Adopter and adapter: The White House approach to technology

The last three presidents will be remembered for many things, in great part due to the technological advancements made on their watch.

The residents of the White House have been both technology adopters and adapters, experimenting with early technologies they believe can help shape and distribute their messages directly to Americans. And the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have each taken policy cues from innovators while consistently promoting technology development as a key to American progress. Manifest destiny is now a technological imperative.

“Presidents always invoke advances in technology to further their domestic and foreign policy goals,” said Andrew Meade McGee, a historian at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, adding that Americans “like to tie notions of progress to the position of the president, who both uses new technologies and shapes technology as a policymaker and uses it to promote policy goals.”

As the Internet came of age, the White House evolved its manner of releasing information to the public. Before the White House had a functioning website, only credentialed White House reporters could obtain press releases or attend briefings. Now all of that is available to everyone, according to Steven Aftergood, a specialist in government secrecy with the Federation of American Scientists. The White House has online archives, a social media presence and various outreach programs, and has “come a long way. But they are far from state of the art. And every advance naturally whets the appetite for more,” Aftergood said.

The last three presidents led the country during the birth, rise and flourish of the digital information age, and used advances in technology to shape their office’s policy and image.

The Clinton Years

The Clinton administration was instrumental in encouraging the Internet to flourish, and developed infrastructure to build the foundation of digital government that is prevalent today. Clinton launched the first official White House website in October 1994 during a larger movement toward web-based communication in federal government. He ordered all executive agencies in 1996 to use information technology to make information accessible to the public, and FirstGov.gov was implemented in 2000 to streamline government services.

As email became a routine of White House communications, archiving became an essential tool in preserving the history that came from the Oval Office. Historians rejoiced. The White House was thus an early adopter of email archiving, noted Jason R. Baron, an attorney and former Director of Litigation at the National Archives.

Since 1994, the White House has captured all emails received from the public as well as between White House and federal employees. This has led to the preservation of approximately 32 million Clinton-era emails, over 200 million emails from the George W. Bush Administration and an estimated 1 billion emails captured as permanent records during the Obama administration, Baron said.

The Clinton administration approached technology as a democratizing force that would connect citizens with government. The White House publications service put presidential documents online and made them available by email. Clinton encouraged the growth of e-commerce with a tax-free Internet policy in 1995, and his 1996 Telecommunications Act was dedicated to developing Internet infrastructure and increasing access to computers.

“This is the first period when you see an in-depth effort to make government more transparent, accessible and open,” McGee said. “That continued with George W. Bush and was couched in the language of efficiency, reducing bureaucracy and making government interact more directly with citizens.”

The Bush Years

The George W. Bush administration continued to develop government websites, bringing services and information to citizens and businesses. Under Bush, the E-Government Act of 2002 established a federal office of electronic government to manage and promote electronic government and the use of Internet-based information technology to improve citizen access to government information and services. This initiative encouraged executive branch agencies to make their websites “the new front door for how a citizen approaches that agency,” McGee said.

President Bush brought taxpayers online and launched additional e-government initiatives to streamline federal government services. The Bush administration continued and expanded Clinton’s efforts to build a federal enterprise architecture, and improved on existing portals while adding new ones such as Grants.gov.

The Obama Years

President Obama came to office having campaigned successfully using social media and technology. He brought “young, web-savvy campaign supporters into his administration, and they naturally wanted to transfer some of that ethos to government itself,” McGee said.

Yet, after taking office, President Obama “expressed dismay at the White House technology” that was “at least 10 years behind his usual functional level,” wrote technology consultants James George and James Rodger, and pushed to modernize phone and computer systems inside the White House. Obama tasked private sector experts with upgrading the White House technology infrastructure, and promoted “smarter” development of technology that would be “efficient, effective and secure.” In 2014, he founded the U.S. Digital Service to improve government’s use of technology to serve Americans, and in 2015 created the position of Director of White House Information Technology.

From the early days of its first campaign until the last year of the presidency, the Obama administration has employed technology and social media such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate with constituents, participate in conversations about current events and drive policy dialogue.

As technology evolves, so does the government deployment of those advances. “Americans…expect their government to make use of the most recent and efficacious technologies while also recognizing these technologies are still in flux,” McGee said.

With the 2016 presidential election a little more than a year away, the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will have to continue the tradition of being both a technological adopter and adapter, moving the nation forward.

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