Experts discuss challenges of building government tech, including legacy systems, regulatory complexity, lack of data sharing between departments, and more
The pandemic has shown how difficult it can be for the US to succeed with major technology projects. We asked leading thinkers what they would do to change that.
Context & Ripple Effects
This expert roundtable lands after a year in which pandemic-era projects made those challenges concrete: the White House's COVID-19 Technology Task Force stalled over privacy disagreements between agencies and big-tech volunteers, and a fragmented, state-by-state approach to contact tracing apps left interoperability and security problems unresolved. Both episodes put the roundtable's themes — siloed data, regulatory complexity, aging systems — on display rather than in theory.
The debate also has a longer history in this coverage: in 2016, Gov IT vendors went to Congress to complain that White House modernization bodies 18F and USDS were opaque, even urging a pause on 18F's role in new efforts, while the 2017 American Technology Council showed successive administrations recycling the same modernization conversation with tech executives. A separate postmortem on failed high-tech projects in developing markets supplies the roundtable's hardest lesson: tools fail where underlying infrastructure and institutions are absent.
First-order effects
- Agencies running major digital projects — and the modernization bodies like 18F and USDS that vendors already criticized as opaque — face renewed scrutiny of whether they can deliver at pandemic scale.
- Big tech companies that volunteered through the COVID-19 Technology Task Force now have public evidence that their engagement model breaks down on privacy and governance disputes.
Second-order effects
- Vendors who took their grievances to Congress in 2016 gain fresh ammunition: if legacy systems and interdepartmental data silos are the binding constraint, contracts shift toward integration and modernization work rather than new builds.
- States that built isolated contact tracing apps face pressure toward shared standards, since the security and privacy costs of fragmentation are now documented.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US government technology reform keeps cycling through advisory bodies and executive summits while the durable blockers — legacy systems, procurement rules, missing data-sharing mandates — remain legislative and institutional problems, not product problems.
- The developing-market failure record suggests the structural fix runs through basic institutional capacity first; any future modernization push that leads with advanced tools repeats a known failure mode.
The trend: US government technology modernization is converging on the same verdict across administrations: execution fails on institutions, data plumbing, and regulation long before it fails on software.