dev iyer

The IRS has a mobile app today because of a conversation in December. @shl had just come out of DOGE, where he wrote publicly about what he found inside the federal government. Most of it was not what people expected. His line was that the government is pretty efficient and could move faster, and that the obstacles were legal and procedural rather than a shortage of talented people. @SamCorcos recruited him to the IRS. Not as a contractor, not as a temporary detailee. As a career employee, A civil servant. At a public event that month, @shl asked the room whether the IRS should have a mobile app. Everyone said yes. Obviously yes. The IRS processes roughly 160 million individual returns a year on a system written in 1960s COBOL, and taxpayer-facing technology there has been a decade behind the private sector for most of living memory. Less than a year later, the app is live. That is the model working exactly as designed. Put builders inside the agency, and let them ship. No statement of work. No eighteen-month procurement. No vendor whose incentive is the renewal. Every agency in the federal government should be operating the same way.