college fixes some of this album. one of the lies that we used to be good at educational testing but as long as there has been international testing, the u.s. has done poorly. motivation is the question. they did a fantastic paper on what the two groups control and experimental. one group of students was told that the test score would follow them so it would go on to transcripts and employers who graduate schools. the control group did not

pay the test group outperformed the control group. differently ifm they think the test mattered. that students invest maximum effort in the sat. this kind of testing does not have high stakes for them. we can motivate them to take the test motivating them to actually invest their top effort is one of the hardest things. that is the major empirical challenge is motivation. how can that change over time? one thing that is happening is + is something they put in a transcript and resume but employees don't know what that means. save that student got a 1200 on the sat. people can interpret that. not interpretable.

you would think that would become more meaningful to employers. this regimeing that does is there is a signaling and screening argument for college that colleges valuable because it simply acts as a screen to remove certain people in the population. employers want to know you have been vetted. this is a good opportunity to find out if this is true. if it's a screening process, tests would not matter to employers. i found that that the biggest problem. >> another couple of quick comments. if the common core is a good idea, a move toward deeper learning and the same effort in referenced in terms of higher education but the rollout

has been a disaster. inpare that to what happens the reagan administration when we adopted medicare and medicaid in order to decide code payer kinds of norms and premises that would make sense when you ended up rolling it out,atw, did an rfp and spent $600 million on a six-year random experiment. which gaveby rand policymakers on all sides of the equation very solid reference about what to do in terms of where the pain points were in copayments and what made sense. imagine if we had done something like that for this common core. if we actually went out and did

testinga pilot test when it is important and costs significant amounts of money can really pay off area just a comment on the chemistry major, most jobs right now if you look at the oban network in the department of labor, there are hundreds of jobs and occupations that require the cons of critical thinking skills. job students will not get a they thunder undergraduate major. they will get looked at first because of their employability more generally. >> questions? you, it has been provocative. .

i know the focus is on standardized tests but the recommendations that are in your paper, is your conclusion that nobody is working on those and there are no alternative that the heavy lifting is not already going on and there are results from it that are positive ?ustome are think institutions interested in these questions and solving the but they tend to work with them at the institutional level. it is not clear -- one of the issues with the local control we have at university which i agree with and want to preserve is that it is a very weird mix of federalism inside the american university system where if you were to design -- to design a system from scratch, you would not have the mixture of things colleges have local control over. we built the university system as a finishing school for elite

white male wasps and tried to expand that and grew that into being a system for everybody. --re are these where kind of weird kind of legacy situations as to who has control of the system. i believe that many institutions are working hard and i believe many professional organizations are working hard. i do not believe that there's the necessary kind of concert of movement and coordination and information gathering to assure that is resulting in outcomes that will work for everybody. i don't mean to imply that other people are not doing these things. i think it's important for the kind of people that are in my world versus the people who are inclined to be skeptical to recognize the moment of danger we are in. does that answer your question?

>> sorry, i'm not supposed to do a follow-up. the values are exactly what you are talking about it they are utilized in many institutions reflecting the local but they also have validity and reliability. do they have scalability in terms of the nationwide experiment? the reality is there is a multistate collaborative going on now that will, indeed come out with validity and reliability at scale. nationalook less the reliability data around it but it addresses all of what you're talking about as far as local control and the control by faculty and other educational it hasionals are you standards without the standardization of a single test. it is based upon the work that students are already doing in the correct him and co-curriculum assigned by faculty.

if they are going to have motivation, they will have it because it results in a grade that allows them to move forward. we are also externally validating on a national scale. it is way beyond what you are suggesting but it's not quite there yet. it will be and we will have results from that in august and september. there were 100 institutions participating in it and hundreds of faculties validating it and scoring it. expand that 100 university scale to 2000 universities. validity is never a destination. we need to continue to validate these things over time. i'm eager to collect as many different kinds of information that's the waye not to fall to anyone instrument. i applaud what's going on there and i await to see the results

and i want to keep the rusher on together more and different kinds of data so eventually all these things will cross validate each other. one of the things i am interested in is not allowing a single test to become the criterion of the set. i appreciate that faculty controlled kind of assessment. hopefully in 10 or 20 years, we will have that kind of data which will demonstrate the validity help to validate each other and other kinds of entrance we can work on. i think it's important work area >> we are out of time so thank me -- join me in thanking our panelists. [applause] thanks to all of you for coming. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> if you missed any of this discussion, you can find it in the c-span video library at www.c-span.org. we have more live coverage coming up today on c-span. beginning at 2:00 p.m., it theern it's a review of nuclear agreement from 20 years ago. hosted by the carnegie endowment for international peace and we will have a live beginning at 2:00 p.m. eastern. at 5:30 p.m., the author and former white house to mystic policy advisor will discuss what he believes private philanthropy distinguishes the u.s. from other nations and plays a crucial role in keeping our communities healthy and our economy growing and our government limited and that is live at 5:30 p.m. eastern on c-span. thanks, remarks from mike dickerson, a former google engineer to help text that

healthcare.gov website. he and his team's folk at the computer history museum in mountain view, california. they helped fix the health care website and their new project on criminal back around checks for gun purchasers. [applause] >> now for tonight's program. in october 2013, the obama administration faced a very large to mr. crisis. -- domestic crisis. healthcare.gov, the portal the nation was supposed to use to sign up for health insurance under the affordable care act was in shambles. it was several months late, and more than 300% over budget. it looked and worked or didn't work like the internet of 1996. the consultants and experts who had built up for the government were warning that it would take millions more, and more weeks if not months to fix. and then something quite amazing happened, largely due to the

creativity of the president himself, and entrepreneurial team of young engineers and project managers from silicon valley, came to the rescue. working day and night from maryland, they completely rebuilt healthcare.gov in a few short weeks. the total cost was the single-digit millions. and the new site, version 2.0, was a complete success. 18 million americans have signed up for health care because of it. from that sort of like environment has emerged to remarkable digital efforts within government and what president obama calls the 21st century equivalent of the peace corps. what is the u.s. digital service, the other is an organization called 18 f, and together they are calling on digital professionals to washington other places around the country to live the 21st century bureau -- to lift the 21st century bureaucracy and its technology into the digital century. the agencies who have experienced it now say they will never go back to the old way of doing things. tonight, we have three founders

with us, along with u.s. digital services offices assigned to the department of education. you going to explore with them this quiet revolution from its roots in the dark days of healthcare.gov one. oh two the bipartisan victories is now winning in washington today. please join me in welcoming mikey dickerson, hillary hartley, he leave and ike, and haley vandyke and lisa galopter. [applause] >> hi, guys. >> hello. >> they are not in t-shirts and they are not all guys. >> summer in skirts. -- some are in skirts. [applause] >> is the most unique panel we have had tonight for a number of

reasons. really glad to have you here. rather than my trying to introduce what each of you does, and what you are doing now, when you introduce yourselves briefly. i would also like you to add what it was you were doing just before you started doing what you are doing now. >> i am mikey dickerson, right now i am the administrator of the u.s. digital service. as a government word that means manager, and right before i got there to do this, if you count this as the healthcare.gov story, right before that, i was here working just across the street at mco that google. i was a site reliability engineering manager there. hillary: i came to the federal government through the presidential service, and at the end of my fellowship, we

launched atf. there it was a much more dramatic story there. 18 f. i have been working with government for about 20 years, which is crazy to me. it was always sort of from the outside. when i found out about the fellowship, about where i saw government going and what i wanted to do and how i wanted to have an effect on the services that all of you use, the fellowship philly the right fit for me. -- felt like the right fit for me. i came to government for a short stint and have been there ever since. >> a short stint. >> it was supposed to be about six months. didn't go home after six months. >> hello, good evening. i'm the chief digital services officer at the u.s. department of education. i have been in government a whopping eight months now, my

birthdays april 6. -- my first day was before that, april 6. i had of zero civic stuff. right before this i was running digital for bt, black entertainment television network, a viacom network. >> my name is haley vandyke. i was breaking a few bones trying to get usgs set up and created. >> thanks. what is the problem? [laughter] >> who is going to take that one? >> i'm hoping someone else will jump on that one. >> the problem is so multifaceted, it's hard to describe. the biggest issue is that the private sector over the last two decades has spent an incredible amount of time and energy improving itself and getting really, really great at building digital services that delight citizens and people across the world.

all sorts of innovations that we don't think of as innovations in a more place in the last two decades. also to things. -- all sorts of things. the biggest problem is that all of those gigantic transitions have completely skipped over government. government is still sitting back in the early 90's, where cloud is illegal, where actual user needs are drawn from everything to how we do digital services and how we write and think about policy. that is the biggest issue. but there's another side of the problem, inside government. which is the government is really good at persisting. it has gotten incredibly good at developing processes that maintain the status quo. to the incredible detriment of government. there is such a pervasive concern, a concern of failure, essentially.

it has created this downward spiral where the status quo has become the riskiest option. government has a really hard time breaking itself out of those molds. what we are trying to do is come in and break that cycle and i shall he bring in the private sector best practices that are very normal to original person in this room and transplant those into governments, where they are much less normal and very radical, to be honest. and actually try and shift or raise the bar and shift with the status quo is today. >> it would be really easy for us, looking from the outside in, to say that so typical. this is the federal government. they dug in, ossified, status quo. it would be a very simplistic way of looking at this. we rise have found it i shall he what you have found in digging in is it's a lot more subtle and complex then the simplest a few we might have. can you talk more about both of those things?

>> i would like to talk a little bit about 2012. the group of people that started the presidential innovation fellowship. it really was the m.v.p. of this movement, in terms of saying we know there are amazing, brilliant people inside the agencies who live and breathe their job, and live and breathe this idea that all they want to do is do their job that's helping government be better. for whatever reason, many of them are stuck, or they don't have the in-house talent to get it done. they've tried to procure things, and maybe that has gone awry. todd park and other folks that saw this need and said let's see if we can entice people from the tech sector, people from industry to come in for short tours of duty. six to 12 months, let's start there and see if we can attract this new time of technologist that has hearts the size of jupiter, that are very mission and impact oriented.

that has hearts the size of jupiter, that are very mission and impact oriented. get them partnering with these people who have amazing ideas, who are stuck for one reason or another. it worked. i think that is really what we are really building on today. yet, you can take a survey and say that is blowing up and that is blowing up and we need to help out here, but there are people on the ground trying their hardest to get that done and are stuck. >> as someone who has partnered with an agency, that is 100% true. they are welcoming this change and embracing the change and asking for more. somebody said to me, i thought you would be wearing a cape. [laughter] they are inviting us to do more and talk about how to change, make culture change and shift. things like human centered design thinking about how to put

the customer first and foremost. how do you extend it beyond tech and put it into policymaking and user centered government? any tools that i can add to fix things, they are all about it. john: the name todd park has come up and for those of you who don't know, todd was one of the leaders who created the presidential fellowship and one of the cofounders. one of the real drivers behind the u.s. digital service. he is sitting right there. high-five. -- hi todd. [applause] a shout out for todd. there is a team of people sitting over there waiting to recruit at the end of the night. if you are interested, make a

beeline to those rows. you talked about what the vision is and you have defined it, but i will go back to healthcare.gov. these things were not happening, the vision for today, and maybe the things that are most representative of the problem were really on display. talk a little bit about what you encountered when you came into clean this up. mikey: sure. [laughter] this is a little bit like reliving the drama of the past. my answer to this has changed over the last year and a half. there are many layers to what was going on there. at the surface, if you just walk in as an engineer and look at other engineers and see what

they are doing and how they are doing it, it was total insanity when you first looked. there were 55 different companies contracted to work on different parts of healthcare.gov, which is a fairly complicated operation, but it is not that complicated. there were -- this is another piece of insanity -- nobody knows how many people were engineers, developers -- hundreds. they were in dozens of different buildings. not only did they have any habit of working together, in most cases, they were for bid and to speaking with each other -- forbidden to talk to each other because of contracts in the government. the government did not do the job of coordinating of how this would go.

they don't really have that skill set. [laughter] the government just not really equipped to do that job. so, what was going on made zero sense. a lot of the things we did which was like battlefield medicine that helped in a short period of time was stuff that seems silly to explain now which is like having people meet together. like, come on. you mentioned in your introduction of the makeshift headquarters in maryland, there is an operation center still going full blast. we still have people there. we are not sure if they are there tonight because it is not a high-volume night. it is still there. installing monitoring, that was the thing that was not done.

with these hundreds of people who are responsible for little pieces would have to collaborate together to make the system work, we didn't know if they were up or not except by cnn. that is what our monitoring was for the first three or four weeks or so. john: you mentioned your view has changed. what has changed? mikey: all of that stuff i said is still true. it is just that if you want to know why it got to that point, there is a lot more to it. it goes to a very simplistic explanation would be that the government was stuck in the past. that is true enough. it is hard to figure out -- the government is not actually

stuck. it does change. it moves forward, for whatever forward means at the time. it just is at a pace that is a lot slower. it was designed to be this way. how many people -- forget people in jobs like ours -- politicians run for office and say their vision is to have government run like a business. we don't want the government to do that for the most part. we don't want social security to radically change behavior between this year and next year. that would be not popular, not good to people depending on those benefits. that is not really a business you want disrupted. the government was designed with values that everybody will get equal protection under the law. that is another strength businesses do not operate with.

take whatever tech company or restaurant, take any of them, all of them have put thought into who is their target market and it is not the entire united states. everything from the declarations on the walls, the prices and hours have been chosen targeting the customer, not the entire country. the government is trying to serve the entire country at once. john: one of you used the term plans to make a website. -- the term planet scaled website. haley, you referred it to everybody uses websites every day, yet the government has not been ready to do that. it is only just now getting out. the government has not been ready to do that. why has it taken so long? we are now, we are 20 years into the world wide web and probably 15 solid years for e-commerce.

does it have to do with the way it is structured? as nobody been the quarterback until the president? what are your theories? haley: there are a lot of factors. one large one is how we actually buy services. unfortunately, government is so simply a waterfall shop through and through. everything we do is through very, very long processes, particularly in procurement. that is what you see with how the private sector operates and how government does today and what we are trying to shift. we buy software the same way we buy battleships which is five-year long requirements

gathering data before we ever build any sort of thing. it is usually another five years after that that we push it it into production. that simply does not work anymore as everybody here knows. i think -- the processes are propped up through intricate, wetland tendon rules and -- well intended set of rules and regulations -- well intended rules and regulations. it is clashing as we look into modernizing in ways that are able to move quickly and adjust to services. even for the private sector, they wanted that. we kind of forget some of these innovations have happened rather fast and many systems are not designed to move that quickly. this is an incredibly new innovative way of looking at

buying from services from the private sector. hillary: one of the things that came out was a proposal. ez it is really trying to -- disrupt how it is done. maybe 1000 pages long and we will gather all the requirements and you are going to bid on this and come back to was in two years. so, they were trying to think of new ways to get procurement in the way government buys things. we are running two big experiments. in our case it's software. one is the marketplace. it resides in this ecosystem and

so it is a consultancy in federal government for the federal government. 18 f they work with , agencies to make a build or buy decision for you. we will help you figure out what it is you need or how we will get it built. one of our lines of businesses is around acquisition services. our two big experiments -- a blanket purchase agreement which is a vehicle for vendors and companies to get into a pool that has been precleared and can do business with the government easily. the concept of it is not

terribly radical, but how we got vendors into it shook things up a little bit. instead of having give us a 300 page rfp, we said to compete into this, here is an application programming interface, a set of data. here's the problem statement. build it. we want to see how you do it. we want you to understand that you know what we mean by fragile, doing research, making the design. it will be open sourced. we want to be able to see it and judge it. we give them two weeks to build something. i believe it was about 17 companies that are now in these pools of precleared vendors that use agile, lean methodologies.

john: is anybody look at you and say two weeks? are you kidding me? hillary: that is the concept in our world. the main environment product. -- the minimum viable product. that is all we wanted. it can be a prototype. we just want to see that officially you can build something and activate it and that you understand all the ways we work. some of the results surprises us -- there was one story. john: go ahead. hillary: there is one story and i will not tell you the name of the company but they sent us an e-mail during the questioning phase. we get these typical phases of this procurement. they were asking us for the data on a cd, because they didn't

understand the requirement that there is this open data on the internet, an api. what is an api? so, there were some surprising moments. by far, we now have 17 awesome teams that our inbox, our intake is exploding. we only say yes to about 10% of the products that come to us for many reasons. the main reason is we simply do not have the people to do it. this allows us to scale and partner with the business community in a way that is revolutionary with how software gets done. it is raising the bar, sitting that standard and having the business community come along with us to spread it out through all of the contracts. john: i think i heard the phrase more than any other which was modern software techniques.

i ask people what they are doing and they say we are using modern software techniques. is that what you are talking about? a business practice. one more question and then we will dive into some real stories about things you have been doing and working on. are you reading my notes? [laughter] somebody explain the difference between the relationship between usds and atf. -- 18f. haley: i think when we look at government overall -- it can feel like this monolithic institution. it is important to realize it is much less than a single company and more like an entire industry that needs instruction. in order to do that, we came up

with a very interesting three layered technique on how we could actually insert agents at each level to help catalyze the change. the first layer is the united states digital service where we work at. we deploy teams into agencies -- the most talented people -- to work on the most mission-critical important services across government. the second layer is also a part of the united states digital service. we felt like the important thing to institutionalize this is to disguise them and plug them into the agencies so they become part of their host environment. they can act working on that transformation and change from the inside. the third layer has an incredible superpower which they

can operate and function like a business. called 18f. they have this incredible model where they are fee for service. any agency that wants to work with them can. this brings in a huge opportunity to scale in a way we can. they work really well together in terms of top-down, dropping into what the highest need is. 18f can work from the bottom up and scale some of the common services and functions. mikey: the business models are different. you need both of them. they are both a critical piece of the solution. being cost reimbursed, general services administration is the home agency for 18f.

it is the agency whose purpose is to provided cost reimbursed services so they can scale as big as they can. they can build the products of the shared service and maintain it for a long time. it has one disadvantage which like vampire rules, you have to be invited and do an agreement before you can go into a place that might need your help. at the white house, we are limited on the amount of money that they will appropriate to us so we can only do a small amount of things that cannot sustain something for decades. we can take on stuff in the scale of months or a few years. we are well-positioned for that. we have the kool-aid man who can just go through the wall.

[laughter] why is it called 18f? haley: it is an homage to 30 rock. the headquarters are the corner of 18 and f. there was a great scene with a were brainstorming the different names. a whiteboard full of things. we came up with about four that we sent to the lawyers. 18f was the only one that did not really pose any problems. it stuck. i really like it. john: i was really hoping it was like area 51. something dark about it. and there you are at the corner of 18 and f street. let's talk about serious things to develop and revise services.

you're in an agency that touches everybody in the country -- education. you guys have done some very great things. talk about what you have been up to. lisa: my first project was something called college scorecard which released december 12. it is actually a presidential initiative, partnering with the department of education. the premise was college education is the surest path to the middle class. unemployment rates with high school diplomas only is something like 12%. if you have a college degree, it is 3%. over the course of your lifetime, it is worth $1 million more over the course of your lifetime. getting a college degree is super important, but the people in most of need of it -- first

generation college goers, people who are learning english -- they don't have access to great support systems, advisors. how do you actually get this kind of information of what makes for a good school, what will give you the best value -- how do you get that in their hands? that is what we were charged with building. i showed up and there was a meeting with the president of week before i joined. they said that lisa will fix that. john: and there you went. lisa: it was a fascinating experience, coming straight from the private sector and understanding the manning to of how important -- magnitude and -- the magnitude of how important -- magnitude and how important this is to shape the country. it is every person in the country had a bachelor's degree, imagine what it would do to the economy and the jobs.

the magnitude of the problem is really awesome. it was an interesting experience. i got on the ground and had to understand how government works, but more importantly what this looks like and what we needed to build because nobody really had a clear definition. so, we went around and talk about the stakeholders and the folks creating policy, review and the data and the white house. four days into the project, how do students look for colleges? i have to talk to some students. i was in d.c. for four days and i didn't know anybody. somebody on my team said you can go to the mall and that was genius. the mall where the kids hang out. or the mall outside the building?

the washington mall. [laughter] that happens when you don't know d.c. mikey: it was school field trip season too. lisa: we got people from wisconsin, nebraska, minnesota. it was a brilliant idea. we got to talk to a high school in anacostia. we talked to people who had written letters to the president. we talked to charter school folks. high school folks in iowa. we gathered all this information and figured out what we needed to do. and get the information into the hands of students so they will know what they will pay to go to college and that it is not the sticker price. it might be better going to a private school rather than a public school. understanding how the school is helping the needs of its students.

looking at how much debt you might leave school with and looking at the earnings you will have after attending the school see can actually know you can pay off any loans. these were the new data metrics we are trying to get out there and change the conversation. we want consumers to be able to get the information. we wanted to change the conversation systemically. the first thing we built was something, college scorecard. it was mobile first. it does exactly what we set out to do. a minimally viable product. i'm really proud of it. more importantly is we actually opened up the data. our password was actually set the data free.

mikey: it is still the password. lisa: it is all completely in the open. we built an application programming interface that would enable other tools, other organizations that might be creating for niche audiences. the idea is if we can actually get this out into the industry and make this the standard. right now the products are being exclusive. is that the right metric? actually getting the data that we think is a board to look at out to students wherever they might be. you want to get the content out to your audience wherever they are at whatever time.

that is exactly the idea behind creating this. we actually built the consumer facing tool on top of the api. i think we were one of the first organizations and government to actually use our own service to power the website. john: how is it going? lisa: we have one million users within the first week. it was not just a consumer tool but we also had seven people who stood up with us at launch that incorporated the data into their own tools. mikey: one million in the first week. this is not the first time this was tried. in the previous year, the old version did 168,000. i got asked that question by the

president in the meeting we had and i did not know, so i went and looked it up. john: how did the president react? mikey: he moved on. [laughter] if i can add some more to lisa's story. she spoke to users, the user centric design, even policy decisions of what data we would release which was incredibly touching. this was the end of the three years that when the administration announced its intentions to do something like the college scorecard. the idea was incredibly controversial. the higher education people had issues. it was a massive policy issue by the time we got involved.

at the meeting on april 1, we heard from the president, the vice president, secretary duncan -- all of them had impassioned views and the president made clear what he wanted to get done. after that was over, we had some really frank conversations with policy decision-makers and said we can help you do this. we can make a website thing, whatever it is you want, we can do that on the timetable you are talking about, but it is going to have to be -- we will have to have a lot of say over the product decisions because it is not going to be possible to do your typical government christmas tree, waterfall plan with everybody hanging their pet

project as an ornament on it somewhere. that cannot happen in six months. given we were up against the clock, people agreed to the terms and conditions that would not oftentimes agree to. after that, we were out on a limb and had to deliver it. we made that promise a week before lisa started and i told her this is what we got and we have this much time to get it done. we sweated it until the end and it was a stressful launch. once that thing was actually released, it got very positive reviews. the agency is not accustomed to that happening. [laughter] it is true. lisa: it was really successful and had a lot of great reviews. that are spanish-language tools now. students can do side-by-side

comparisons. it is really tremendous. there is still much more work to be done. part of what we are doing is continuing this. i think one of the incredible things which is why the partnership worked so well with how the government can be effective -- development started on the project in the middle of june. the api, front and and all of that stuff went from the middle of june to the middle of september so three months. not for nothing. even private sector, that would be fantastic. this is a partnership. we actually partnered on this project together to bring it all to fruition and make it happen. we would not be able to do it if it weren't for the services and platform that was already being built. that is how we were able to get it done.

hillary: a great partnership to talk about. we were able to do an agreement with them to put a development team together. the infrastructure that we had our e-mail. 18f playing that support structure for the other two layers came into play. the other one, talking about how we work and why it is different now. 18f has done this a couple of times, it obviously was never as important as the president. the president wanted a ranking. that kind of iterated and changed and it was due to this team saying that is great, mr. president.

we should talk to high school kids, their parents and high school counselors and figure out what they need. do they want a ranking or do they want to be able to search and compare and contrast? lisa: i was not at this meeting. we were going to have an unprecedented kind of thing. the thing that was important that we focus on was doing the right thing for the audience. we took into account what was important for policy, data. we took that into account and put the user first. john: there are two other not universally needed, necessarily, projects you have been working on, but big, gnarly areas with big policy implications. one is the veterans administration. the second is immigration and

the whole green card system. you guys have taken both of those on. somebody describe those as really big hairballs. can you talk a little bit about those because those are even more in some ways significant. mikey: that was when we talked last july. you can add other agencies to the list. v.a. and dhs -- you want me to do it? so, v.a. problem statement in a nutshell -- we are creating disabled veterans had a pace we -- at a pace that we cannot absorb into the rest of the system. you can probably guess the foreign-policy decisions. it has been overwhelming the rest of the system since then. backlog of disability claims at one point was 600,000 or so.

the high water mark was hit around march 2014, just a few months before we came onto the scene. delayed disability claims in the case of the v.a. very often mean a last in treatment which could -- a lapse in treatment which could be physical therapy for a new amputee because we create a large number of people with that problem. hearing loss is common and mental health issues are common. untreated post-traumatic stress and depression is not only a life-threatening situation for the veteran, it is for a lot of people around the veteran as well. if you follow this part of a news, 2014 to 2015 or so, the job was try to make the processing of those disability claims more efficient.

and the appeals to the disability claims more efficient. we have to get better at exchanging, doing handoffs between department of defense when you separate from active duty and handed over to the v.a. eamthe customer, there is a s there were your medical records are supposed to leave the dod system and be picked up by the v.a. hospital network. that calls for something that sounds like an interoperable electronic record. that was largely done and still largely done. that mandate for interoperable medical records is several years old. and it was met so far by the dod approximately one file box average paper records hiring a contractor to scan them and sending them as a pdf to the va.

we have made it somewhat better, but there is still a long way to go on medical records. the nutshell version of what there is to do at the v.a. and , we are in the middle of it. john: there was somebody else working from google on that? matthew weaver? mikey: yes. john: is matthew here tonight? mikey: i think he is in san francisco. john: they get to pick their own job piles. [laughter] i don't know if you detected or not, but anyway anyway, matthew's handle within the v.a. is rogue leader. if you are a "star wars" fan, you will get the implication. mikey: on the business card. yet, he is here. he has been a big part of the v.a. effort. you brought up immigration. that is thersion of process by which you enter the united states on either in immigrant visa or not immigrant visa.

either way, particularly for those trying to immigrate and become american citizens the , process is incredibly difficult. it involves interacting with a lot of different bureaus of the u.s. government, all of whom act as if they have never heard of each other or to interact with them you get something from , one place and you physically carry it your self to the next government office when you give it to them. sometimes you have to carry a package of papers in a sealed bag you are not allowed to open. and you take it with you to like the border crossing. you have to pay fees at a half-dozen different places throughout this process. each of those fees will be a different amount to figure out to interact with a different payment system. you might be able to use a credit card or might not. you have create a new login and password each time. all of these things are true about the immigration process. we came along and attached ourselves to the side of an estate initiative at the agency called u.s. citizenship and

immigration service which is part of the homeland security. it has been there for years , and they are working on this problem and we kind of picked up , an accelerated some pieces of it. we did successfully put online in a new form in a new actual human design form which is called and id process which is , how you get a replacement green card and you lose it. this is your piece of paper, your documentation that gives you the right to work in the united states as well as not be deported from the united states. losing it and not being without it is stressful. it used to be six to nine months if you were lucky after you mailed in the paper form when you got your replacement back. it is on the order of a few weeks now. after the launch of the new thing. we started with that because it is a relatively simple process as these things go. it is only a couple of forms and a couple of fees.

it is really high volume when it affects a lot of people. there are high hundreds of thousands, 700,000 transactions , 800,000 a year. john: haley. haley: the immigration one is really fascinating of an example for a couple of reasons. one is that we never say there is a new idea in government, because if you thought of it, someone else has thought of it. lo and behold the immigration system is actually not a new idea. it was tried more than a decade before. it has been underway for a long time. we will not go through the numbers -- billions that has been spent on trying to digitize the immigration system before then. mikey: like to. [laughter] haley: yeah as a taxpayer, it , hurts my soul. the point is this process has , been underway for over a

decade. it was less than a few weeks, actually three months in when we were able to drop in and a very -- drop in with a very tiny team of five people to when they showed up and got it out the door. what that means is the folks who are out of the boundary working on this inside the agency were also the people who fixed it. it shows that part of the context you are working in here, you cannot actually change the context and the environment and have different results without a huge amount of risk. you have to poke in a strategically place all the right pressures on the system and it could shift faster than you think which is why i like the immigration example so much. john: for decades, we have been hearing presidential candidates, other politicians use this phrase waste, fraud and abuse. ,i was wondering what that would actually look like if it ever got uncovered. i don't want to be the one to

suggest fraud or abuse is going on here at all but the stories , you have been telling for the last hour or so are certainly stories in this day and age of 2016, not for any intentional purposes, it is not functioning. mikey: yeah. haley got out a second ago in the beginning, we have -- back to your very first question, which was hard. what is the problem? a big many. a big part of it is the normalization of failure, by which i mean we have arrived at a state where the status quo way of doing something, which is put out for an rpi, wait for three or four months look at the

business that comes back go , through the process, do all that stuff. hire a huge government, hire a business who does almost all of its business with the government to do the waterfall plan that you are used to, spend seven years and a couple billion dollars because this is a fact about the government. it is easier to spend a couple billion that you hire a few people and only spend one million. that is true. all of these things, this is all guaranteed not to succeed. there is a spanish group study that we cite a lot that says 94% of government i.t. efforts come significantly over budget or behind schedule or deficient. o'er all three of those things. that is the outcome 94% of the time. haley: 40% of them never see the

light of day or ship functioning. mikey: 40%. this happens all the time. i say the normalization of that what i mean is nothing bad will , happen to any of the people involved in the contracting decisions that made that, which makes it the safest thing for them to do. when we say that, haley said the riskiest way to do a project. it is in the sense that the project will not succeed, but it is the least risky from the perspective of the people in the government who are responding to a different set of incentives. because nothing -- again, a project does not work, nothing will happen to you. what will get you in trouble is if you try something new and dangerous, if that goes anything less than smashingly well, then there will be a lot of attention on you. and then all of the oversight and accountability mechanisms of government like congress conducting investigations, the gal, government accountability

office conducts investigations. , your internal inspector general -- it will be all bad. if we only did one thing, we mostly talk about -- this is again something that has shifted over the last year -- it seemed year ago the real special sauce we were bringing into the government was these new ways of approaching technology problems and new this and knew that. that is true, but probably an even more important an ingredient in the special recipe is we are way too outsourced of risk from the perspective of the agency. we are term limited appointments. we are not, neither, nobody on this stage has in mind the my own career security as forefront. and is hopeless, by the way. it is a misunderstanding and a failure to understand to blame

the government employees for putting their career stability first, like everybody puts their stability first everywhere. everywhere in the whole taking , care of themselves and their family is just about the most important thing for anybody working a job anywhere. to be there as somebody that will not be there five years from now and obviously having somebody else to blame, that is a huge value-added. lisa: it is more than just career stability. i think you touched on it with the incentives of what success looks like is just different. i don't necessarily know it is about making sure that i have a job in 10 years. i think the definition of what win is and how i did my job is well is maybe not well aligned

with something of what they perceive is risk. we know risk is continuing the status quo. john: the statistic you mentioned earlier about if the status quo is 94% of all projects come in late over , budget or behind schedule. 40% never see the light of day. that is the norm. everyone is just working to the norm. that is part of what you guys are trying to change. i want to talk for a minute -- we have such great questions from the audience and i want to get to those. there are other subjects i wanted to talk about. you are doing this with a relatively small team. there are about 113 members of the u.s. digital service which span out across almost every agency in the government. maybe more. 185 people within 18f. in washington terms, you could put them on the head of a pin. i want to talk about the kind of person that it takes to be in -- on this team and to do what you do. it surely cannot be a good thing

to walk in and say i am from silicon valley, get out of the way. i will show you how to do things around here. [laughter] what kind of person is successful on your teams? haley: you raise a fantastic point. for, is, we are looking although we are not looking, they tend to find us -- an incredible combination of skill sets. it is not that anybody in our team can be the most technically competent in the room at any given moment, but we also have eq, an ability to communicate well to win over the people in the room. we actually had our first full year about a day or two ago where we had an online application available on the internet. we launched at the beginning of last year. we now have our first full year of data. in that year, we have had almost 4500 people apply. to give you a little bit of context, it turns out our

acceptance rate is way more competitive than harvard's because we are really looking , for the best of the best. i cannot tell you how incredibly thrilled i am to work with such a talented team, because the people of the united states digital service are phenomenal. we have this really interesting collection of leaders across the industry. everything from people like mikey who sets up the classes of engineers inside google. to the founding members of amazon. two people who took twitter's infrastructure to what it is now. it is an incredible collection of the smartest, most genuinely incredible people i could have ever imagined working with and they are inside the government which is the mind blowing part. i think that is a differentiating factor between the folks on our teams and any other team. they are coming in to do this not because they get to put the white house on their business card where they get to make tons

-- or they get to make tons of money because they are usually taking a pay cut to come into government, but they are not shabby salaries. they are coming because they want to make a difference in the lives of americans and want to work on things that matter. those of the type of people we are looking for. but like i said in the beginning they tend to find us because of if you are looking to have an impact, there is no better place to be working than the united states federal government. hillary: and we mentioned the term eq. we are really looking for people that can have empathy. that can have empathy with the people they are building services for, the people across the table from them. f, we really screen for that sense of mission driven, impact driven person.

that, absolutely we are screening for a certain skill set and certain level of skill, but really almost more than anything is that eq side of it. is are you here for the correct , reasons? because if you are not, once you hit that first bureaucratic wall, you will not want to hop over it. you are not going to know what to do. you will have to be willing to bash your head into the wall and figure out your way around it and keep going. add on that. someone coming straight from the private sector, in terms of the scale and impact of what it means. i worked on shockwave a little while ago but was basically the advent of animation on the web. before shockwave, the web was static traffic that did not move. i helped launch hulu. my code and my products have shipped to literally hundreds of

millions of people. i have had an opportunity to be really fortunate to kind of affect the way people consume media in a significant way. nothing compares to what i'm doing now. the ability to -- if i could just affect one person's life in terms of helping them go to college and make a better life for themselves, this would be worth it. i'm getting the opportunity to affect more people's lives and have real significant impacts. it is just, the scale is enormous and different from the private sector. mikey: i will be quick. i would say you have to be pretty good at whatever is your particular field of expertise. you have got to be reasonably confident in yourself in that field of expertise, because you will be in a lot of rooms where you will be the only one who has done an agile spread before and you need to explain how it is done, and you will need to be convincing when you do that.

a lot of times, you need to be very patient -- [laughter] and very resilient. and, ready to let, ready to be ok with it when you let other people take credit for the stuff that you have done. if you are all that stuff, then you're ideal for us. haley mentioned we are very selective. that is true. i would remind everybody who is listening though that there is no correlation between how good people are and what they do and how good they think they are and at what they do. [laughter] so, please do not hear that and think this is not for me. this is for some elite engineers somewhere else. you may be exactly that person whether you think you are or not. john: that is fantastic. one more question and then we will go to the audience. some ideas that come from this

president are not always the most popular in washington, especially with the people on the other side of the aisle. and so the natural question is, especially since he had such a high profile in leading the effort, how is this being received in washington? is it bipartisan? what sort of support is starting to get now? haley, let's start with you. haley: this is one of my favorite parts about the digital service. in the midst of all the soitical rhetoric, we hear much about pc and the two parties not working together. they have managed to thread through both sides of the aisle. it is the most fantastic example of a bipartisan agenda we can see today in washington. it is this incredible thing that is happening, where in the process of delivering processes topeople, making it easier give care and access to the people that need it.

we are also saving tons of taxpayer dollars and making government more efficient and effective at the same time which is both parts of what the aisle wants. i don't know if i agree with that assumption. we are getting tons of support all over d.c. whether it is from the agencies or the house. one of the recent developments we are very excited about was a couple of weeks ago, congress came out with our fy16 budget. which is a lot of insider based stuff, but the point is we received almost our entire funding request from a predominantly republican hill , which leaves a very strong bipartisan support of the work we are doing. we have a criteria that is mostly focused on how many users are going to benefit from the service. and it is truly providing a life-changing impact will service? what is the failure risk? what is the opportunity cost for not doing something differently?

the president and the gao, the internal auditor's office government , accountability office which are independent and works closely with the hill, they are almost exactly the same. the biggest problems that need to be solved everyone agrees with, because no one thinks that veterans should be waiting longer to get access to the ir benefits. no one thinks government should be wasting taxpayer dollars on things that can be much less expensive and work simply. it is an incredible coming together of both sides of the see -- d.c. mikey: the budget thing is super surprising. we will not tell you the half-hour version of it. i promise. but, people who do follow these things closely were dumbfounded , because not only were we funded -- not only are we a project that the president is very personally invested in, that was asking congress for money, this congress for money, but like, we are our

, appropriations land inside the white house. if there is one thing this congress does not want to add more money to -- there is a few of them, but the white house is high on the list, anyway. this is a very surprising outcome. haley and some other people helped. obviously i didn't know what i was doing and still don't. talke went to, we go and to the appropriations committee and we bring our powerpoint slides and make our sales pitch and we say this is what we are here to do and please give us money. they are very stonefaced and don't give much of a reaction. and then we find out when the spending bill comes out just like everybody else. we don't get any special insider access to that legislative process. john: this is a good segue into the first audience question. given this is the president's last year, what are the goals for 2016? can you talk about those? hillary? you want to go for it?

islary: from 18 f, which separate from the white house, our two big goals are to expand consulting services so we can help with the agency embedded teams that the usgs is getting into the agencies and we can help go in and be a startup team for certain agencies. we are expanding on that. we are also going around the acquisition space. i want to mention the marketplaces, and the purchase agreement we set up, and right now we are calling it micro purchasing. it is very easy to purchase something on a credit card in the government, but we have a spending limit of up to $3500. but we are doing as we are actually building a platform an , auction platform. if you are a developer and never have participated in some thing like that we are sort of doing , that. all of our code is open source.

we develop completely in the open. we pitch tasks, we pitch issues that have been written for certain projects. we are going to put this one up for auction. it is interesting because we have done it twice. we have done sort of two different taxa batches. -- task batches. the first time, the task got bid down to one dollar. the person was trying to make a statement. i am an open source developer. i would have done this for free, but pay me a dollar. the second time, we want to be stirring business. we want to be participating in the community. so, we made a few tweaks. we do not say you could not bid one dollar, it turns out that didn't happen this time, but another interesting plot twist but all of the final bids were between $250 and $350.

some was one task ended up being 18 lines of code which shipped in about 24 hours from the time the auction closed. we are changing the game on how services can be delivered and how we can scale our efforts. the plot this was actually that somebody again it was not one , dollar, but somebody actually fixed the thing that we put out to auction before it was over. [laughter] john: what about usds? what are you guys trying to get done this year? it was not quite the way you phrase the question, but it turns out there is a presidential election this year. it is almost a guarantee -- i know some of you have heard me say this at lunch. it is almost a guarantee that the next president and the next person in my job will not spend as much time together. unless the next administration has their own healthcare.gov and this becomes front and center

in the agenda again, which could happen. out howve got to figure to, if we assume for the moment that what we are doing, something worth preserving, how to create enough of our own reputation and our own relationships with the rest of the agencies and all of the layers of people that are still going to be there in 2017, that we continue on into the next term. this is the institutional conversation that started months ago inside it with us. it will go all the way to the end. that word can mean a lot of different things to people in washington. the place where we are evaluating on is just flat out delivering enough stuff that is enough value that we are worth continuing. i don't ask the mind -- we are criticized that we depend on

appropriation from congress every year. if they did not want to find it next year, they don't have to. if they don't want to under the next year, they don't have to. we depend on legislative power from the top of the agencies. top-down support. if we don't continually earn the right to exist, we will not. i am at peace with that, but it causes people stress. what we try to do for 2016 to make us worth continuing, we need to shift more stuff at the da. what i talked about the appeals process we are working on right now. we are on the hook to produce a new system for viewing social security, disability claims, adjudication not unlike the process of the v.a.. we have to improve the refugee admission process and a new one i mentioned, i wish there was

still only two, one of the newest think we are on to is if you follow really closely the white house talk about the executive actions on improving criminal background checks before you can buy a gun, we have entered work with the fbi and modernized that system as well. those are all things we need to show real results on this year. haley: if there are a lot of knowns, but one thing that is exceedingly clear is that technology will not become any less important to the government than it is today. it will become more important. the incredible transformation happening right now is that it is exceedingly clear that, the president or the ceo of the country, yes you have a background in policy, it is good if you have a background in economics, but there is another

way to store it out, and that is tech. understanding tech yourself or empowering pto, you can do the same thing with the country. that trend is not going to change. that is for sure. john: i have a question for you. not about 2016. it is an important question. this was the first time they had heard of collis carter. what are you doing to get the word out, clearly one million people have created user accounts. a lot of people could benefit. hillary: absolutely. the target audience is underserved communities. we talk a lot about high school students. over 24 yearsare old. it is really important. we built this product, and i am glad.

one little piece of what we are doing in 2016 which is actually building this culture of continuous improvement. part of that includes outreach, and part of that includes getting the message out there, guidance counselors who actually are reaching their students. how do we partner with third-party organizations and get them to use the data? there is a lot more. we did what i call a one out, but it will iterate from a future perspective but more importantly from an outreach perspective. and you actually don't need to have heard of it or gone to a.gov website to benefit as a student opening up the data that lisa did. that is the point. getting a push into where users currently are with different education websites. not every person thinks of going through .gov to get help for

things like this. we want to make it ok and push this location where the we currently are. john: two more questions. and then i have one more final question. what about pushback from the hundreds of thousands of contractors engaged in developing software the old way? you are so few in number and they are making a lot of money. those are the facts. [laughter] hillary: as i mentioned, we are very much trying to work with the interviewing and enable and empower small businesses to do work with the government. that is part of what the general services administration does. we are taking that mantle on the technology side of things. all of the things we are doing is really in service of that. all of the stuff i mentioned,

the marketplace, trying to get new businesses doing business with the government for the first time. the bounties, you have got to be registered for spam.gov. you need to be a registered business owner. people doing business for the first time, it is doing them a lens and a window into this new experience or you yes, there are absolutely things all over the country. and the government is making a money out of it. we are trying to -- and we have heard this in various ways -- shipping software, but at the end of the day we are shipping culture. fundamentally seeing a change to where these things can get done. it can be faster, cheaper. you don't have to pick two, which is the old adage. when you show that can be done with a group of people inside the government, then you also

show that you want -- we understand there are regular people doing this. it is 80 billion at least, $80 billion industry to do i.t. business with the government. you can't even see the. we are in that number. -- the dot we are in that number. you need to rely on the business community and the other vendors out there. what we can do is give the people we are working with a new experience, go through and design a new studio, go through an agile iterative cycle for the first time. they come to expect that from the next people they work with, and they will look for that quality in the next people they work with so the whole system sees change. john: great question. answer. mikey: all of us have a slightly different take on the strategy,

and that is fine. the remedy has great ideas. the point i would make is, it is to changedon't have every project in the whole entire -- we don't have to hit all of that $84 a year -- $84 billion a year. the projects i discussed, if we only ever affected those, i feel like what we would do was worth doing. that is .1. point one. yes, there is a joy nor was -- ginormous industry that will be contractor driven. to bring all of that work inside the federal government would be a staggering expansion, hundreds of thousands of more federal employees. an agency bigger than the v.a., which is the biggest in terms of employees. for that toend

happen. we are not making any efforts to make that happen. i feel like i say this in every event and it never gets printed in the press, it never gets picked up, it never gets amplified. we are not here to kill the industry. we wanted to continue to exist. i don't care if those same exist companies exist. we just need to fix the ecosystem a little bits of competition is more healthy. so that we spend -- so we can still spend. where's the government? the government will continue to spend a shitload of money. that is why it never gets quoted. [laughter] mikey: that is going to continue to happen. he will also make a lot of money, -- people will still continue to make a lot of money. , there would be an

improvement if either, if either we continue to spend exactly the amount we do, but the things that work when we are done, like if we did not have that 40% to that never saw the light of day, if everything actually works, even if we did not save a dime. if we get everything to work better, but we save money, that would be an improvement. we could do this without contractors. -- not do thisuld without contractors. they don't want to work like this either. we can save the environment, they would ask we love to work with us the way they used to working with us. i think government is actually popping up at a failing industry. i don't know who else does waterfall except for us now. people don't appreciate having the waterfall operating shop. mikey: we do what they hire us

to do. if we get smarter about directing them, then good. but they submitted bids to what hillary is talking about. experiment will stuff, making composition more competitive. they will adapt. it is up to us to set the direction, because we write the paychecks. mikey: what if there -- john: what if there is a realm for nondevelopers? for people that have more entrepreneurial business, not necessarily tech skills. i see you shaking your head, haley. haley: absolutely. we needd incredibly -- an incredibly diverse range. the best engineers as well as the best park managers, designers, researchers, policy experts, people generally done it getting shit in harsh environments.

no less of a hospitable environment and the government for actually getting stuff done. so if you are good at bureaucracy hacking, please apply. mikey: that is a real thing. john: the final question, and making it a little personal, you talked about the shipping culture not just simply services. shipping culture and having a culture of a two way street. i want to ask you as a final thought. how have you changed? how has this experience changed you, and what will you take away from this when you look back on it? honest, the way this has changed me, i will not know. i will never be as satisfied working on a project again.

impact of the federal government is so large and so meaningful in people's lives that i probablyon't know it yet, i will spend the rest of my life to find some thing that impactful once i leave here. for me, i have only been here a few months, and having worked for large corporations before, the way government works in the bureaucracy hacking and trying to get stuff done is not completely foreign to me. the thing that i have learned and that has kind of struck me the most is, i knew when i was joining my team members with it coalition would be super passionate and engaged and excited about what we were doing . what i did not know about the government when i showed up was, i was blown away by the people who i was partnered with their,

who show up every day, get out of bed, one foot in front of the other, because all they want to do is make the world a better place. get,education, easier to more equal across this country. i kind of expected all this resistance, and you hear about -- as an outsider you hear about how hard it is to get anything done and nobody wants to, they are a bunch of bureaucrats. and they are on the ground, and anybody just wants to fix things. that is a great learning experience for me. two,one, plus and now me. the culture has resonated with me most. i was a designer really building web services in the private

sector and mostly around and for government. i was coming from the design side with marketing and sales and this my stint until i get to the government. i have been preaching designed for a long time. focus on these, think about using these before stakeholder names. the thing that has stuck with me, because my job really from the beginning has not necessarily been delivering product but has been building this team, delivering this team. it is incredible what you can do when you put your focus on people. and on culture. the number of people that, when you ask them, what is the best thing about 18 f? the first thing out of my mouth is, the people. it, whenput a focus on

he put a focus on diversity, really wanting to hear from everybody, it is really incredible what that team can do . that will change how i approach everything from now on. john: mikey. mikey: i had the most time to prepare. [laughter] john: and you just took a big sip of water. mikey: yeah, i feel like i am ready to answer this question. first becauseedge i feel like it is important on behalf of all the people that work with us to acknowledge that , yes, none of our lives are ever going to be the same. a good number of people are going to, and have, and done a limited tour of duty like the video we showed, and go back to something resembling normalcy for what they were used to. i must likely am not. i can see that. i have no idea what is going to become of any of us.

we talked about this not because of conversations in front of 500 people, we have no idea what is going to become of us in a year or so. the human cost of doing this is high. the sacrifices people make to do this kind of work is high. and going into some debt to, but i won't spare you. i have become aware of that. i am aware of the job i do, which is a backstop to a lot of those people who come to work in the government and it comes to be cover. you mentioned mike weaver. he is a speech he loves to do about there is no possible informed consent here because it does not matter. what happens when we recruit and i talk to people one-on-one before they come and say, i have got to tell you how hard it is going to be, you will not believe me. and even if you do, even the hardest thing you can imagine, it is still worse. you will have so hard works and

moments,'s but we will get through it. so my frame of reference has changed the lot, where if he said, how are you going to change the government, i would say it is a dynamic process, it will be great. technology stuff. i don't think about that hardly anymore. why think about is the problems of managing enormous organizations -- what i think about is the problems of managing enormous organizations of people. it is not sufficient that they all want to get something really good done. they do all believe that they want to make service better for veterans as lisa said. one thing you need to come to terms with really fast. the first few weeks are hard, you meet these people that all want the same thing you do, but life is still very hard. we are building his organization ourselves where a couple hundred people now is enough to have it

dynamic. i face the fact we are not medically different from the people working in the -- magically different from the people working in the government. all the incentives we have to be difficult, to run a group and be in a consensus, it is the same. so wherever i go, i don't know, they are probably thinking about those kinds of problems mostly. thing? an i add one john: sure. is, thist strikes me is also a tremendous opportunity to have a platform, to have a platform to talk about building diversity. takenthink that we have on ownership of trying to build that out and prove it is possible and actually beat representative of the folks that we are trying to serve, but more importantly we understand and know we will be developed --

redevelop and have better voices and opinions if we look at diversity. that is one thing we try to showcase. especially in the tech industry, you talk about elite folks we are trying to recruit. the more we can actually showcase this is possible, to build this team because it is that isith diversity, an important take away as well. [applause] i feel like we have discovered something rare and wonderful tonight in the work you are doing and you as individuals. thank you for spending time with us and being revolutionaries. thank you so much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

live atr: coming up 2:00 eastern, it is a review of the u.s.-corian nuclear agreement and what lessons can be applied to the multinational agreement with iran. it is hosted by the carnegie endowment for the international peace in washington, and we will have it live starting at 2:00 eastern. an formerhe author white house policy advisor. philanthropyes distinguishes the u.s. from other nations and plays a crucial role in keeping the economy growing and government limited. that is if 5:30 on c-span eastern. at 8:00, and author moderates a panel on emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic.

here is a preview. to crowding more people together, we are also crowding animals together. we have more animals under domestication right now than in the last 10,000 years of domestication. huge numbers of livestock we are keeping right now, and many of them live in these farms. we have one million or more individuals crowded together, so they are the equivalent of urban slums. incidentally, it allows pathogens to exchange and make them more of your lint. -- make them more virulent. influenza is one. when the virus is dropped into the farms where all of these captive animals are crowded together, they start to change.

they replicate and mutate. that is what viruses do and they become more of your lint. . more virulent some have even involved in more ways that can impact humans. announcer: you can see all of that discussion on infectious diseases in the next pandemic begetting a cloceastern here on c-span. -- 8:00 eastern here on c-span. , the supremespan court cases that shaped our history come to life with the series ""landmark cases: historic supreme court decisions." we look at the most significant decisions in history. this ismarshall said different. the constitution is a political document. it set the political structures. but it is also a law. if it is a law, we have the court to tell what it means.

>> the fact that it is the ultimate anti-presidential case. it is not something that you want to do. >> who should make the decisions about those debates. in lochner versus new york, they said the supreme court should. announcer: we will look at a the that established positives as the supreme law. tonight at 10:00 eastern on c-span and c-span.org. "newsmakers" is pleased to welcome tom cole. tell us about you, because you wear a lot of hats. you could be considered the top gop strategist. another possibility , appropriations committee, the budget committee, roles

, member of the republican steering committee and others. what has put you in that middle of all the debates. kristina peterson is with us from the wall street journal covering congress, and scott want covers for the heel. do you think it is likely republicans can pass a budget? there seems to be internal division. this was the first time since republicans took rachel -- control of the house in 2011. do you think it is likely given where we are in the process? tom: if we took control, it would be the first time since the 1990's. . think we will get there a budget is always the perils and falling exercise. runas like falling will be over by the train, but it never happens.

we are continuing to negotiate in good faith. i don'think the budget is likely to change. much. that is a matter of law and it gets passed down. there are some things that some of the folks that have concerns are interested in in terms of addressing entitlements and rules changes that will force us to deal with unauthorized appropriations. i think those are good things. they need to be dealt with. you have got to count on the speaker and the leadership team to get it done, and hopefully they will. caucus has been making requests fairly difficult to grant, saying they want ironclad assurances some of these cuts will be enacted into law. -- beyond thee ability the speaker can promise. sometimes folks forget we operate in the house of

representatives. we are not the british house of commons. we don't have all of the legislative authority in a single institution. there is no way that speaker ryan can commit what the united states will do with a single word. i think sometimes people demand things that are unrealistic. in the process, there is only so much we can do from one chamber. a prettyress has truncated calendar this year in part because of the presidential nominating conventions. lawmakers will be leaving a bit earlier for the summer recess. do you anticipate that will mean congress money to pass a short-term defending bill in september in order to take the threat of a government shutdown off the table before the 2016 election? tom: more likely than not. we are proceeding the case, not waiting the budget. it will be easier if we get a

budget done. the hearing schedule is essentially complete. the first bill has a ready been marked up. we will be ready to move bills, but that is a larger leadership decision. we think we are ready? some of these bills are bipartisan. appropriations, something like milk on, which was marked up for military construction with veterans. others are much more controversy all. -- controversial. if hillary clinton -- scott: if hillary clinton wins thatvember, will add more to the lame-duck conversations? tom: i strengthens your hand a little bit. we have assented to very much in the balance as to whether or not that was elite republican.

republican. is it smarter to delay or smarter to expedite the process? you would hope that whoever is going to be the next president that we do them a favor and actually have a functioning government running. they will have to deal with the debt ceiling in march as it is. obviously they will have their new team nominated and confirmed . they don't have to be worried about writing a whole budget because we cannot get our job done. we will get it done. we were able to do it last time. for the first time in many years, all the bills went theugh both the senate and house committees and jurisdictions. while we do not have the fourth time we would have liked, we at least had products you uld sit down and negotiate over. kristina: you mentioned the senate hanging in the balance in november. if donald trump is the republican nominee, do you have

concerns that can make it harder for republicans to control the senate and even maybe retain house majority? tom: i think he is very unpredictable. i have seen him change numbers within the republican electorate i would not have thought possible six months ago. anybody that tells you that we ruz,nate prop -- trump or c they might definitely lose. they have had a better predictor than anyone so far this year. it is more likely to me that this campaign is very volatile political year. we have seen things not anyone in january was predicting. when will have to wait and see. there is an argument that trump will actually bring voters out, and the historic democratic coalition over to our side. voting in other areas. that is true all over the campus. i still think it will be a close

presidential election. 2008, and i don't think politics works anymore where you can have a life like we had in 1964 or the democrats had in 1962 -- 1972. that was terrible for republicans. two unpopular wars, bush at 30% approval ratings. financial disasters before the election. it should have been a democratic wipeout. it was not a great year, but john mccain still got what would have been 180 electoral votes today. got a good percentage. there is a based on each side. i don't think for him we nominate will put new york or california in play in the general election. both sides seem to have bases

that are fairly secure. that would suggest to me again probably that helps the house majority frankly right now if republicans retain that. i think it is going to be very, very close. scott: you know speaker ryan very well. you have served with a long time in the house. he gave a big speech earlier decrying, essentially the state of politics today, full of angry rhetoric and insults and even violence on the campaign trail from donald trump. do you think the speaker's speech will have any impact on the campaign as is enfolding -- unfolding, or will that fall on deaf ears? to: frankly, it never fails pander to the angels of our spirits, so to speak.

in theto get caught up presidential rhetoric, not to participate in that. but to try and elevate things a little bit. but all the speaker can do is use the platform that he has got. he has done that effectively when he is saying that speech he thought was inappropriate or in advance of republican ideas that were inappropriate or the muslim comments are the careless rhetoric around david duke and the kkk, he has been on all sides, and that has integrated to at least softening some of the course we have seen so far. i am wondering if you show the opinion of some a trumptives to see nominee as the death of conservatism in the united states? multipleve heard that

times in my life. great deal ofve a respect for george will. he is a remarkable commentator. we are a center-right country, there will always be a center-right party. we may go through difficult times, that i have been politically around for a long time. as recently as 2009, we were told, oh my gosh, the republican party is gone for a generation. two years we are back with the largest house majority in that modern era. the party shows remarkable ability to self correct and reform over time. i would suggest the same thing is going to happen now. there is a question it is a very turned era. -- turbulent era. is there any possibility house speaker paul ryan might end up being the nominee? he is saying no, but we heard

him say no for the seekers -- speakership. tom: let me break it into two parts. have been at republican convention since 1976. i have seen a lot of this stuff but i have not seen anything you have to remember also, the primaries are one thing, the delegate process is another. i don't know how people will vote, in the first round or another, depending on state rules. in my home state, we were very closely contested. uz carried the state in the delegate selection. regulars are the people now running the process.

we will choose district delegates in april to go to the convention, and quite frankly, most of them are likely to be for ted cruz, if he is still in the race. they will pick up the rubio delegates, in my view, and the trump delegates will be trump voters on the first round, but there is a good chance once they moveree to move, they will in the other direction. i do think if you cannot win it out right before you get there, i do not think anyone has it in the bag once they arrive. i think it will be tumultuous. there will be multiple talents unless somebody is literally inches away. as for speaker ryan, i take him at his word. i do think he has any desire to be the presidential nominee. anyo not think he has desire to be the presidential

nominee. if he did, he would have run for it. but he did not want to be the speaker and it became evident he was the only person who could unite the conference. look, he has already been vetted. he has been on a national ticket. i don't think there is a person in politics who doesn't like or respect paul ryan, even people who disagree with him like him as a person. and he represents the values as a republican that you would want to put forward. chaotict is a convention, there is a chance he or someone else could emerge. fan, i would ryan be glad to see something like that happen, but it literally has to happen on its own.

see that in the speaker's race. this is a much more complex process. you think the house conference can be chaotic. look at thousands of delegates from every state in the union. a lot of them have never been to a convention before. they are showing up with various allegiances. how someone emerges from that, i don't know. >> might there not be some kind of popular revolt if he were nominated and trump voters were frustrated? tom cole: winning the nomination is the responsibility of the candidates seeking it. you do have to have a majority of the delegates. ted cruzar more likely enter thesich will

convention with operations setup. it is far more likely that one of the three of them emerge than somebody like ryan. if it will bes manipulated. nobody is capable of manipulating the process. but if they deadlock, because the animosity of the candidates is logical great, it to look beyond them and i think paul ryan is somebody who has been fair in this process, who has not tried to scheme. if the blocks were such that they could not find another what happened in the republican conference. we had a number of very talented potential people that could have , but there was only one person people could really agree on.

>> if donald trump keeps marching along that comes up short, is there a point in the calendar when the party has to rally behind donald trump and call on john kasich, who could be a spoiler, to drop out of the race? to unite use moment the moment when somebody gets a majority of the delegates. that is when you accept the process. that you do have to get the majority. you either win or you lose. voter ie that on every have ever participated in and every election i have ever -- vote i have ever participated in and every election i have ever been a part of. support the winner. if you don't get there, it's not as if you can say i don't have to go through the convention. you do. and you need the majority.

short-circuiting the process would be wise either. i think you let it play out. >> let me get away from presidential politics -- >> think you -- thank you. [laughter] switch to the supreme court. u.s. said it is the president's prerogative to nominate but the senate does not -- you have said it is the president's prerogative to nominate, but the have to act.ot from a republican standpoint, is it advantageous to stall? 4-4 case thisst week. are you concerned about that vacancy? mr. cole: i am more concerned about who controls the court over the long term. i do not have any role here, just an opinion to express, but

i think the senate has done the right thing. ins is pretty unprecedented the final year. it's nobody's fault. it's not the president's fault. it's not the senate's fault. we had an unexpected and terrific loss. but the court hangs in the balance, and i think the american people have a right to express an opinion on this through a presidential election. it is emerging in a presidential year. if the senate wants to hold individuals,meet those are decisions they can make, but i think they are wise to wait until after the election to make the decision. and frankly, the new president will probably be very happy that mitch mcconnell did what he did. a if that happens and democrat does win the white house, do you think republicans next january would be comfortable confirming a

potentially younger and more liberal supreme court nominee. just because you are nominated does not mean you are accepted. i think the next president will have to be careful who they there is a political calculus there as well. if the senate changes control, republicans will have to rely on a filibuster. republicans have already shown they are willing to do that. they did it last time for a nonce a pre-or justice. but once you have a presence who is going to be there for four years and has the legitimacy of ,aving won a national election there is a lot of respect in terms of nominating. but the supreme court is different. we know the president can make a change. once we put somebody on the court for a very long time,

obviously, that is going to push the balance. the next president, i hope, will want somebody who heals congress a little bit. these battles have been very divisive, and there is going to be a minority the next president has to deal with, whoever wins. i think the lesson of the last few years is that you have to build these relationships early. i think the president did not do that. day after the election with very few friends and relationships on the other side, and i think that is shown in a lot of the problems he's had legislatively. >> you call donald trump's proposal to ban muslims un-american. recent attacks, ted cruz proposed stepping up

patrols by law enforcement officials of muslim communities in the united states. what do you think of that? mr. cole: it depends on what he meant. if you're are talking about anding cops on the street turning these into heavily -- that is not the right thing to do. i choose to believe he probably misspoke or what have you, but we are very fortunate in this country. we have a muslim community that .s well integrated iny are the largest builders central oklahoma, very big

contributors to our community. i don't think those kind of folks need scrutiny. i think they need to be lifted up, celebrated, praised. i would hope we avoid rhetoric like that. look, all these guys just need to read the constitution. it's pretty clear that there is test and america. it's in the founding documents. it's one of our great principles. it's why we can be as diverse as we are and have the life we have our values.e it's unfortunate any time a presidential campaign puts that in doubt. speaker i am proud of ryan being willing to speak out about who we are in the values we have. >> easing congress would at any point have a test for the authorization of military force -- do you think congress would at any point have a test for the

militarytion of mi force? >> i hope so. i think we have been very remiss. that these are dangerous people and we need to be fighting them, but we need to have a full scale debate and people need to be able to hold members accountable for how they vote and the judgments that they make. we have short-circuited the process. we did that in libya with, i think, disastrous results, and we are doing that now. and you don't know what the consequences are going to be down the line, but right now, isentially, the president acting on authorizations passed long before most members of congress were even elected. i was not around in 2001-2002

for those authorizations. i ought to be held accountable for libya and which way i voted. i ought to be held accountable for islamic state. i think it's doable and the praise and -- and the president should have had the decency to come -- democrats didn't want him to do it because they thought it was divisive. he sent us something in february, but by that point, it was already committed. been a lot of inexcusable activity. i think we should have held a vote in august of 2014. we did not do that as a majority. that's on us, but frankly, the president should have come and asked. >> in the wake of the brussels attack, we did see some action .rom congress

is there another role for congress to play? aside from oversight and making sure we are alert, i don't know that there is a lot to do. wonderful relationships with belgium. we grieve for what happened and we need to offer them every assistance possible, and i think that is being done, quite frankly. there is no partisanship when it comes to something like this. >> congress has adjourned for the holiday without emergency funding for this eco-virus. -- for the zika virus. mr. cole: there is a lot of unobligated money. some, like what has been set

aside for ebola, you could use now. it is incumbent on the administration to get a handle on that. senator burwell is on my subcommittee and doctors at the national institute of health are terrific people. we do have a serious problem, but we have the means to deal with it in the short term and come back as an authorization. we are not giving people a chance to ask questions about this and that. again, i think we can get there, but i doubt it will be exactly the form that the administration requests or exactly the amount of money. we met with cdc officials in brazil and talked to the brazilian government. having dialogues and

looking at this, but to mandating -- but demanding resources, we have made it backent, we will resources, but i think they are politicizing the virus in a way that is not appreciated. >> thank you very much. newsmakers is back with a conversation with tom cole of oklahoma. a member of the budget committee and a key member of republican leadership in congress. let's start with the budget because he is an appropriator. thats fairly optimistic the budget process would work this year. is that what you are hearing when you're in the halls of congress? personally am a little skeptical.

it seems like there is a lot of internal resistance and no democrats are going to vote for it, so that seems like a pretty big lift to me. that said, there is no consequence if they don't pass the budget. they have a bipartisan budget agreement in place that they passed last fall when john boehner was on his way out. as the congressman noted, it seems likely they will pass some sort of short-term spending measure in september two avoid any possibility of a shutdown. >> how is the new speaker doing in his relations with this group? >> i think the relationship so far have been pretty good. has spent a lot of time trying to woo members. he invited chairman jordan to his office. he holds a dinner with some caucus members each week when they are in session. theas restored some of

members who had been booted off committees by speaker boehner. he has made an effort to reach out to this group. , ther as the budget freedom caucus once the budget numbers to be pushed lower. leadership once the numbers to remain exactly where they are. >> speaking of relationships, could you talk about the relationship between the house and senate under the new speaker. past two years, republicans had a joint retreat, but you really don't see house and senate republicans on the same page yet. they are suggesting to just get rid of some pesky rules and senate republicans really don't

want to do that. thesee some agreement on big policy issues, but when it comes to actually working , there is not a lot that they agree on. >> what have you heard from top strategists in the party -- tom cole is a top strategist in the party. what did you hear from him today? potential dark a horse nominee at the convention. a lot of republicans who partisanship and take with currently available, specifically donald trump and , while it is a long shot, i think there are a contested convention with paul ryan as a dark horse

out there who are secretly hoping for this to end nominee. >> he spoke about his many years in politics. >> he did seem to suggest that donald trump does not have the requisite number of delegates going into cleveland, anything could happen. thank you both for being our guests. >> thank you. announcer: tonight on "the the chair of the house judiciary committee talks about some of the key issues in technology, encryption, privacy, surveillance, and e-mail. he is joined by politicos technology reporter. >> encryption is a good thing and an important thing, and we have to find our way through this not by weakening encryption, but by strengthening

efforts to contain it. you have to look at criminal enterprises, hackers stealing millions of documents from government agencies and millions of credit card records from retail establishments and financial establishments to know that we need to be moving toward stronger uses of encryption and stronger encryption itself. announcer: watch "the communicators" tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span two. prime timeook at our schedules. at 8:00, a discussion on the history and future of pandemics. at 8:30 p.m. eastern, book tv with authors of books on party politics. c-span3, american history tv with a look at supreme court justices.

tonight on c-span, the supreme court cases that shaped our history come to life with the cases."eries "landmark our 12 part series explores real life stories and constitutional dramas behind some of the most important decisions in american history. different. the constitution is a political document. it is also a law. >> what sets dread scott apart is that it is the ultimate anti- presidential case, exactly what you don't want to do. the decision make about debates? the supreme court said it should. >> tonight, affirming the supreme court's power of judicial review.

that's tonight at 10:00 p.m. eastern on c-span and c-span.org. coming up live shortly, a look back at the u.s.-north korea nuclear agreement from 20 years ago and what lessons could be applied to the current agreement with iran. live at 2:00rt eastern. there may be some technical issues so it may start a little bit later, but we will have it for you here on c-span. the eastera look at eggroll hosted by president obama and the first lady. >> ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please welcome lady,ent obama, the first and a very special guest, the easter bunny.

mr. obama: good to see you. now, to sing the national and them, please welcome tony award winning and multi-grammy winning platinum artist it dean ina menzel. id oh, say can you see, by the , what sorly light hailed at the , whoset's last gleaming

,road stripes and bright stars , overh the perilous fight the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming, and the rockets red glare, the bombs , gave proofair that our flagght ♪s still there ♪ oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,

, andthe land of the free ♪e home of the brave here, youhappy to be guys. thank you for having me. mr. obama: could everyone give adina a big round of applause? how is everybody doing today? happy easter. this is always one of our favorite events of the year.

it is so much fun. i don't want to talk too long, but i do want to make sure everybody thanks our outstanding arine band, who does such great job. i want to thank all of the volunteers who help to make this day possible. give them a huge round of applause. and i want to thank the first ,ady of the united states michelle obama. you, honey.thank here, you stand with the bunny. hi, everybody. happy easter eggroll a. -- day. are you having a good time? it is going to be perfect weather. the sun is coming out, which is always great. we are thrilled to have you here. bittersweet for us because this is the obama administration's last easter roll.

when we think about what we have accomplished over the last seven years, it's pretty remarkable, because when barack and i first got here, our goal was to open up the white house to as many people from as many backgrounds as possible, our kids, our news edition's, to open it up to culture, to expose families to healthy living, and to just have a lot of fun. also all of our military families. themve, honor, and respect for their service and sacrifice. and since we started having easter a groll's, we have had more than 250 thousand people come to this lawn. has been amazing. today, we will have 35,000 people come in and out of the

south lawn throughout the course of the day. some tremendous athletes, entertainers, artists, who are going to read and play games with you all. we have a little with and a little name a or however you do p an ney ney, or however you do it, we have that. celebrate all of the messaging and amazing change we have seen in this country. and we want to celebrate our nation and what makes us strong, our diversity and values. that is what makes us strong. the president and i have been

honored to be here as your president of first lady and two host you in our backyard every single year. i hope you guys have a terrific time. we are going to be out there doing a little a groveling. we are going to have a fun run. any kids out there, i will run with you. any adults who feel like you can hang, you are welcome to join in. have a good time. we love you. thank you for all the support you have shown from us over the years. happy easter. the shown for us over the years. happy easter. let's celebrate. >>