“The hardest thing for us was that there were things that the President himself would say and do that weren’t credible.”

Edward Hartwig, former Deputy Administrator of the United States Digital Service, talks with Emily Walter about the effects of misinformation in government.

Emily Walter: Start by telling me your name and the title you had when Covid started.

Edward Hartwig: My name is Edward Hartwig and the title of my job when covid first started was deputy administrator of the United States Digital Service. USDS builds services and products for hundreds of millions of people including veterans, people who access healthcare, the unemployed, it goes on and on. My role as deputy administrator was to be in leadership, to manage most of the projects, to manage the people, the recruiting and the onboarding, and also to provide strategic advice to my boss–the administrator.

Q: How did you get that position and what are your qualifications?

A: I’m not technical by nature, but I have a good understanding of it. I was hired as a bureaucracy hacker, which is to say that I’m very good at navigating around government red tape.

Q: When covid first started happening and everything was shutting down, how did that affect the work you were doing?

A: We actually about, I don’t know, maybe a week or two before the government declared an emergency around covid, we actually released our employees to work from home. And so, one, we got a little ahead of the game there. We had a more mobile, more remote capable workforce than most of the government. We worked on covid, our methodology involved doing in person research. And so we had to make some hard decisions around whether we would travel in the early days of the pandemic, whether people were willing to take that risk. So we created a policy that no one would be forced to travel if they were uncomfortable but people who wanted to travel could travel. We did that once, and someone contracted covid. Our work depends very much on working with people to design products for them or, sorry,  with them rather than for them from sort of an ivory tower. So it was difficult especially when it came to the frontline covid workers and the work we did in building the covid reporting system.

Q: There was a lot of conflicting information right at the beginning, how did that affect overall work morale and how you were able to effectively get things done?

A: Early on I felt like it was mostly confusion. Everything got more difficult, right? We had to learn new ways of working, we had to learn new strategies. Some people are working on the ground and some people are working remotely. So the morale aspect was difficult because some people were remote but wanted to be involved in in-person things, and couldn’t be. Some people felt uncomfortable. They felt comfortable traveling but didn’t feel comfortable, for example, going out to dinner with their colleagues who were less concerned. We created a number of communications changes that allowed people to communicate more directly with leadership and laterally and get more support. As we were researching covid, the in person, qualitative research–not necessarily the data, but the interviews with people–would vary dramatically based on where in the country we were doing the research. Whether they were civil servants or politicians, where they were on the political spectrum, all created more chaotic data and responses than we were used to. There was less uniformity and it was hard sometimes to parse out what was politically motivated feedback and what was feedback that would be useful for a delivery of the service to the public.

Q: Were your employees getting differing levels of information than, say, you and your boss,  and if they were, how was that affecting tensions or conflicts?

We learned a lesson early on in what transparency should be. You know, it’s easy to say that the boss should tell the team everything, but to be honest, if you tell everybody everything it becomes chaos. Some things are relevant to some people, some people really want all the details of what’s going on and some people don’t. Some people get caught up in the details and it becomes a distraction. And so we had  taken the approach that we would always honestly answer a question that an employee asked us, but we wouldn’t necessarily tell everyone everything. We gave people the amount of information we felt they needed to know and then we let people follow up on an individual basis so that one person’s desire for information didn’t create chaos in everyone else’s space. We would answer any question honestly, but we wouldn’t broadcast everything. Communication was the biggest piece because there was information that was public, there was information that was obvious, there was info that was not public, and there was info that was probably sensitive like personally identifiable, HIPPA related information that we had to follow a bunch of rules about which made it, sometimes, hard to be transparent even when we wanted to be more transparent

Q: Were you given any false information at any point that trickled down and affected your team? Not necessarily that you knew was false, but eventually wasn’t true and had a bad impact?

I think the hardest thing for us was that there were things that the president himself, at the time, would say and do that weren’t credible. We lost staff, we had morale issues for people that didn’t want to work with somebody that they felt was not being honest with the public. We worked directly with the organizations that were combating the coronavirus pandemic and so there were differing opinions at times, but then there were times when there was bureaucracy that was clearly meant to protect one organization rather than serve the greater public. So that was sometimes frustrating and difficult to manage. I don’t think that’s false information, but there were people that had a work or personal self interest that made it so they could block progress for at least a short period of time. Places where we would go where information that would later be proven either incorrect or objectively false, it was impeding the work. We were there to help the public and sometimes we’d run into either self-servants, politicians, or what-not at a number of levels that they had access to information and they chose to say things that weren’t reflecting that information. To say the least, covid was politicized. We were working at the state and the federal level and we got very different responses in the work we were doing around covid. Even in places that are politically leaning one direction, sometimes they only represent a slim majority of the people in that space. How do you serve those people when you’re working through the government and the government has a particular opinion about what covid should be or what it is. It’s one thing to say that our state is doing well and open for business. That can actually be true in a lot of places, but it was never uniform. There were rural counties, for example, that had incredibly low cases of covid and those people probably should have been open for business. Or there were urban areas and dense city areas in that same state you absolutely wanted everyone to be wearing a mask and getting vaccinated and potentially staying home. You get big pronouncements, for example, that were statewide by certain figures, and you’re like “that’s not false, but it’s disingenuous and it can do a lot of harm.” We wanted to create more finite data that said this is the place you can go to get trusted information about your actual region, county, municipality, is doing well or not. I think there was a lot of interest in some of those places to not have that be true because it didn’t reflect the larger message that was coming from the government of those states.

Q: How was it like transitioning between conversations with your colleagues who were generally just as informed as you between people like friends and family who may not have had accurate information or been misled in some way?

Getting messages from dear friends who were emergency room doctors that didn’t have the protective equipment they needed at the time, that were not getting the information they needed was hard. And to be honest, what I did with that was I took those messages and I gave them to the people in the white house coronavirus response and I said “this is what you’re trying to solve for.” It was hard to hear the struggles of those friends but it was also great to be able to provide a legitimate perspective on what was happening. The white house is ten layers removed from an emergency room at best, and so sometimes you can look at the numbers and say “hey we’re doing better” and not really realize that better isn’t good enough. Being able to relay that information up gave them, I hope, a sense that they were able to contribute to what was happening. It was largely public data, the problem was that the data itself was messy. It was too early, there wasn’t enough of it, to understand clear trends. I was lucky to be, and my team was lucky to be at the forefront of understanding that data and being able to compile it. I was able to answer questions from my family, from my friends, from my neighbors, from my community to understand what the real problems were. It was a gift to be able to clarify certain things for people to the best ability that I could. It’s difficult wishing that you could be more articulate and explaining and more clear in your ability to deliver a message that would help people. It’s not what you say, it’s what people understand. The failures we had in either putting that information out there or communicating it clearly were making it more visible and more available were something that we kept in mind every day.

Q: Did you run into situations where people didn’t want to believe the information you were trying to help them understand?

 I absolutely had senior people, the most experienced, battle hardened folks that you can imagine, people that had dealt with real frustration, and pain, and suffering in their professional lives, in their personal lives that had fought through it that were crying their eyes out on the phone with me in frustration because the lack of willingness to hear the truth because it was inconvenient or because it didn’t fit the moment.

Q: Do you have any other stories or anecdotes about misinformation in general?

The press plays a role in crafting the public narrative, and it’s really easy—especially in very divided times—to scapegoat certain people. There were great people that worked on the coronavirus response in the Trump administration that probably made the difference between real success and real failure, and they’re oftentimes either not people you hear about in the news or they’re people who got a little bit vilified or scapegoated. I thought Dr. Birx was an exceptional human being. I think she didn’t get the recognition she deserved for the work that she did and I think it was infinitely harder for her in the environment she was in to be heard. She found ways to effectively do that. I can’t think of how that isn’t a true statement. She cared and worked hard. She went on the road and did the work. I don’t think that she was accurately portrayed in a way that reflected the amount of good she did. Also, I think it’s really clear right now we’re learning about what’s happening with the Russian president. He had a small circle of people around him and leading up to the invasion of Ukraine. He heard from fewer and fewer advisors. He surrounded himself with more and more people that parroted his opinions rather than hearing contrary opinions. It’s a good reminder that you can make some colossally terrible decisions and impactful, and oftentimes life-threatening decisions when you don’t surround yourself with people who you trust but don’t necessarily agree with you. At multiple layers in the response to covid, sometimes willingly not hearing the information and sometimes not having the diversity of thought and opinion of perspective and experience around them. I think that we suffered from that and I hope one of the things we do moving forward as a country is recognize that you make better decisions when you consider all the options. You can’t solve those problems when you’re in the crisis. You have to think ahead to what the next crisis could be and have the right people in the room when the crisis starts. If you try to assemble that team or bring in those perspectives after the fact, it’s infinitely more difficult and oftentimes you won’t get past the gatekeepers in your own self interest group to get that diverse thought in. A lot of what happened was just a lack of having the right people being heard.