Federal CIO says he’s zeroed in on government service delivery

“‘Your job is to kill people.’ That is the first thing drilled into new recruits at United States Marine Corps boot camp,” Gregory Barbaccia, the federal chief information officer, told an audience of government vendors and federal employees that work in the digital delivery and customer experience.

“It's blunt by design, not to glorify violence, but to create absolute clarity,” he said. “Their job is to remove the enemy from the battlefield and help their fellow Marines do the same. Anything that doesn't eventually affect that outcome is a distraction.”

The Trump administration wants to focus the government on service delivery with a similar “obsession,” Barbaccia explained during remarks given during an ACT-IAC event on Friday.

In addition to holding the title of CIO, Barbaccia is also the federal government’s service delivery lead under the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act, signed into law by former President Joe Biden before the end of his term. 

In that role, Barbaccia is in charge of coordinating government-wide efforts to improve service delivery. He characterized the current moment as an inflection point where he’s focused on building accountability structures and empowering people in the government to fix problems.

His goal is to address the root causes behind negative experiences with government services, he said, not just paper over symptoms like bad websites or paper forms. 

“We have to stop treating service delivery like a surface-level design exercise and start treating it like a core operating discipline,” Barbaccia added.

The government struggles because it organizes around its own bureaucracy — not how citizens experience the government — and still depends on paper and manual processes without using data to measure success, he said. 

Many of these talking points align with the analysis of the problem offered by Biden administration officials who also worked on the issue during his term.

Now, many of the necessary pieces of the work have fallen into place to make more progress, Mo Earley — director of federal customer experience at the Office of Management and Budget — said during a panel at the same event. 

Early pointed to the inclusion of service delivery in the President’s Management Agenda and the creation of agency-level leads for the issue in the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act.

Those agency leads are still being designated. Beyond that, picking the right governance models within agencies is necessary to make progress, said Jonathan Finch, director of digital experience at OMB.

The CX team at OMB has also been working with the new National Design Studio created by President Donald Trump last year to “figure out how we can bring the full weight of our collective entities to bear to solve this problem,” said Finch.

The executive order setting up that effort also signals top-down support, said Barbaccia.

“I'm here to tell you that senior level politicos are very motivated about these things,” he added.

The CIO also said that the administration is applying guidelines created by the design studio to government websites.

The focus on service design comes after a year of massive change for federal agencies and employees since Trump took office last January. 

Many of the teams that previously worked on design and technology in the government were dismantled or lost many employees in Trump’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce.

Experts have previously told Nextgov/FCW that the administration’s high-profile Department of Government Efficiency actually “tarnished” some of the tools commonly used to improve services.