How Megan Smith is trying to bring her Silicon Valley sensibility to the White House as US CTO
Her Task Is to Wean the White House Off Floppy Disks — WASHINGTON — President Obama's top technology adviser cringes when she hears highly educated adults say how bad they are at science and math …
Context & Ripple Effects
Megan Smith arrives as U.S. Chief Technology Officer mid-way through the Obama administration's broader attempt to import Silicon Valley practice into government: the same period produced the US Digital Service and 18F digital corps, which were explicitly built to attract top tech talent into federal work. Her brief — from modernizing antiquated White House IT down to retiring floppy disks — makes her both a symbol and an operator of that experiment.
The role she shaped proved fragile but durable in structure: months after this profile, the White House added depth by naming Princeton computer scientist Ed Felten as Deputy U.S. CTO, yet by early 2017 Obama's tech teams were publicly optimistic while privately fearing for their programs' survival under the incoming administration. Later coverage of Michael Kratsios overseeing a director-less OSTP shows how differently the same machinery can be staffed and run.
First-order effects
- Smith's direct mandate is internal modernization — weaning the White House itself off obsolete technology like floppy disks — which puts career federal IT staff and legacy procurement processes immediately in her path.
- Her Silicon Valley background signals a recruiting pitch: the appointment, followed by hires like Felten, is aimed at persuading technologists that government service is a credible career move.
Second-order effects
- The US Digital Service and 18F become the delivery vehicle for that sensibility, pulling working engineers out of companies and embedding them in agencies — shifting the labor market for senior technologists to include tours of duty in Washington.
- Rival power centers inside the executive branch, notably OSTP, are forced to define themselves against or alongside the CTO shop, as later staffing fights over who leads science and technology advice make visible.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the U.S. CTO function becomes a structurally permanent but politically contingent institution: every transition re-decides its staffing, ideology, and clout rather than dissolving it, which is exactly the tension visible between the 2017 fears and later OSTP profiles.
- The deeper shift is cultural — government treating technology leadership as a first-class executive function with named, credentialed leaders — an expectation that persists even when individual occupants lack technical backgrounds.
The trend: The U.S. CTO role is evolving from a one-administration modernization experiment into a recurring test of whether government can institutionalize imported tech talent across political transitions.