Last week, the U.S. Digital Corps (USDC) program gathered in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the graduation of 71 Fellows—USDC’s largest graduating class to date. Notably, 87% of the graduating Fellows are continuing in full-time roles across government, demonstrating USDC’s success in building long-term talent onramps and career pipelines for early-career technologists and agencies alike.
The graduating Fellows served at 21 different agencies improving digital services, strengthening cybersecurity, and delivering better outcomes for the public.
We were joined by USDC’s countless partners and champions—host agency supervisors and mentors, agency leaders, and friends and family of the graduates—and I’m glad that we were able to feature a selection of demos by Fellows of their work during the ceremony.
GSA Administrator Ed Forst opened the event and congratulated Fellows on their impact: “The unique projects that you produced across agencies were all about improving expectations, experiences, and outcomes… All of you crushed it. You made step function changes in the federal government.” Acting TTS Director Greg Barbaccia also emphasized how USDC and other talent programs are “a critical component of this Administration’s tech priorities.”
Three Fellow demos illustrated how USDC supports agencies in improving government services in very different ways:
Enhancing access to medical information through an improved PubMed Central
As the sole front-end engineer on a major modernization effort at NIH, USDC software engineer Sam Levy transformed PubMed Central into a faster, more accessible, and cloud-ready platform. Delivered ahead of schedule and under budget, Sam’s project improved the search experience for millions of daily users while strengthening the long-term foundation of one of the world’s most trusted biomedical research resources.
Ushering in a new era for FedRAMP
A cross-functional team of Fellows—Zoya Egiazaryan, Sasha Lapommeray, and Bryan Pablo—showcased their work redesigning FedRAMP’s main website and Marketplace experience to make it easier for federal agencies to find compliant cloud service offerings to deliver on their missions. The Fellows also shared an overview of FedRAMP 20x, which dramatically reduces the time to certification for cloud services and shifts the security paradigm from static documentation to machine-readable data evaluated in real-time.
GSA Administrator Forst also mentioned that USDC’s impact on FedRAMP stretches far beyond Zoya, Sasha, and Bryan, in celebrating that “the majority of the FedRAMP team in some way touched the U.S. Digital Corps.”
Conducting data-driven oversight of the organ transplant system
USDC product manager Annie Tor demonstrated how she and her co-Fellow Luke Neureiter helped build a fairer and more effective transplant system for patients and families by strengthening federal oversight of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). During their fellowship, they:
- Developed and launched a public dashboard that increases transparency and resulted in a decrease in the number of organs allocated out of OPTN sequence, and
- Led the first transfer of critical patient safety data from contractor-managed systems into government-managed infrastructure.
A celebration of public service
Before each Fellow was recognized individually and presented with a certificate and USDC challenge coin, OPM Director Scott Kupor thanked the graduates, saying, “Thank you for the time you’ve already spent in government, and more importantly, thank you for the time you will spend. Hopefully you can be an evangelical spirit for what it’s like to work for the government and what it’s like to solve problems at the scale and complexity that we have.”
Beyond demonstrations of Fellows’ impact at their agencies and hearing their gratitude for their supervisors, mentors, friends, and family as they received their mementos, it was heartwarming to see a physical manifestation of the close-knit community that Fellows created across their cohorts in the form of a USDC quilt. As graduates Bella Mendoza and Chloe Hall shared when they revealed the quilt, “for generations, quilts have marked life’s greatest milestones. They are made by stitching together pieces of fabric that on their own might seem ordinary but, together, represent something lasting—a physical record of the people who made them and the stories they carried.”
The relationships represented in the quilt that USDC Fellows built will last long beyond their time in the fellowship—we like to say, “once a Fellow, always a Fellow”—and as Acting TTS Director Greg Barbaccia noted, they will also provide tremendous value to government: “Many agencies are all trying to solve the same problems. That’s a flavor of challenge that cross-cutting programs like USDC are well-suited to solve, with Fellows placed at over a dozen agencies, but all maintaining a central ‘home base’ here at GSA and TTS. Different [agency] missions, but a shared sense of identity, purpose, mission, and urgency.”
Congratulations to all our 2026 USDC graduates! I can’t wait to see where your journeys in public service will take you and the impact you’ll continue to create for the American people.
Chris Kuang is the director of the U.S. Digital Corps.
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