Eric Hysen '07, Digital Government Service

by Ted Jou '99

An ongoing project during his tenure was streamlining document processing for people that CBP encountered at the border.  As Hysen explained: “At the start of the administration, people that would get picked up by border patrol would get processed largely on paper,” which would need to be physically shared between different agencies. “And that was not just causing people to spend more time than necessary in custody, but also meant that our agents and our officers were spending more time literally pushing paper rather than doing their core law enforcement work.”  DHS worked to digitize these records, and as a result, “we saved over a million hours of time that agents would have been spending writing and filling out paperwork.”

Hysen also held the title of Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Officer at DHS, and in that capacity he developed policies for the use of facial recognition at DHS.  Recognizing that the use of facial recognition “can be incredibly controversial, and when used improperly or without enough testing, can be really harmful,” he sought to implement the technology with the “right restrictions in place to require us to do the right things and to test the systems that we had to ensure they weren't biased.”  Under these policies, TSA implemented PreCheck Touchless ID, which allows travelers to opt in to facial recognition at airports.  Hysen said: “It's the only time I've ever–in doing customer observations–seen people excited to go through the TSA checkpoint,” as he watched them “breeze through without taking out a wallet,” and “without even taking out a phone.”

Hysen has been working at the intersection of government technology since high school, where he was elected Blair SGA President and was also a SysOp. He said that he “loved being a part of such a big, diverse, complicated school” at Blair.  One of the side projects he remembered completing was building the first web app for voting in Blair SGA elections.  Hysen credits Mr. Hammond for fostering a culture around tinkering and figuring out how systems work, which is how he has continued to approach problems in his career. 

After Blair, Hysen went to Harvard, where he initially wanted to major in political science but was drawn towards “the challenge of some of the computer science classes that were interesting.” He ultimately graduated with a major in computer science and a minor in government. Hysen was also involved in student government at Harvard, and in his senior year he led a week-long event called “Hack Harvard,” which was an incubator for web applications that were developed by students to improve services on campus.

After college, Hysen went to work for Google in a group based in DC that was developing products related to government services.  One example he gave was a search feature to “look up your polling place and show you the results of your election, or help you learn about the issues.”  Hysen started as a software engineer and then moved into product management.

In 2013, when the rollout of the HealthCare.gov website was plagued with errors, several of Hysen’s colleagues at Google were hired by the Obama administration to help rescue the project.  After the new HealthCare.gov site was released in 2014, Hysen attempted to recruit one of the returning Google engineers, Mikey Dickerson, to work on the civic products team at Google.  But when the two met, it was Dickerson who recruited Hysen to leave Google and join the government as one of the first members of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS). Although originally envisioned as a small team working on a few specific projects, USDS grew to over 200 by the end of the Obama administration and worked with many agencies all across the federal government.

As part of USDS, Hysen worked with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on a project to digitize the legal immigration system. When he arrived the digitization project was already a decade old, but like most big government IT projects at the time, it had been contracted to a system integrator with thousands of pages of requirements. As Hysen explained, these contractors promised “the perfect combination of our proprietary systems configured to all of those requirements–we’ll test it, we’ll release it, and it will all work perfectly.  And of course, it did not.”  With the support of the Obama administration to modernize these processes, USCIS shifted that approach “to be more like what I was used to at Google,” Hysen said. He described the new development process to be “more agile delivery, using open source software, and being able to deliver every couple days or every few hours rather than at the end of the quarter.” Hysen was proud to report that in just a few years, USCIS had improved “from less than 10% of immigration applications processed digitally . . . to over 70% by the end of the Obama administration.”

Hysen left the federal government in 2017 and moved to San Francisco to work in private philanthropy (for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) for a few years, and he also worked for the California state government before joining the Biden transition team in 2020, which led to his appointment at DHS.

After leaving government service, Hysen was recently named to an Executive Fellowship in Applied Technology Policy at the UC Berkeley School of Information & Goldman School of Public Policy.