Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Greg Barbaccia said on Thursday that the Trump administration is shifting from static, point-in-time metrics toward outcome-driven ones, signaling changes to how federal agencies measure success and design federal websites.
Speaking at the Adobe Government Forum in Washington, D.C., Barbaccia said the federal government already has extensive IT policy and guidance in place, and it is now in “an implementation phase.”
“We have a tendency to bake in a lot of point-in-time metrics to policies. That stymies us in a lot of ways. Policies need to be in the future,” Barbaccia said.
“You’ll see this out of my office,” he added. “We’re going to collect certain metrics. We’re going to take a look at them after a couple of months, and if they don’t make sense, we’re going to change them and do something different.”
The goal, he said, is to “focus on outcomes for the public.”
Similarly, Barbaccia said his office is looking to improve how citizens interact with federal agency websites that are often fragmented and confusing. He emphasized designing services around user needs rather than agency structures.
“You should not need to know how the federal government is organized internally to interact with the government service,” Barbaccia said. “We have a terrible way of designing things around us, designing them around the bureaucracy and not around the people we serve.”
Notably, President Donald Trump established the National Design Studio (NDS) within the White House last year, which seeks to reduce duplicative design efforts and improve the quality of public interactions with government services.
Last week at ACT-IAC’s CX Summit, Barbaccia noted that the NDS is working to produce the same digital experience across agency websites, so that the public gets a consistent voice and design from the federal government.
Barbaccia told reporters that the White House already has “pilots running on internal sandboxes” of website redesigns, and he said CIO.gov will be an early example of that.
As a signal of success, Barbaccia said he wants to see simpler, more intuitive digital experiences and fewer websites standing between citizens and essential services.
“I want the taxpayer to be able to not have to visit a million different websites, to do a million different things,” he said Thursday at the Adobe Government Forum. “It is 2026. It is crazy to sow this type of confusion with the citizens when they don’t know how to do simple things, things that touch everybody – Social Security, taxes, public benefits, stuff like that.”
“I’m looking for design to be based around the least technical user, not the most sophisticated technical user. That’s a big key priority,” Barbaccia said.