Feds Modernize Services to Improve User Experience

Federal government is leaning into a digital future, modernizing customer and employee platforms to streamline federal services, improve user experience and boost efficiency. Agencies are integrating AI, building out an open-source ecosystem and bolstering digital security as they transform operations.

The Trump administration has called on federal agencies through a series of executive orders and directives to leverage emerging tech and streamline federal acquisition to quickly bring solutions in the door and revamp government services.

CMS Drives New Efficiencies with Open Source

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is driving efficiency through the first federal Open-Source Program Office (OSPO) and leveraging new tech tools to reduce workforce burden, costs and risk, ultimately contributing to federal health care advancements.

OSPO is focused on strengthening trust in a federal open-source ecosystem, while saving time and costs, said CMS Open-Source Lead Remy DeCausemaker during a March open-source conference.

“We’re here to reduce duplicate work and duplicate costs. We’re here to reduce security risk and continuity risk,” said DeCausemaker. “We are thinking about how our OSPO can bridge layers together to work more effectively and reduce costs, burden and risk.”

Over the past two fiscal years, CMS has reduced 193,000 hours of burden for health care providers through new use cases, said CMS’ Chief Digital Strategy Officer and Director of the Digital Service Office Andrea Fletcher.

“We can’t even estimate cost savings for this … so how we measure our impact on this is reduction in burden hours,” said Fletcher. “[We’re] trying to simplify and streamline how this has an impact on the health care industry as a whole.”

CMS’ new validation transparency tool is is saving time and money by simplifying compliance with hospital price transparency rules.

Required since 2021, hospitals must publish prices in a machine-readable format, but compliance has been low due to unclear requirements.

The tool allows users to upload, validate and name files without installing special libraries or adding extra work for hospital IT teams. CMS hosts the tool’s code on GitHub, encouraging feedback and collaboration and fostering clearer communication with health care organizations.

“It solved a real-world problem, it reduced burden, it used best practices, it was compliant with policy, it avoided costs … it demonstrates how an open-source strategy can deliver [services] faster and cheaper,” said DeCausemaker. “This can serve as a model and has served as a model for other projects across CMS, HHS and the federal government.”

Patent Center Boosts Efficiency with Shift to Digital ID Verification

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has adopted ID.me for Patent Center users to simplify identity verification, improve efficiency and enhance security, supporting its broader push toward digitization and improved user experience.

Patent Center handles over 600,000 applications and 9.5 million documents annually. Previously, identity verification took 10 to 14 days and required notarization. With ID.me, the process is entirely online, typically takes under 30 minutes and eliminates extra costs, such as notary charges. Applicants can access the system immediately upon verification, helping them meet critical deadlines.

This faster, digital process reduces workforce burden, increases fraud prevention and strengthens cybersecurity. As of April 22, more than 2,600 users had verified their identity using ID.me.

The ID.me rollout aligns with federal modernization goals and industry standards. It’s part of Patent Center’s broader digital transformation, including the 2023 replacement of the EFS-Web and Private PAIR systems with the Patent Center platform. Now, 99% of USPTO patent filings are submitted digitally.

Patent Center has also pushed to move from PDF submissions to DOCX, reducing OCR-related issues and improving use of text in downstream systems. Since the shift, over 93% of new 111(a) applications arrive in text format.

Looking ahead, Patent Center plans to be fully cloud-based later this calendar year, further bolstering efficiency, IT stability and security.

AI is Improving Taxpayer Experience

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is leveraging AI to improve data management and support taxpayer and employee experience as Treasury takes a closer look at its data posture.

The agency is developing generative AI pilots to enable customer service representatives and internal staff to better access IRS’ massive amounts of internal documentation, Reza Rashidi, director of the Data Management Division in Research, Applied Analytics and Statistics and IRS’ AI governance lead explained during FedInsider’s AI for Agencies: Modernization & Taxpayer Services Webinar.

“We need to make sure responses come from our own documents, as opposed to the publicly available documents where the large language models have been trained on,” said Rashidi. “There are mechanisms to do that, and that’s where we’re building a lot of pilots, and we’re testing those right now in internal settings.”

AI has enabled IRS to better identify taxpayer pain points and solutions, Rashidi added.

“We’re using AI to find out the taxpayer’s issue, how did the process answer the taxpayer, provide the service to the taxpayer, and identify what improvements can be implemented,” said Rashidi.

IRS CTO Kaschit Pandya explained how AI is boosting operational efficiencies at IRS during the webinar.

“We’re looking at it through the lens of where and how best to optimize, which means finding the right use cases we want to make sure we’re solving for a problem that we have, versus AI being the hammer, looking for the nails to solve,” said Pandya.

AI has presented IRS with a new opportunity to modernize, but bridging the gap with legacy systems has been challenging, Pandya explained. The agency is taking a thoughtful approach to AI implementation to help transform legacy systems into more modern ones.

“AI, specifically generative AI, has allowed us to extract business logic from these older systems. That business logic is then used by our developers to write the more modern code against that logic,” said Pandya. “We have seen tremendous gains from business extraction, or the logic extraction and then translation to the new language, we’ve seen a cut down from our ability to generate new code from days to hours on many occasions.”