E14 Part 2 Dana Chisnell on Scaling UX Inside the U.S. Government

What does it take to change how a 260,000-person organization thinks about the people it serves? Dana Chisnell took what she learned from elections and civic design into one of the hardest environments imaginable: the federal government itself. This is Part 2 of 2. Dana talks about her time at the U.S. Digital Service and DHS, where she built a user research practice inside immigration systems, figured out how to make developers care about real users, and eventually walked away in spring 2025 because she had to.