White House wants its top agencies to have digital task forces
The US's web-based health care portal didn't launch as planned, to put it mildly, but the digital task force created to salvage that mess (and prevent others) showed that it's possible to have modern, responsive government services on the internet. Accordingly, the White House wants more -- as part of its proposed fiscal 2016 budget, the Obama administration is asking for $105 million to give each of its top 25 agencies a digital team of its own. The hope is that these new divisions, along with a bolstered central task force, will both improve your experience dealing with government bureaus online and help fend off malicious hackers.
It's too soon to know if the strategy will work. Just because it helped Healthcare.gov doesn't mean that you'll see that success repeated 25 times, after all. However, the White House has had at least some success with its recent technology-centric reforms. To some degree, the budget itself is proof -- in keeping with open data policies, you can read about the proposed spending on Medium and check out the raw budget data on GitHub. At the least, the gesture shows how an internet-savvy government is quickly becoming more of a necessity than a nice-to-have luxury.
