Healthcare.gov, the government health insurance marketplace website, launched in October 2013 only to buckle under the weight of just 2,000 simultaneous users. As millions of Americans stared at error messages and frozen screens, a political crisis unfolded, but so did a new era of government technology.
The result was 18F, an in-house digital services consulting agency that brought Silicon Valley expertise to government, challenging decades of outdated procurement practices and introducing a radical new approach to building digital public services.
