Inside DOGE, The IRS & How to Scam the US Government - Sam Corcos - #1004

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Before we get started, I'm going on tour this winter around the US and Canada, and you can join me. It's an hour and a half long show. There's a half hour Q&A at the end. There's meet and greet. There's music warmed up before I get started by Zach Talander, and tickets are limited, and you can get yours right now. New York, Boston, Chicago, Austin, Salt Lake City, and Denver still have limited tickets left at chriswilliamson.live. That's chriswilliamson.live.
All right, let's get into it. You got a new job. Congratulations. How'd that happen?

**Sam Corcos** (0:32)
I had a lot of friends reach out to me from the administration saying that they really needed help doing, really looking into IRS modernization. It's one of the worst managed IT projects in the government. I think maybe second only to the VA's attempt at implementing an electronic health record system. It's about $15 billion over budget. It was actually started right around the time I was born, and it's still ongoing. It's still five years away. It was five years away in 1991 It's still five years away. So, they said they really needed somebody to look into this and see if we could fix it.
So, I've always wanted to do government service. It's a thing that has been important to me. I care a lot about the future of the country, especially the national debt, but I kind of assumed this would be a thing that I would do in my 50s after I'm retired. But my wife really encouraged me to give this a go. So, about six months ago, I made the plunge and here I am.

**Chris Williamson** (1:38)
What are you?

**Sam Corcos** (1:40)
I'm the Chief Information Officer of the Treasury Department. That's my official role.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
What's that mean? What's that guy do?

**Sam Corcos** (1:47)
So, the Chief Information Officer in private companies, usually the CTO, is the primary technical leader in the government as a Chief Information Officer. It's an interesting one. I think a lot of what I've learned is tracking the history of a lot of these things can be interesting. So, the Chief Information Officer really stems from, if you go way back, it stems from when it was effectively a librarian role, if you want to call it that, where the legacy of Chief Information Officer is when things were in filing cabinets. Where is the information? How do you keep track of the stuff? And it slowly evolved into what it is today. But part of the challenge that I've seen internal to government is that most of the Chief Information Officers, at least before this administration, were non-technical. And the main reason is there's no technical standards or requirements for the role. And so, you can kind of see how you get there, where when it's a librarian role, there's no requirement to really know how computers work. And if you never update the standards, you just sort of fall into the situation.

**Chris Williamson** (3:01)
Is that prescient that not only were the systems not updated, even the job title wasn't?

**Sam Corcos** (3:06)
I think it's less the job title, it's more the qualifications for the job. We have standards for being the chief counsel of an agency. You have to be a lawyer. I think most people would think that's reasonable. We just never updated that for technology, or in government, they really call it IT.
That's the more common way they would describe it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:26)
It also feels like an outdated term.

**Sam Corcos** (3:28)
Yeah, for sure.

**Chris Williamson** (3:30)
How technical are you?

**Sam Corcos** (3:31)
Me? I've been a software developer for more than 10 years. In my most recent role, I was the CEO, so I didn't do as much coding I did in the early days. I actually poked around in my GitHub account a few months ago. I've contributed about a million lines of production code, so I'm not the best engineer that I know, but I've done a lot of it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:52)
That sounds like an H index for engineers compared with academics.

**Sam Corcos** (3:56)
Yeah, it is definitely something that if you optimize for it, it becomes useless because it's very easy to just create a bunch of boilerplate code and pretend like you did it, but I'm sure it's correlated.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
What's your relationship with DOGE?

**Sam Corcos** (4:13)
I was originally brought in through DOGE in March, so that's when I started. I was put in at the Treasury Department with my primary focus being the IRS, which is trying to figure out how to land the plane on this IRS modernization program.