Tackling a single executive order from Donald Trump’s vast body of first-day proclamations is like picking out a single bullet from an AK-47 in a burst. However, one of the bullets hit me directly in the abdomen. In other words “Establishment and Implementation of the Presidential Office of Government Efficiency.”The acronym for its name is DOGE (named after the meme coin), an Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by $1-2 trillion. Until this week, DOGE was launched as an outside agency, but the move officially makes it part of the government by incorporating it into an existing agency, formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget, called the U.S. Digital Service. The latter is now known as the U.S. General Services Administration, and its new director will have closer ties to the president and report directly to the president’s chief of staff.
It appears that the new USDS will shift its previous focus on building cost-effective, well-designed software for various government agencies to a full-scale implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s like the government’s version of a SPAC, a risky financial strategy that brought Truth Social to the public market without revealing a consistent business plan to underwriters.
This order is surprising in some ways, since at first glance DOGE seems more limited than its initial ultra-ambitious pitch. This iteration appears to be more focused on saving costs through streamlining and modernizing the government’s large and cluttered IT infrastructure. Significant savings are expected, but several orders of magnitude short of trillions of dollars. At this point, it is unclear whether Musk will become DOGE administrator. It seems like it’s not big enough for him. (The first USDS Director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “I would like to congratulate Elon Musk on his promotion to his previous position.”) But reportedly, Mr. Musk pushed this forward. Structure as a way to incorporate DOGE into the White House. There are countless pink post-it notes posted inside government buildings claiming space beyond USDS property, including one in the enviable office of a former chief information officer. I heard. So perhaps this could be the starting point for a broader effort to abolish entire government agencies and change policy. (I was not able to get a White House representative to answer my questions, but this is not surprising given that there are dozens of other orders asking for clarification as well.)
one thing teeth it is clear. This will end the U.S. Digital Service as it existed and usher in a new and possibly dangerous era for the USDS. I have been passionately covering the USDS since its inception. The 11-year-old agency was born out of the high-tech rescue squad that rescued the mess that was Healthcare.gov, a hellish failure of a website that nearly jeopardized the Affordable Care Act. Its intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency. Internet-style technology (cloud rather than mainframe). A nimble “Agile” programming style Instead of outdated “waterfall” technology), it’s about making government technology as nifty as the apps people use on their phones. Those soldiers often left well-paying jobs in Silicon Valley, attracted by the prospect of civil service. They worked out of a funky brownstone government building on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. USDS typically takes on projects that were buried under tens of millions of contracts but never completed, and delivers excellent results within weeks. The company plans to send employees to agencies that request assistance, taking care to work collaboratively with IT personnel. A typical project involved making the Department of Defense’s military medical records interoperable with the various systems used by the VA. USDS became a darling of the Obama administration and a symbol of its association with geek cool.
During the first Trump administration, USDS remained afloat through clever maneuvering. It was the rare Obama initiative that survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyke, deftly secured the buy-in of President Trump’s in-house fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Mr. Kushner for an off-the-record meeting in early 2017, I encountered Mr. Van Dyke in the West Wing. She gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were looking up, at least for now. Nevertheless, the four years of the Trump era have been a balancing act of sharing the agency’s accomplishments while managing to keep a low profile. “At Disney parks, they paint things that they want to be invisible a certain color green so that passersby won’t notice them,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting that green color ourselves.”When COVID-19 hit, USDS worked closely with White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx. This was a feat in itself, as it collected statistics (some of which the administration was unwilling to make public).
By the end of Trump’s presidency, the green paint had faded. At one point, sources said, Trump’s political appointees noticed — albeit not happily — that USDS was recruiting at technology conferences for lesbians and minorities and asked why. That’s what it means. The answer is that it’s an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointer accepted, but instead of adding “Lesbians Who Tech” to the redemption, he asked if they could just say LWT.
