that improvements benefit the entire state rather than isolated programs.
That enterprise perspective encourages teams to focus on functions shared across agencies — from payment processing to content design — and to apply emerging technologies not for novelty but to reduce friction for residents.
The original USDS team likely didn’t imagine the ripple effects their work would have, but today state teams like the CDS and CODE PA are still using some form of their blueprint to rewrite the rule book for using tech to enhance public service.
The group’s legacy may expand in another way. In December, the Trump administration announced a new initiative called Tech Force. On its website, the new program says it aims to recruit “an elite corps of engineers to build the next generation of government technology,” suggesting some possible through lines reaching back to USDS.
Participants in Tech Force will join two-year programs, within which they will work inside federal agencies on AI implementation and solving “the federal government’s most critical technology challenges.”
Tech Force’s website, however, describes it as “distinct from other technology initiatives within government,” though its prominent program tag line, “Tech for the American People,” points to a similar spirit.
