Elon Musk plays DOGE Ball — and attacks America’s Geek team
Tackling a single executive order from Donald Trump’s massive first-day decrees is like picking out a bullet in a blast from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the stomach. That is “Establish and implement the President’s Department of Government Effectiveness.’‘ The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after a memecoin) and it’s an Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by a trillion dollars or two. While DOGE was, until this week, considered an external agency, the move makes it an official part of the government — by folding it into an existing agency that was previously part of the Office of Management and Budget called the U.S. Digital Service. The latter agency will now be known as the US DOGE Agency, and its new head will have a closer connection to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.
The new USDS will clearly shift its previous laser focus on building well-designed and cost-effective software for various agencies to a serious implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s like a government version of a SPAC, a sophisticated financial maneuver that brought Truth Social to the public markets without having to disclose a coherent business plan to underwriters.
This command is surprising in some ways because, on the surface, DOGE appears to be more limited than its initial super-ambition. This iteration appears to be more tightly focused on saving money through streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and cluttered IT infrastructure. There are big savings but there are a few zeros short of trillions. It is currently unclear whether Musk will become a DOGE administrator. It didn’t seem big enough for him. (The first USDS director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn: “’I want to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old position.”) But according to the report, Musk pushed for this structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I heard that inside the Executive Office Building, there are many pink Post-it notes claiming the space is even outside of USDS territory, including one such note on the office stationery. The enviable room of former chief information officers. So maybe this could be the launching pad for a more far-reaching effort to eliminate entire agencies and change policies. (I couldn’t get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising since there are dozens of other orders that similarly require explanation.)
One thing To be clearly—this ends the United States Digital Service as it has existed and marks a new and possibly dangerous era for the USDS that I have passionately covered since its inception . 11 year old agency comes out from high-tech rescue team Saving the chaos was Healthcare.gov, the massive failure of a website that nearly destroyed the Affordable Care Act. That brave team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of programmers and designers using internet-style techniques (the cloud, not the mainframe; “agile” agile programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government technology as convenient as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, are lured by the prospect of public service. They work from the agency’s elegant brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. USDS often takes on projects that are under contract for millions of dollars and are never completed—delivering outstanding results within weeks. It will put its employees into agencies asked for help, be careful when collaborating with rescuers in the IT department. A typical project involves making DOD military medical records interoperable with various systems used by the VA. USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its association with nerds.
During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept USDS afloat — that is Obama’s rare initiative has survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got support from Trump’s internal fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an informal chat in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; She nodded meaningfully to me that things were looking up, at least for now. Still, Trump’s four years have become a balancing act of sharing the agency’s accomplishments while somehow remaining undetected. “At Disney theme parks, they paint things they want to be invisible this certain shade of green so people don’t notice it when they walk by,” one USDSer told me. “We specialize in painting ourselves that green.” When Covid hit, that was a feat in itself because USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx to gather statistics — some of which The government does not want to make it public.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint had thinned. A source told me that at one point, a Trump political appointee noticed — not to his delight — that USDS was recruiting at tech conferences for lesbians and minorities, and ask why. The answer is that it is an effective way to find good product managers and designers. The appointee accepted that but asked if instead of putting “Technological Lesbians” in the return line, could they just say LWT?
