Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I have two special guests from the

USDA, or the U.S. Digital Services, continuing our DC on the road theme. For those of you that may

remember some of the fiascos with the original healthcare.gov, this is a group that came in

and fixed it. And more importantly, has been working on many other services since then. The two

guests we have today are Mikey,

who is the administrator of the USDA. And before that, he was an engineering manager at Google

for a number of years. And Haley, who is a deputy administrator at the USDA, she's been working

to help implement some of President Obama's key technology initiatives during his administration.

So Haley and Mikey, welcome,

you guys. Thank you for having us. Thanks. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to have you guys because the government

is like the biggest buyer of IT services. And then on the flip side of this, we have this idea

that you can have a startup inside the government. And so there's just interesting tension

between this idea of the government as a buyer and the government as a builder. And you guys are

sort of sitting at the heart of that. Yeah. Well, just to start with how we operate. So we are

essentially a startup that's embedded inside the White House and as part of a team of teams working

across government

to help improve some of the core citizen facing services of the United States government.

We bring in some of the best minds from the private sector and set up tours of duty where people can

come in and help apply those same best practices and skill sets to improve the fundamental services our

country provides. I think it's interesting that you referenced that as a sort of a tour of duty

because one of the complaints that I've heard, you know, we have a lot of government folks that

come in through our doors is that it's really hard to attract top talent to work in government

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