Obama leaves mixed technology legacy after 8 years as president
MIT Technology Review has assessed President Obama’s legacy on tech issues. They found that the Obama Administration performed well in using technology to open itself up to greater scrutiny, but this record was marred by the healthcare.gov debacle. Obama encouraged tighter regulation of ISPs but the days of net neutrality could be numbered under the incoming Republican administration. Obama’s National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing promised 1m jobs, but further investment is needed to deliver these, and it is not clear that Trump will provide the cash for them.

Here is an assessment of five particular signature technology topics: upgrading government use of technology, net neutrality, stimulus spending on technology, electronic medical records, and advanced manufacturing.

President Obama speaks as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks on during a town hall meeting on April 20, 2011, at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

How Government Uses Technology

The healthcare.gov disaster led the president to encourage government to act more like a tech company.

Barack Obama’s very first executive order back in 2009 wasn’t about reshaping U.S. health care, closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center, or any other high-profile political issue. It was one requiring the U.S. government to use technology to be more transparent and effective.

Obama’s campaign had famously relied more on computers and the Internet than any before. Now the Open Government Directive showed that he wanted to see digital technology change how government works, too. Eight years later, this wonky and obscure thread of his legacy may become one of the most enduring.

Obama did unusually well attracting Silicon Valley veterans to Washington to help with the goal. His interest in the Internet and the industry seemed evident in his first campaign, says Brian Behlendorf, a leading figure in open-source software who helped Obama’s campaign, and then advised on open-government projects in the White House. And technologists clicked with him. “I think it had a lot to do with him—the fact that he was the young outsider, not the establishment,” Behlendorf says.

In Obama's first term, the White House joined Twitter, launched its first blog (complete with comments), let citizens petition their government online, and hired America’s first chief technology officer. It built new kinds of services such as recovery.gov, which let anyone track how Obama's $800 billion stimulus package was spent.

Then an embarrassing digital disaster forced the Obama administration to step up its efforts. Nearly $500 million was spent building the healthcare.gov insurance exchange that was at the heart of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But when it launched in October 2013, the site barely worked.