In case you’re wondering why we should care about the ins and outs of Ukrainian bureaucracy, there are two big reasons worth paying attention to this. The first is that Americans have been paying for much of the technical development. The second is that the “government in a smartphone” concept is rapidly spreading around the world. USAID has been supporting Ukraine’s digital transformation since 2016. The volunteers that developed Diia were Ukrainians working with EPAM Systems, a software engineering company based in Pennsylvania. And EPAM Systems may be a private company, but USAID isn’t. It’s taxpayer-funded. After the Russian invasion, USAID donated another $8.5 million to Ukraine to help develop Diia’s wartime features. USAID director Samantha Power spoke at the World Economic Forum in 2023, touting Diia’s success. She and Federov both talked about the huge successes and discussed sharing Diia’s model with other countries. Incidentally, Samantha Power is married to Cass Sunstein, the author of Nudge and a number of other books that some might consider pro-social-manipulation. Power has stated that USAID intends to look for leaders in developing nations that have been running on anti-corruption platforms and sharing Diia-like technology with them to help modernize their countries. She specifically cited Zambia, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador. In January, Estonia announced that they would begin trial runs of their mRiik app, modeled after Ukraine’s Diia. https://www.activistpost.com/2023/03/is-the-us-funding-an-experiment-in-digital-control-in-ukraine.html