USDS is the federal government's first attempt to recognize the fact that the United States has no cross-department best practices for software engineering at the federal level. It's an organization tasked with running roughshod over various software engineering projects, but in its first iteration, it served an advisory role, and had no "teeth." So it ran into a lot of challenges where it would try to provide best practices for various government orgs, and the orgs, convinced that they knew best because they've been doing this for decades (wrong) already, could just ignore them.

I believe they have some teeth now, and it may perhaps be because a couple of interactions like this occurred. I know Mr. Cutts himself built up a bit of a reputation as a skullcracker, because it turns out he was quite good at figuring out how to apply bureaucratic leverage (mostly by figuring out how individual team members were incentivized and then aligning the relevant incentives to make them care about getting the job done the right way).