Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™.
During Donald Trump’s second presidential campaign, his relationship with the tech industry was highlighted due to his budding relationship with Elon Musk, who spent $288 million to help elect Trump. While many people in tech believe this is when the federal government started to embrace the tech industry, the relationship with the federal government was started by former President Barack Obama during his campaign and subsequently expanded while he was in office. Obama first supported technology via social media on the presidential campaign trail in 2008. Facebook had been founded on Harvard University’s campus four years before his campaign, and due to its connection with the younger electorate, he leveraged it in a way not seen before, though it has been seen since with Donald Trump’s embrace of X. Obama’s campaign used Facebook to target younger voters, empower grassroots organizations, and drive small donations that helped push Obama’s breaking haul during his first run. Seeing how engaging with technology in novel ways helped lead to Obama’s win, it’s no surprise that he ended up embracing it during his first term.
One of the first moves that Obama made was to nominate a chief technology officer of the United States. Aneesh Chopra served as the first CTO of the U.S. and helped push forward technological adoption on the federal, state, and local levels during his tenure from 2009-2012. He championed many initiatives during his time there, but the few that jump out to me and really helped to move the relationship between tech and the federal government forward were the Open Government Initiative, the HITECH Act and Startup America.
The Open Government Initiative was built around three core principles, the first being “transparency,” which was meant to make sure that federal government information was available to the public. It also led to the creation of data.gov, which now holds thousands of data sets from federal agencies. And like any organization, the other two principles were “participation” and “collaboration” to reduce the number of decisions being made in a silo.
The HITECH Act (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act), which came out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, was comprehensive legislation aimed at rebuilding America after the 2008 financial crisis. A major win of the HITECH Act was that it significantly increased the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) from 10% in 2008 to over 95% by 2017. Offering financial incentives to hospitals that showed meaningful use of EHR technology and giving hospitals a three-step approach to EHR adoption helped increase the probability of adoption. The first step was about capturing and sharing data, the second involved advanced clinical processes, and the last was what health should be about, which was improving outcomes. Obama’s administration did not only look to improve health outcomes of Americans via the Affordable Care Act, but it also looked to implement the use of technology to improve health outcomes of Americans as well.
Startup America came about in 2011 with a focus on increasing the amount of high-growth companies across the country and not only in traditional startup hubs like the ones found in California, Massachusetts, and New York. The effort had two key components, starting with the Startup America Partnership led by AOL co-founder Steve Case (Case Foundation) in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation, which is a nonpartisan organization rooted in increasing economic mobility. The second component was the Startup America Initiative, which included government policies and programs administered by the federal government. The largest policy actions that came out of it were the creation of the Small Business Investment Company Early-Stage Innovation Fund — which provided $1 billion to match private sector investments in early-stage companies — increasing the speed of patent processing, and expanding the Small Business Innovation Research program. In the private sector, Intel’s venture capital arm committed to invest $200 million in American startups and IBM pledged $150 million to entrepreneurship programs. This stable bridge that had been built between the government and technology improved things for everyone, while the current version via Trump and Elon is good for no one.
Instead of using the foundation that Obama built to continue to bring much-needed technology to the government that would improve the lives of everyone in America, Trump is instead choosing to demolish it by firing the whole 18F group, which was what people thought DOGE was going to be. 18F was a government agency created to make it easier for federal agencies to build, buy, and share software that would move their missions forward. When one-third of DOGE employees quit because they did not want to use their skills to erode the trust that U.S. citizens should have in the government, it was great to learn that these employees were formerly part of the U.S Digital Services, which was created by the Obama administration aimed to modernize federal government websites.
Often the work of one president is claimed by their successor, but when it comes to which president truly has embraced technology and the people within it, members of the tech right for some reason are overlooking all the work that Obama’s administration had done when talking about the relationship between the government and the tech community more broadly. So thanks Obama for doing what Elon thinks he is doing.
