The White House today announced the name of the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency: Amy Gleason, the US government’s problem solver in the early days of the data-starved response to the Covid pandemic and a seasoned worker in the health space. The White House named Gleason after it argued in court that Elon Musk is not really the head of DOGE, and faced pressure from a federal judge to say who is. How long Gleason has been the acting administrator, and if Musk was an unofficial one before today’s announcement, is unclear.
This is Gleason’s second time working in US Digital Services, now turned DOGE. In her first tour, which started in 2018 and carried through the frenzied and chaotic pandemic response, she pushed the bounds of existing bureaucracy to meet the crisis’ demand. Gleason was interviewed on the Reveal podcast’s Covid Tracking Project series, where she described long hours and the frequent hurdles she encountered in an effort to create an effective emergency response.
“We would leave at four in the morning from the White House,” Gleason recalled. “You could take a shower, maybe you got a 30-minute nap and you had to be right back there. So everybody was kind of running on fumes.”
But Gleason was creative in battling bureaucratic hurdles. She described an early, maddening challenge: in the midst of lockdowns, she couldn’t get access to needed federal data without finding a notary.
“You walk in DC it looks like an apocalypse, exponential growth of cases and deaths,” she said. “And so then the shock of somebody saying, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t give you access until you get this form notarized.’ Well, where am I supposed to get a notary to sign this? It’s like the horror of this situation and then to constantly face these walls of, “Oh, we can’t do that because we can’t do that, because we can’t do that because,” starts to get you to be really frustrated.”
The issue led her to create HHS Protect, a data system that eventually became a comprehensive hospital data tracker, though it first generated outcry from the CDC and the public over delays in information. Like Musk, Gleason very much sees data as an efficient way to get work done. “We put hundreds of people into that system in the first two weeks, hundreds of federal users so that they could start to be able to see the data,” she said about her work with HHS Protect.
Gleason was undoubtedly impacted by her work in the early, chaotic months of the Covid-19 pandemic. “You hear about people coming back from battles or major catastrophes, an earthquake or a tsunami or something, and they have that kind of haunting thing, and I have that,” Gleason told Reveal. “I would try to go to sleep, and that’s all you could think about is how many people are dying right now of this thing and what could I do to stop that?…I felt the weight.”
Julia Metraux contributed to this article.
Gov-Politics
World
