FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Department of Administrative Convergence, Office of Digital Experience Transformation
The Department of Administrative Convergence is proud to announce the official public launch of CitizenBridge™: America's first fully unified government services platform and the culmination of a three-year, $218 million initiative to give every American a single, seamless entry point into their federal government.
CitizenBridge™ is available now at citizenbridge.gov. Officials describe it as 'a paradigm-shifting citizen experience.' Officials have not personally used it.
What Is CitizenBridge™?
CitizenBridge™ is a homepage.
It is a very well-designed homepage, featuring the Department's new brand palette (Civic Slate™ and Federal Teal™, selected after a $4,400 color consultation), a search bar, a rotating banner of stock photography depicting Americans of various demographics looking confidently at laptops, and forty-seven clearly labeled buttons.
Each button links to a separate federal portal. Each portal has its own login system. Fourteen of the portals require passwords of between twelve and twenty-two characters, with conflicting rules about special characters that three portals describe as mandatory, two describe as forbidden, and one describes as 'discouraged but not prohibited, depending on the browser.' The browser requirements are listed in a PDF.
The PDF requires Adobe Reader. The link to Adobe Reader goes to a 2019 version of the Adobe website that redirects to the current Adobe website, which asks users to create an account.
'This is exactly the kind of friction we've eliminated,' said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Digital Convergence Howard Crane, at Thursday's launch event, gesturing at a slide that said 'FRICTION ELIMINATED' in large letters.
A Historic Achievement in the Field of Putting Things Next to Each Other
The consolidation initiative was first announced in 2022, when then-Secretary of Administrative Affairs Janet Burrell pledged to reduce the number of federal digital touchpoints from 'an embarrassing quantity' to 'one, ideally, or at most a few.' A task force was formed. The task force produced a roadmap. The roadmap produced a working group. The working group produced CitizenBridge™.
CitizenBridge™ does not reduce the number of portals. It does not merge any portal with any other portal. It does not share login credentials across portals, sync user data between portals, or allow any portal to communicate with any other portal in any way that would suggest they are aware of each other's existence.
What CitizenBridge™ does, according to the official technical specification document (available upon written request, allow six to eight weeks), is 'provide a unified navigational layer that surfaces existing service endpoints within a coherent branded environment.'
In plain English, it is a list of links.
The list of links cost $218 million.
The Portals Themselves: A Brief Survey
Behind CitizenBridge™'s welcoming homepage lies an ecosystem that one beta tester, a retired systems administrator from Akron, Ohio, described as 'like being handed a map of a building and then discovering the building is forty-seven different buildings and some of them are in different time zones.'
Photo: Akron, Ohio, via c8.alamy.com
Portal 7 (Federal Benefits Enrollment) has not been updated since 2017 and displays a security warning in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It works correctly in Internet Explorer, which Microsoft discontinued in 2022.
Photo: Internet Explorer, via pngimg.com
Portal 19 (Small Business Licensing Gateway) requires users to first complete a registration through Portal 31 (Identity Verification Services), which requires a code sent to Portal 12 (Federal Notification Hub), which sends the code to an email address that must be registered through Portal 19.
Portal 34 (Veterans' Services Access Point) and Portal 35 (Veterans' Benefits Navigator) were created by different agencies in the same fiscal year to solve the same problem and have, according to sources within both agencies, 'never formally acknowledged each other's existence' despite sharing a physical server.
Portal 41 is listed on CitizenBridge™ as 'Coming Soon.' It has been listed as Coming Soon since 2020. The agency responsible for Portal 41 was reorganized in 2021. Its successor agency is aware of Portal 41 and describes it as 'a legacy commitment currently under review.'
Officials Respond to Early Feedback
Public response to CitizenBridge™ in its first 72 hours has been described by the Department as 'robust and informative.' The Department has not shared the specific nature of the feedback, though a spokesperson confirmed it has been 'catalogued for future reference' and that a satisfaction survey is available on Portal 23.
Portal 23 is currently down for scheduled maintenance. The maintenance window, according to the Portal 23 status page, began on March 3rd and has no listed end date.
Deputy Assistant Secretary Crane acknowledged at a press briefing Friday that 'some users may experience a brief adjustment period' as they familiarize themselves with the new platform. He confirmed that a user assistance hotline is available Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern, excluding federal holidays, and that wait times are currently running at approximately four hours.
'The important thing,' Secretary Crane said, 'is that for the first time in history, all of these services are in one place.'
They are not in one place. They are in forty-seven places. CitizenBridge™ is a sign pointing at all of them.
What Happens Next
The Department announced Friday that a formal review of CitizenBridge™'s Phase One rollout will be conducted over the next eighteen months by the newly formed Office of Unified Platform Experience Assessment, a task force of eleven officials charged with determining why citizen adoption of the new platform has been 'below projected benchmarks.'
The Office of Unified Platform Experience Assessment will publish its findings in a report. The report will recommend a Phase Two. Phase Two will be announced at a launch event featuring a new slide that says 'FRICTION ELIMINATED.'
CitizenBridge™ is available at citizenbridge.gov. The site is best viewed in Internet Explorer.
