In this episode of Tax Notes Talk, April Harding, former IRS director of user experience services, discusses her proposed agency modernization plan and the future of IRS digital products.

Tax Notes Talk is a podcast produced by Tax Notes. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

David D. Stewart: Welcome to the podcast. I'm David Stewart, editor in chief of Tax Notes Today International. This week: IRS 2.0?

As we've covered in previous episodes, it's been a tumultuous year at the IRS. The agency has faced controversial directives from the Trump administration, as well as constant leadership turnover and significant employee attrition.

But before President Trump took office for a second time, the IRS had been pursuing modernization efforts, including changes to customer service and technology. These goals were backed by $80 billion in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Although Congress did end up clawing back a portion of that funding, the IRS made some significant movements toward modernization. Former Commissioner Danny Werfel said in November 2024 that the agency was delivering on key customer service goals and implementing new technology for the first time in years.

So what could a fully modernized IRS look like, and will the agency be able to move into the future considering its recent struggles? One of our producers here at Tax Notes Talk, Peyton Rhodes, recently spoke with April Harding, a former director at the agency whose work included building a detailed IRS modernization plan.

Peyton joins us now to discuss their conversation, and I would normally say welcome to the podcast, but since you're here almost all the time, welcome to the microphone, Peyton.

Peyton Rhodes: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me behind the mic, Dave.

David D. Stewart: Now could you give us some background on April?

Peyton Rhodes: Sure. So April comes from a background in user experience and digital product design, so she doesn't really describe herself as a tax person. But in 2023 she made the move from the private sector to the IRS, where she became the agency's first-ever director of user experience services. She was leading a team there that was focused on updating the IRS's digital services and optimizing for customer experience.

David D. Stewart: And what all did you talk about?

Peyton Rhodes: We touched on her personal career path as well as what led her to the IRS and then ultimately what led her to leave. We also spoke about the plan she built as a roadmap for the future of digital transformation and user experience at IRS. That roadmap is called the IRS 2029+ plan, and April has described it as a bold reimagining of what the Internal Revenue Service can and should be.

David D. Stewart: All right, let's go to that interview.

Peyton Rhodes: Well, April, thank you so much for joining us in the studio today.

April Harding: Thanks for having me.

Peyton Rhodes: So before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's start with a little bit of your professional background. You've had a number of roles in the digital transformation space. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means, about your career path, and what brought you to the IRS?

April Harding: Yeah, so digital transformation for me, especially in government, is really about making sure that we close the gap between what government is intending to do and what it actually delivers to people. Most of that happens digitally now in 2025. So most of these institutions that were set up many years ago with paper-based processes before the internet was invented have to transform in order to be able to work effectively at that.

But I have done that not just for government — I'm fairly new to government actually — for lots of other organizations, the whole gamut of clients, so e-commerce, startups, advocacy groups, corporations. All along the way, over those 20 years of my career building things online, I focused where I could on pursuing what I always considered my first love, which is politics and public policy. So my academic background in undergrad was in political science, and then I did go on to get a master's degree in public policy because I've always just been really fascinated by and animated by the idea that ideas themselves can impact individual lives, and also at the scale of a national population. So how do we as a society use the tools that we have in the digital age to make that happen?

I always have tried to balance, or at least toggle back and forth between, that interest in public policy and my interest as a creative person who likes to make things in building things online. So when I found myself at IRS, it was really my dream job to finally bring those two worlds together.

Peyton Rhodes: Awesome. What originally interested you in the IRS? Was it just the perfect role, or were you ready to move into government?

April Harding: So it was really both of those things. I was looking to move into government full time to become a public servant. At the stage of my career that I was at, I really wanted to get that fulfillment in this moment in my life. When I found the role at IRS, it just felt so uniquely designed for the flavor of nerd that I am who loves user experience and human-centered design and complex challenges.

I definitely did not set out to go work at the IRS. I think most people that you talk to who are IRS employees did not set out to work at the IRS, and to a one, everybody that I told in my inner circle when I said, "I'm going to work at the IRS to do this digital thing," they were like, "Why? Why would you do that? That is notoriously an unpleasant organization that most people don't like. That seems impossible to change." My response was usually, "Yeah, all of those things. Impossible to change is my jam." That's what excites me. The opportunity that you get to really improve things for people is enormous. So I was very excited to step into the first-ever — unbelievably in 2023 — UX team at IRS.

Peyton Rhodes: So you were formerly the director of user experience services at the IRS. Can you talk to us a little bit about that team that you were leading and the goals that you were working towards?

April Harding: The team, by the time I left, was 80 people, incredible humans, specialized full-time in-house technologists producing work, doing the building of things, which I didn't even know at the time that I started was pretty unique for IRS to have a team of in-house federal staff actually producing deliverables, working on products. It was the only way I knew how to work, and I was given a wide space in which to operate. The mandate of the role was, "Here's some headcount on an org chart that you get to fill. Your job is to make the products better. Good luck," which is wonderful and terrifying to step into, more wonderful for me than the other because that is a thing I've been doing for a very long time.

So we had some staff who were already in-house. We had about a dozen people when we started that were coming over from other departments in online services, and then I got to bring in the rest from outside of government or at least outside of IRS. We built a really strong team of practitioners who had built and shipped products in the past who had a lot of ideas about frameworks and how to work and how to deliver and who had the skills to make the assets that we needed to make to improve all the legacy products.

In trying to do that though, everyone who has ever built a product online who is trying to improve the user experience will ask on day 0, "Who is this for? What is our goal? How do we know if it works? What do we know about what people want, and why are we doing the things that we've been doing so far?"

What I found — and then spent probably a year double-checking, turning over every rock to be sure because I just didn't believe it could be true — is that the IRS didn't really have existing answers to most of those questions. There was a vague idea of the taxpayer, this vague idea of the taxpayer experience or voluntary compliance, and this vague idea of online service and digitalization, but that's not enough for a UX practitioner to work with. We need to know: "What's our roadmap? Why do we put things on a roadmap? How do we amend it, and how do we deliver experiences?"

So we really had to begin by defining what experience the IRS was trying to deliver to people so that we could then design that experience, work with users to understand their needs, and measure it appropriately. Research, design, and measurement, all of those functions were part of my team.

Peyton Rhodes: So you ended up making the decision to leave the IRS as part of the deferred resignation program. Can you tell us a little bit about what led to that decision?

April Harding: Yeah, I did not want to go. It was devastating. The sequence of events early this year put everyone in federal government and the IRS in particular in a really tough spot as far as decision-making. When the second round of deferred resignations opened up for Treasury, there was a very short window in which people could act.

Again, I had built this team of folks that were doing work that there weren't other executives at IRS that had ever done that. When you are a human-centered designer or a researcher and your whole life's work — and these are very mission-oriented people, not just on my team, but across federal government — is about doing the right thing the right way, it's critical that you have leadership that understands what you do and how to do it well and why you do it. So I knew for my team, especially my direct reports, my managerial team, that whether or not I was still going to be there was going to be a huge factor in their decision-making about that deferred resignation.

My position was "I'm not going anywhere." However, I was also a special class of employee — there are only a couple dozen of them in the government — called streamline critical pay, where they bring in outside talent under special rules. We basically are at-will employees who are the easiest type of person to fire in government. I worked my internal network and begged everyone who might have any information to tell me if I was going to be able to stay, because if it was going to be game over, I needed to let people know. I unofficially found out that I wasn't going to be able to continue. So it was a gift to receive that in time to make a decision for myself — I'm a single mom, I have mouths to feed — but also for my team to be able to make their decisions based on that.

Peyton Rhodes: Wow. Well, you sound like you were really passionate about the work that you were doing there. Let's pivot to some of that specific work. Your post on LinkedIn about the IRS 2029+ plan went pretty viral within the tax community. Can you give us a broad overview of what that plan was and why it was created?

April Harding: So I think very broadly, among my friends and family, I have been calling it a love letter to the IRS. Honestly, it is how I see that organization as the best version of itself and all the things that it could be. There's so much potential there and the path forward is so clear. But practically, it's a summary of everything I learned in two years of being in a very unique position in that organization.

So there are lots of ways for technologists to come into government. You can parachute in through a fellowship. You can bolt on through a product team like with 18F [software development team] or USDS [U.S. Digital Service] in its former version. Those folks are amazing and bring so much to the table, but in proving concepts and bringing ideas into government that way, what they don't get the opportunity to see is how that translates into the existing bureaucratic machine.

Through a lot of good luck more than anything else and maybe unintentional organizational design on the part of IRS, I found myself in this moment where Direct File was being developed as the most successful digital product that IRS has ever built — that maybe the government has built so far — and being responsible not for that, but for managing all of the legacy products. So my role became how do we take what we learned from the success of Direct File and translate the bureaucratic machinery that has produced things differently into one that can produce that consistently going forward in all of the spaces. So I really focused on, as we were keeping the trains running and delivering the existing legacy products better and better, how do we think about scaling and transformation that creates a machine that consistently produces good things? That's what I was trying to do.

I was the biggest troublemaker IRS had ever seen in the digital transformation space before January of this year. It's hilarious now to think about how dramatically the conversation has shifted, but I was advocating for efficiency and ROI and measurement and product-based design and service design and all of these things. I was very excited at the beginning of this year that there was so much energy for big change and accountability and digital product development.

Regardless of how that ends up playing out, what I wanted to do before I had to leave was document what I had learned from that privileged position of being able to observe and influence and learn, that not many people have been able to have, and then think about how to take that forward. If someone is reimagining what this organization could be, here's a thought-starter, here's a straw man, here's a first draft. Take this and run with it based on what I and my team of incredible people have learned along the way.

Peyton Rhodes: OK, so the plan was an answer to you finding out that you were going to have to leave IRS.

April Harding: This summary version that I shared was put together on my last day because my departure date also got pushed up a little bit, which was unfortunate. But I had been working on all the components of this and socializing them internally for the past year.

So I took the first year to be sure I wasn't missing something and understand what the gaps were, and then my second year, we were building the strategy. We had defined objectives and key results. My analytics team built an end-to-end data pipeline and platform to measure things in this new and more meaningful way. That was a real product that existed. We built service design blueprints that started to illuminate the current state and set a vision for the future.

We had been socializing those things at the commissioner and Treasury and leadership level within the organization for several months, and we were acting on all of those things. So it wasn't new in May of 2025, but those were all independent pieces, different facets of the same object that when I found out I had to leave, I knew I needed to pull together in a way that could make them understandable for decision-makers going forward in case, at some point in time, someone becomes interested in picking back up this idea of holistic digital transformation.

Peyton Rhodes: So let's get into the specifics a little bit. The plan lays out a three-pronged vision, the first of which is achieving an IRS that effectively collects every tax dollar. Can you take us through how you'd optimize the tax collection process?

April Harding: Yeah, so I have to caveat this with the thing that a lot of IRS people say also, which is I'm not a tax person by training. However, it's important to start with the biggest picture view of what IRS is about. I was exposed to a lot of conversations, especially in the early part of this year, about return on investment in IRS. There's no standard definition of what the return part of that means. What are we trying to do here? What really is our objective, and how do we know if we're succeeding at it?

So I did begin advocating for the idea of a triple bottom-line approach to ROI for the IRS, and that's to account for the fact that we don't have a profit and loss measurement like private companies do, but in order to define the purpose of the Internal Revenue Service, we need to think about what our bottom line really is. As I started to unpack that and talk with other decision-makers in the organization and from what I had learned along the way, it became clear that it was really about this idea of tax collection that is the foundation of it, this idea of customer service, and this idea of privacy. Those all go hand in hand.

So despite collections being pretty clearly outside my purview as a customer experience professional in that role, you can't separate it from the delivery of services, especially because it is often the case that decisions about what to make for the customer experience inside IRS are justified by saying this will improve voluntary compliance. We're doing this because we want to improve voluntary compliance. That's our goal, voluntary compliance. It takes about 10 minutes of Googling to find that voluntary compliance is stagnant over the last 20 years, despite billions of dollars and decades of modernization projects. We're not really moving the needle on voluntary compliance with better customer service.

What you do find, again from the academic side, is the tax gap, which is the gap between taxes owed and taxes collected, is mostly due to underreporting. So I didn't go into a lot of detail about operationalizing the collections machine in my proposed strategy. What I did was set a vision for — we need to decide what our goal is and then create actions around a strategy to see if we can achieve those goals. So I proposed that reducing the tax gap and increasing the voluntary compliance rate would be the measurable key results of that objective.

The way that I would suggest doing that is by rethinking where we focus our efforts. So if we know that underreporting is the primary issue, then we need to maybe think differently about how we collect data reported. Maybe that is as broad as regulatory policy that defines transparency in business bank accounts, and there's some more clear way for people in tax compliance to understand what small businesses and sole proprietors are taking in regardless of the forms that they file.

I don't know how plausible that is. Again, that's really outside my area of expertise, but what I do know is that that is the space where the problem is. So setting goals and focusing on thinking differently about how we monitor reporting and collect more accurate information about revenue is going to be the key to unlocking that untapped potential.

Peyton Rhodes: Well, you mentioned that moving the needle on customer service doesn't necessarily equal moving the needle on voluntary compliance. The second goal of the plan aims to provide excellent customer service. Can you speak a little to why that's important if it's not necessarily affecting voluntary compliance, and speak a little to the issues that you think IRS currently has with their customer service model?

April Harding: Yes, and this is why I think, again, it's so important to define a triple bottom line, not just the single bottom line of dollars collected, especially because how much tax is owed is something the IRS itself can't control in any way. Both the previous administration and the current administration have set a priority for government customer service. We could speculate about the reasons behind that, but in both cases, it's been said that it is because the government has an obligation to make things better and easier for people.

There's also a lot of research that shows that individual interactions with government service delivery are the building blocks of trust in government and trust in democracy. So every moment that we are interacting with people — and every taxpayer, of which there are hundreds of millions, has to interact with the IRS in some way, whether directly or through a third party, and if we can improve those individual moments, we can actually impact overall trust in government, which builds a healthier democracy.

Peyton Rhodes: Well, we've seen recently the IRS calling some employees who participated in the deferred resignation program back to work. They seem to be citing maybe a lack of staff for the upcoming filing season. How do you see the attrition in staff affecting your plan's vision for revitalizing customer service at IRS?

April Harding: My understanding of what's happening right now with the callbacks is that it is mostly focused on the legacy customer service operations. So the way that IRS has historically measured success in customer service is in relation to phone calls, calls answered and hold time, things like that, and activity in the online products, but primarily about those live interactions. So I don't think that changes in staffing, adding or subtracting staffing in the legacy customer service operations, are necessarily related to digital transformation.

What I would like to see the IRS do is completely change the way that it thinks about customer experience and not just customer service. What we do know for sure is that if you have to call the IRS, that is the symptom of a bigger problem. What my team was focused on was really identifying the root causes of those problems so that we could solve them at the root. We can answer phones all day long, but how about if you just don't have to call in the first place?

We also know things like most of the time people are calling or coming to our web-based tools, it's to check on their refund status. It's a huge frustration. It's an emergency issue for a lot of people to get that refund check. There are a lot of ways to ease that moment of refund status, and we put a lot of work into better explaining where your refund is. But you know how we get to zero phone calls? Get you the check faster, and that is an organization-wide, enterprise-level transformation of process and people and tools and concept. That is what I would prefer to focus on.

Peyton Rhodes: So the third and final goal of the plan calls for protecting taxpayer data while also promoting government transparency as much as possible. Can you speak a little to why data protection is so important to the user experience as it pertains to IRS and how the plan would improve IRS's data protection processes?

April Harding: Yeah, so the IRS is the owner and maintainer of some of the most sensitive personal information in the country, and with that comes an enormous responsibility to protect the privacy of taxpayers' financial information and personal information. There are any number of ways that bad actors could use the data that the IRS has about individual taxpayers and taxpaying organizations for inappropriate purposes. It has always been the case that IRS has focused heavily on protecting the privacy of that data.

Where that becomes an issue is when the protection of privacy and the protection of that data gets turned into something that has a chilling effect on the utilization of taxpayer data to actually deliver better services and operate more efficiently and collect taxes more efficiently. What we saw in the early part of this year was a heavy focus on taxpayer data and data consolidation.

I will endorse that the legacy data systems need to be addressed, need to be modernized, and that there's a lot of good we could do by bringing those different in-house data sources together and utilizing them in appropriate ways to make things easier for everyone. You should be able to know what we know about you when you're logged into your account. For example, we should be able to give you recommendations about credits that you may qualify for based on what we know about you. These are the kinds of things that I would like to see that organization enable with better consolidation and use of data, but it has to be a zero-risk situation in terms of the privacy and security.

Because on the other side of that trust coin, if you read again the most recent research and the academic literature about American trust in government institutions specifically related to data privacy, the majority of Americans do not trust the government to keep their data safe and secure. We need to publicly and transparently show how we are making that a number one, two, or three priority, and how we are measuring ourselves against that standard in order to begin to rebuild that trust.

Peyton Rhodes: So you spoke a little bit earlier about how your team was in the process of building these performance markers in order to measure the success of aspects of your plan. Walk us through what a successful implementation of this plan would look like both internally at IRS and externally for practitioners and taxpayers.

April Harding: So I would love to just recap what the key results are and then talk to you about what the implementation of that looks like. We did set these three vision objectives, which were, as you mentioned, efficiently collect every tax dollar owed, provide excellent customer service, and fiercely protect privacy while providing maximum transparency. Those are great ideas. The IRS has never been short of ideas. We've had all kinds of strategic operating plans and projects with this language. What we haven't had is a way to know whether or not we have done that thing.

So what I think is really important to introduce is quantifiable results that tie to those. So the core of the proposal that I put forward was these key results for each of those objectives. So, for compliance, it is that the voluntary compliance rate is greater than 85 percent. We got to move the needle on that and that the net tax gap is less than 5 percent. If both of those things are true, we are doing our job on collections.

For customer experience, it is most people, more than 95 percent of taxpayers file quickly, accurately, and easily. Those words at the end there were very carefully chosen, and yes, they are measurable. We went to a lot of trouble again with my analytics team to define what quickly means and how we would measure that accurately, what easy means and how we would measure that with our digital behavioral and qualitative analytics. Ninety-five percent of taxpayers receive all available credits and deductions on time; 95 percent of taxpayers pay the correct amount on time; 95 percent of taxpayers quickly receive a correct resolution to their issue; and 95 percent of taxpayers are satisfied with their issue-related interaction with the IRS. If all of those things are true, the IRS is undeniably succeeding at customer service.

Right now, there are no such benchmarks. We have granular measurements like self-service participation or phone call hold time, but those don't really tell the story. If you talk to any one of your friends and neighbors about their experiences with the IRS, this is the level of success they would like to see.

Then for privacy, the way that I would suggest measuring success in that is with two key results. One, that wrongful disclosures of taxpayer data represent less than 1 percent of all taxpayer data disclosures. So when we're disclosing information, we're getting it right, the right information to the right person, and that malicious external data access attempts are successful less than 1 percent of the time. Constantly, the cybersecurity folks are fighting off external attacks, make sure that number is less than 1 percent success, hopefully far less than 1 percent success. So, those are the results that I am proposing the IRS hold itself accountable for. Now, in terms of implementation, how do you do that?

I think there are three overarching ways that you succeed at implementing that, and a lot of it is laid out in that 10-page document, but the three that I would focus on are first correcting the Conway's Law problem. So, Conway's Law is this term that was named after a computer scientist, Mel Conway, who said something that is now paraphrased often as you ship your org chart. So, regardless of the technical planning that you do, if you're building a system, it's going to reflect the communication strategies and incentives of the people who are in the organization that produces that. IRS is absolutely guilty of shipping its org chart. It's the number one problem.

So, in order to fix that, what I have proposed is a brand new org chart that solves the communication structure problem, that solves the incentive problem, which starts with these measurable goals as the thing that everyone is incentivized to produce.

It also solves the change management problem. So, if you change the org chart, change the communication structures, you also have to get the humans who are in that organization to come along for the ride. There's this huge misconception, especially right now in the public conversation, that the individual humans are the problem. If you swap out the people, you'll solve the problem. That's absolutely not how bureaucracies work.

I could spend a whole hour talking to you about this fascinating book that I recently read that was written in 1989 called Bureaucracy in which the author unpacks in an academic way what causes bureaucracies to work the way they do, but really, it's about defining the outcomes, and the people are shaped by the outcomes and incentives and structures. So, to implement a strategy, you really just got to say what you're going to do, hold yourself accountable through real measurements, align the people in productive ways to those goals, and help them adjust to the new circumstances. That's how you would implement something like this.

Peyton Rhodes: And you categorized yourself as the biggest troublemaker at IRS. So, obviously, you faced roadblocks in getting your vision accepted at the agency, let alone implemented. What is the biggest roadblocks that you see facing your plan in terms of general culture at IRS?

April Harding: Great question. I spent a lot of time thinking about this because I spent a lot of time trying to remove blockers from my team, and I tend to come at ideas about organizational change from the perspective of people, process, and tools.

From the people perspective, the number one blocker at IRS, and I suspect in many other agencies as well, is that everyone can say no to something, but there is no one who is empowered to say yes. This distributed consensus-based decision-making model stifles innovation. It stifles risk-taking. And it is maddening and disheartening, and it grinds people down because at any moment, you are exposed to a wide variety of vetoes and you can't get anyone even at the commissioner level to say, "Yes, go do that."

There's a lot of cultural background to why that is the way it is, this relationship-based dealmaking structures that are in play in the current bureaucracy. But if we could create an organization where an appropriate person is on record as being empowered to say yes to a decision and that decision of course could be overruled rarely, but that decision stands and animates the rest of the process, that would change a lot of the way that digital delivery happens.

The process part of the problem comes down to that digital products are developed in a project-based activity-based framework. If we start thinking about outcomes and products instead of projects and features, and we design processes to achieve outcomes and products that we invest in for a long period of time, that would significantly change the way that things happen.

But right now, it's a blocker because projects related to digital products are scoped three years in advance. They are detailed at the feature level by people who are not engineers or designers. They are baked into fixed-price contracts, and they are contracted out to vendors who then are absolutely obliged to deliver those things. There is no room to learn, there is no room to change, there is no room for failure, and there is no room to consider that after all of those features are done, the product is maybe not done. There are no product roadmaps, not in any meaningful way that someone from outside would recognize at IRS. So changing that process from a project-based one to a product delivery model that's about service outcomes would be huge.

The last blocker in relation to tools is pretty self-evident for anyone who spent one day trying to onboard in a government agency. It is so hard to get any normal work done on a government laptop, unbelievably hard. I spent 18 months going through literally hundreds of pages of paperwork that was developed by literally over 100 people to buy a product that exists, that I could go right now on my laptop, subscribe, put in my credit card, start using it in one hour.

There is value in security, paperwork, and documentation, but there is not value in the 99 percent of noise in that software approval process that cannot be justified. So letting people who make things online use the tools that everyone else uses to make things online would dramatically change the situation.

Peyton Rhodes: Well, considering all of that culture context, and also considering the very current moment of developments going on at IRS that are maybe making getting everyday work done difficult, what are your hopes for the IRS 2029+ plan in the future, and do you see a world where your vision is implemented?

April Harding: Absolutely. I'm super optimistic about what I have proposed here, which again is a first draft. There are many, many ways to crack that nut, but it is the right thing to do. It is evidence-based. It is common sense at a lot of levels, and it is what taxpayers want and need. Those things are true, and I believe in the power of good ideas to be maintained.

The timing, I'm not so sure. It's pretty clear right now that the environment is heavily engineering driven, and I will also cosign the idea that engineering at IRS needed to be addressed. There's a better way. I don't know if what is happening now is the right way to address it, but what I also know is that the only thing happening is focusing on code and engineering decisions and that is not enough. There's a reason that product teams have engineers and designers and researchers and analysts that measure success. Those are the pieces that are missing. So I don't see a bigger strategic view being implemented right now because that is where the focus is.

What I also know is that it requires courageous visionary leadership, but not much more than that. One or two empowered leaders who have this strong vision and are willing to start building cathedrals that won't be completed in their lifetime, that's what it will take to take all of this energy about radical decision-making and big changes that a year ago were impossible to consider.

If we take that energy and we have a leader who can direct it toward something that is thoughtful and in pursuit of anything, maybe the thing I suggested, but anything that we're saying out loud is the goal, it can be done. I am hopeful that at the Treasury or IRS level, there will be leadership that appears that will decide to take this action. I don't have any insider information on the next commissioner or what's going on, but I know that it can be done, and it doesn't take much more than that courageous vision to make it happen.

Peyton Rhodes: Turning back to you personally, what's next for you? Do you see yourself returning to government work, or do you have any ideas?

April Harding: I certainly hope to return to government work. What I know about myself is that I am in my core a problem solver and a person who finishes things. And I have had the opportunity to get a close look at this problem space, and I'm fascinated by it. There's so much more to do in the space of government digital transformation. I really want to continue to apply what I have learned at the state or federal or local level. What that looks like, I absolutely have no idea, but I know that my desire to continue to work on systems and these complex challenges will not go away. So we'll see.

Peyton Rhodes: Well, before we wrap up, is there anything else you want our listeners to know?

April Harding: Well, it's been said before, but it bears saying again: The people who have been doing this work inside of federal agencies, some contractor teams, but especially the federal employees, have been working inside a set of very challenging constraints. This year has been very hard for them, but they have always been and are still showing up every day, doing work that they believe is for the benefit of the public. They are incredible, and they can do what we need them to do. They can make a government, we, America, can make a government that is as good as any private sector business. There are folks there who have been trying to do that and will continue to keep trying to do that. So, basically just a shoutout to all my friends who are still fighting the good fight.

Peyton Rhodes: Well, April, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

April Harding: Thank you.