Addressing a single executive order among the voluminous executive orders from Donald Trump’s first day is like picking a bullet from a burst of bursts from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the stomach. It is “Creation and Implementation of the Presidential Department of Government Effectiveness.” »The acronym for this is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it is the Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by a trillion or two dollars. Although DOGE was, until this week, presented as an outside agency, the move makes it an official part of government, integrating it into an existing agency that was previously part of the Office of Management and Budget called United States Digital Service. The latter will now be called US DOGE Service, and its new head will be more closely linked to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.
The new USDS will apparently shift its former focus on creating cost-effective, well-designed software for various agencies to strictly implementing Musk’s vision. It’s a bit like a government version of a SPAC, the dubious financial maneuver that launched Truth Social onto the public market without ever having to reveal a coherent business plan to underwriters.
The order is surprising in a sense because, at first glance, DOGE seems more limited than its super-ambitious original pitch. This iteration appears more narrowly focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and messy IT infrastructure. There are big savings to be made, but only a few zeros are missing from reaching trillions. At the moment, it is unclear whether Musk will become the administrator of DOGE. It doesn’t seem big enough to him. (The first director of the USDS, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn: “I would like to congratulate Elon Musk on his promotion to my former position.”) But it seems that Musk insisted on this structure as a way to integrate DOGE into the White House. I’ve heard that inside the Executive Office Building there are numerous pink post-it notes clamoring for space even beyond USDS territory, including one of these notes on the enviable office of the former information director. So maybe this could be the starting point for a larger effort that eliminates entire agencies and changes policies. (I was unable to get a White House official to answer questions, which is not surprising given that there are dozens of other orders that also require explanations.)
One thing East Clearly, this ends the U.S. digital service as it previously existed and marks a new, perhaps perilous, era for USDS, which I have covered enthusiastically since its inception. The agency, founded 11 years ago, was born high-tech rescue team saving the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that nearly derailed the Affordable Care Act. This intrepid team of volunteers defined the agency’s model: a small group of coders and designers who used Internet-style techniques (cloud, not mainframe; the agile and “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique to make government technology as slick as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, were attracted by the prospect of public service. They worked out of the agency’s funky headquarters in Jackson Place, just north of the White House. USDS typically took on projects that were mired in contracts worth hundreds of millions and were never completed, producing superior results within weeks. It would be integrate employees into agencies who asked for help, taking care to work in collaboration with the IT service lifers. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the various systems used by the VA. The USDS has become a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddoms.
During the first Trump administration, skillful maneuvering kept the USDS afloat: it was the a rare initiative from Obama who survived. His number two, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got the buy-in of Trump’s internal fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record conference in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; she gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were getting better, at least for now. Nonetheless, the four Trump years have become a balancing act of sharing the agency’s accomplishments while remaining under the radar. “At Disney theme parks, they paint things that they want to make invisible this certain color of green so people don’t notice it when they walk by,” a USDSer employee told me. “We specialized in painting this green color.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx to gather statistics, some of which the administration was not keen to go public.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was beginning to wear thin. A source tells me that at one point, a Trump political appointee noticed — not happily — that USDS was recruiting at tech conferences for lesbians and minorities, and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointee agreed to this but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the refund line, could they just say LWT?