The 44th president of the United States is getting ready to leave the White House, and on Tuesday will give his farewell address.
As @POTUS contemplates his legacy, the editors of MIT Technology Review took a look back at some of the most important technology initiatives of his eight years to assess that record. He succeeded in some important ways, such as supporting net neutrality and joining global action on climate change. But there were failures, too—remember healthcare.gov?—and even some of the successes are now in question as a new administration comes into power.
Here is an assessment of five particular signature technology topics: upgrading government use of technology, net neutrality, stimulus spending on technology, electronic medical records, and advanced manufacturing.
How Government Uses Technology
The healthcare.gov disaster led the president to encourage government to act more like a tech company.
Barack Obama’s very first executive order back in 2009 wasn’t about reshaping U.S. health care, closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center, or any other high-profile political issue. It was one requiring the U.S. government to use technology to be more transparent and effective.
Obama’s campaign had famously relied more on computers and the Internet than any before. Now the Open Government Directive showed that he wanted to see digital technology change how government works, too. Eight years later, this wonky and obscure thread of his legacy may become one of the most enduring.
Obama did unusually well attracting Silicon Valley veterans to Washington to help with the goal. His interest in the Internet and the industry seemed evident in his first campaign, says Brian Behlendorf, a leading figure in open-source software who helped Obama’s campaign, and then advised on open-government projects in the White House. And technologists clicked with him. “I think it had a lot to do with him—the fact that he was the young outsider, not the establishment,” Behlendorf says.
In Obama’s first term, the White House joined Twitter, launched its first blog (complete with comments), let citizens petition their government online, and hired America’s first chief technology officer. It built new kinds of services such as recovery.gov, which let anyone track how Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package was spent.
Then an embarrassing digital disaster forced the Obama administration to step up its efforts. Nearly $500 million was spent building the healthcare.gov insurance exchange that was at the heart of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But when it launched in October 2013, the site barely worked.
The Google engineer who led the “trauma team” of industry experts brought in to rescue the site afterward became head of a new, permanent group of software wizards dubbed the United States Digital Service—to help agencies prevent big projects spiraling out of control.
A second group, called 18F, was created to help agencies improve how they build and procure technology. Modeled on a startup, it encourages avoiding cumbersome procurement contracts in favor of the flexibility offered by open-source software and cloud services.
Aaron Snow, who cofounded and later led 18F, argues that Obama’s efforts to make the government smarter about technology should survive—and perhaps even expand—under his successor and later presidents. “Our core value and proposition is very nonpartisan,” he says. “Nobody argues with the notion that when the government spends money on IT, it should do so efficiently.”
Source:-MIT
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