Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner has helped bring home a lot of his father-in-law’s agenda wins, from rewriting the Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement to bipartisan criminal justice reform.
But far from those headline-grabbing efforts is Kushner’s real focus: introducing customer service to the federal government.
“Jared is deeply passionate about this,” said Matt Lira, Kushner’s associate with the White House Office of American Innovation that is trying to reinvent and modernize government by introducing successful — and often simple and obvious — business applications.
While it’s a highly technical and years long campaign, the effort headed by Kushner and White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell basically comes down to making government services easy to access and customer-friendly in a way they have never been.
The information technology revolution has initially focused on the Departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, two agencies that impact millions monthly.
Agriculture, headed by Secretary Sonny Perdue who brought similar reforms to Georgia when was governor, has revamped its website from one that brags on the agency to a customer portal. It also added Farmers.gov to help the industry navigate loans and other information.
Following @POTUS‘s lead, @usdaRD announced $600M for broadband infrastructure in rural America. High-speed Internet is a necessity and vital for economic opportunity. Thanks to Congress, which provided the funding. https://t.co/sXrMalD8ak
Full release: https://t.co/CIb76K9v7L pic.twitter.com/diXnVmv89i
— Sec. Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) December 13, 2018
The State Department has improved Global Entry and processed 100,000 applications through a new Trusted Traveler website and the military has through Move.mil, made it easier for military personnel to move.
And the VA is also driving a digital revolution to eliminate inefficiencies, such as forcing vets to drive to offices, sometimes hours away, to sign documents they can now do online.
“When the average American interacts with their government, there is a huge delta between the quality of those experiences and the quality of any other experience in their life,” said Lira. “Every time one of these negative customer experiences occurs, it undermines the people’s faith that institutions are working for them. They deserve better — that is why we are focused on improving the quality of those experiences,” he added.
One phrase heard in other agencies eager to be included in the revamping of staid websites is “dashboard envy,” an encouraging sign that there is support for the changes the Trump White House is making, said an official.
The effort, stalled in some agencies due to the shutdown, has bipartisan support, the backing of the tech industry, and a presidential executive order, a coalition-style that Kushner has become known for.
“Much like with other issues in his portfolio, Jared’s leadership has been critical to building bipartisan coalitions that deliver meaningful results for the American public,” explained Lira.
The team has other influential members, notably Matt Cutts, the leader of Google’s search team for over a decade, who runs the United States Digital Service, and newly hired Anil Cheriyan, the former chief information officer at SunTrust, who will run the General Service Agency’s Technology Transformation Service.
In addition to making government agencies more people-focused, it is also expected to save more than $12 billion by reducing data and call centers and speeding up the processing of requests, loans, and issuing of checks.
Administration officials said the program has no end date, and that is on purpose. They hope to set in place for future administrations a system of regular IT updates that will keep government systems at the forefront of business innovations.
“Modernizing all of government IT and services is a multi-year and probably multi-administration endeavor. So our focus has been to not only drive short-term results, but to build the foundations for long-term change. To date, we are very pleased with progress on both of those objectives,” said Liddell.
And, Lira added, “improving customer experience is the lifeblood of any successful business, and that’s one of the reasons the White House is as passionate about it as they have been.”
