DOGE Service Eyes Faster Procurement, AI to Modernize Government

U.S. DOGE Service is eyeing procurement reform and legacy modernization as part of government’s ongoing push for efficiency across agencies, Administrator Amy Gleason said Wednesday at GovCIO Media & Research’s Federal IT Efficiency Summit. 

“We still buy things like we buy ships and paper when we need to buy software and services. Really modernizing that process is something we focused on a lot in helping leaders remove those burdens,” she said. “If it takes you a year to buy something, that’s a year that it took you to not do your project and not deliver on something. And so we really need to find modern practices to help people get the modern tools they need, and to fix our processes.” 

Gleason, who also serves as strategic advisor at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, outlined an ambitious agenda for federal technology modernization, covering procurement reform, healthcare data interoperability and AI adoption.

Four Priorities Driving the DOGE Service Mission 

The U.S. DOGE Service, which rebranded and repositioned from the former U.S. Digital Service, is focused on four core pillars, Gleason said. 

The first is improving services for the public through human-centered design — designing with the user instead of for them to make processes easier.

The second priority is recruiting top technology talent into government. Gleason said modernization cannot happen without engineers at the table. 

“Sometimes I can go through agencies and have a lot of meetings about technology and modernization, and there won’t be a single engineer in any of the conversations. And so it’s really hard to do that modernization if you don’t have great tech talent,” she said, and added that they are “always hiring.” 

Third is partnering directly with agencies to modernize legacy systems, including COBOL code dating as far back as 1964, and focusing on agile procurement that delivers results in months rather than years.  

The fourth pillar is protecting taxpayer dollars by tackling fraud, waste and abuse, and promoting transparency and accountability across federal programs. 

Gleason named several high-profile successes that demonstrate what human-centered design can accomplish. Federal Student Aid’s FAFSA, which saw its lowest completion rate two years ago, was relaunched and hit a record completion rate with two months remaining in the current filing period. The redesigned process now takes most users just 10 to 15 minutes to complete. 

Another example is passport renewals. Citizens can now complete the entire renewal process online, including submitting a self-captured photo from home, and receive their passports in days or weeks rather than the months the old process required. 

For veterans, a new filtering feature on disability claim screens drew over 400,000 users in its first two weeks alone, with high satisfaction reviews. 

The Health Tech Ecosystem: Killing the Clipboard 

At the center of Gleason’s work at CMS is the Health Tech Ecosystem, which she launched last summer at the White House with President Donald Trump and CMS Secretary Mehmet Oz. The initiative brought together more than 800 organizations in a public-private collaboration aimed at solving healthcare interoperability within one year. 

The initiative’s top goal is putting health data directly in patients’ hands.

“My daughter has 51 patient portals, which is virtually impossible to remember how to access that many systems, and her data is siloed across all of them,” Gleason said, drawing on her experience as the mother of a child diagnosed with a rare disease.  

The ecosystem’s “kill the clipboard” initiative would allow patients to share their records via QR code at a provider visit, mirroring the experience of showing a boarding pass at an airport. 

AI as a Force Multiplier 

Gleason is an outspoken advocate for AI adoption across government. Recently, CMS used AI to analyze more than 30,000 public comments it received on a recent RFI. The technology summarized them into searchable themes while preserving access to individual responses. 

She also described AI’s potential in healthcare, recounting how her daughter used generative AI to reanalyze 16 years of medical records and discovered she had been misdiagnosed, a finding that made her newly eligible for a clinical trial. 

“She didn’t have to know the right question to ask, and she didn’t have to know all of her information or what was in her biopsy, it just did that for her,” Gleason said. “That’s the power of having that data and having technology with it.” 

Gleason’s call to action for federal leaders who have yet to embrace AI tools in their daily work was to use it every day.