Dealing with a single executive order from Donald Trump’s first-day edict is like saying one bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. It is “Define and Implement the Presidential Department of Government Efficiency.” The acronym for the name is DOGE (named after the memecoin), and it is an effort led by Elon Musk to reduce government spending by two trillion dollars. Although DOGE, until this week, was founded as external body, this move became an official part of the government—by attaching it to an existing agency that used to be part of the Office of Management and Budget called the United States Digital Service. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and the new head will be more tightly connected to the president, reporting to the chief of staff. The new USDS will apparently move its former laser focus on building cost-efficient and also- software designed for various agencies for the hardcore implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s like the government’s version of a SPAC, a dodgy financial maneuver that launched Truth Social on the public market without having to disclose a coherent business plan to the underwriters. more limited than the original super ambitious pitch. This iteration appears to be more focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s vast and inefficient IT infrastructure. There are huge savings, but some zeros short of a trillion. Currently, it is not certain that Musk will become the administrator of DOGE. It didn’t seem big enough for him. (The first director of USDS, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “‘I want to congratulate Elon Musk for being promoted to my old job.”) But it is reported that Musk pushed this structure as a way to put DOGE in the White house. I heard that in the Executive Office Building, there are several pink Post-it notes that claim space even beyond the USDS turf, including notes about the office that the former chief information officer can despise. So maybe this could be a launching pad for a broader effort that would eliminate all agencies and change policies. (I could not get a representative of the White House to answer the question, which is not surprising because there are dozens of other orders that ask for an explanation.) One thing is clear – this is the end of the United States Digital Service as it existed before, and a new sign, and maybe an era perilous for the USDS, which I have enthusiastically covered from the beginning. The 11-year-old agency is out of the high-tech rescue team that saved the mess that is Healthcare.gov, the failed website that nearly killed the Affordable Care Act. This team of intrepid volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who use internet-style techniques (the cloud is not a mainframe; an agile “agile” style of programming rather than outdated “waterfall” techniques) to create government technology. as good as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving behind lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, are lured by the prospect of public service. He works out of his funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. USDS typically takes on multi-million dollar projects and completes them—delivering superior results in a matter of weeks. It will put employees in the agency that ask for help, careful to work collaboratively with lifers in the IT department. A typical project involved making DOD medical records interoperable with different systems used by the VA. The USDS became the darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom. During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat—it’s the rare Obama initiative that survived. The second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got buy-in from Trump’s house fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record talk early in 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; he gave me a conspiratorial nod that he was looking up, at least for the moment. However, Trump’s four years have been a balancing act of showing the agency’s accomplishments while remaining under the radar. “In the Disney theme parks, they paint the things they want to be invisible with a certain green color so people don’t see them,” USDSer said. “We specifically paint ourselves green.” When Covid hit, that was a feat in itself, as USDS worked with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx on gathering statistics — some of which the administration didn’t want to publicize. wear thin. A source told us that at one point a Trump political appointee — not happy — that USDS was recruiting at a technology conference for lesbians and minorities, and asked why. This answer is an effective way to find good product managers and designers. The designated accepted but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” in the refund line, could they just say LWT?
