If we had a functional federal gov’t, it’d be great for e.g. GSA to procure commonly needed SaaS services (e.g., form OCR, address geolocation, bank account verification, etc.), put a thin wrapper over each, and provide them to federal, state, & local gov’t for free.

Federal infrastructure shouldn’t just be highways and dams and railways. It’s 2020. Federal software infrastructure is long overdue, and can be provided at a fraction of a percent of the cost of physical federal infrastructure.

Instead, 19,000 cities and 3,000 counties and 50 states and 6 territories all have to procure this stuff over and over again on their own, resulting in zero economies of scale. It’s dumb.

I mean, @RobinCarnahan and I are working to build this stuff at the State Software Collaborative, but this is the proper role of the federal government, and not a small team of former feds working at a private university. It’d be great if we were rendered unnecessary here.

A lot of folks did amazing work setting up shared services within GSA (Federalist, http://Cloud.gov , http://Login.gov )…and then Trump came into office, and his appointees at GSA have refused to let those services be used by state or local governments.

In the intervening four years, technology has marched onward, while GSA has made clear they’ll tolerate no such advances. There’s a big gap between contemporary tech norms and what GSA will permit to be offered.