Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like selecting a bullet from a volley from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the stomach. That is “Establishment and implementation of the Presidential Department of Government Efficiency.”The acronym for that name is DOGE (the name of a memecoin), and it is the Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by one or two trillion dollars. Although until this week DOGE presented itself as an external body, this move makes it an official part of the government, integrating it into an existing agency that was previously 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 its new head will be more closely associated with the president and report to his chief of staff.
The new USDS will apparently shift its previous laser focus on creating cost-effective, well-designed software for multiple agencies to a strict implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s something of a government version of a SPAC, the dubious financial maneuver that launched Truth Social on the public market without having to disclose a coherent business plan to underwriters.
The order is surprising in a sense because, at first glance, DOGE seems more limited than its original super-ambitious speech. This iteration seems more focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s huge, messy IT infrastructure. Big savings can be achieved, but a few zeros short of trillions. As of now, it is unclear whether Musk will become the administrator of DOGE. It doesn’t seem big enough. (USDS’s first director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn: “‘I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.’) But, reportedly, Musk pushed for this structure as a way to integrate DOGE into the White House. I hear that inside the Executive Office Building, there are numerous pink Post-it notes claiming space even beyond USDS territory, including one such note in the enviable office of the former CIOs. So maybe this could be a launching pad for a broader effort that eliminates entire agencies and changes policies. (I couldn’t get a White House representative to answer questions, which is not surprising considering there are dozens of other orders that similarly ask for explanation.)
one thing is It’s clear: this ends the US Digital Service as it previously existed and marks a new, and perhaps dangerous, era for the USDS, which I have been covering enthusiastically since its inception. The agency, founded 11 years ago, emerged from the high-tech rescue team that saved the disaster that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that nearly brought down the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the model for the agency: a small group of coders and designers using Internet-like techniques (cloud, not mainframe; the agile and agile programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government technology as clever as the apps people use on their phones. His soldiers, who often left lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, were attracted by the prospect of public service. They worked out of the agency’s former brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. The USDS typically took on projects that were trapped in centimillion contracts and never completed, delivering superior results in a matter of weeks. It would integrate its employees into agencies that requested help, taking care to work collaboratively with workers in IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the different systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with nerd cool.
During the first Trump administration, clever maneuvering kept USDS afloat; It was the rare Obama initiative that survived. His second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, skillfully won the buy-in of Trump’s internal fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record talk in early 2017, I met Van Dyck in the West Wing; She gave me a knowing gesture indicating that things were improving, at least for the moment. Trump’s four years, however, became a balancing act of sharing the agency’s accomplishments while staying under the radar. “At Disney theme parks, they paint things that they want to be invisible with this particular green color so that people won’t notice it when they walk by,” one USDSer told me. “We specialize in painting ourselves that color green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx on collecting statistics, some of which the administration I was not willing to publish.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was wearing off. One source tells me that at one point a Trump political appointee realized, not happily, that USDS was recruiting at lesbian and minority tech conferences, and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great designers and product managers. The designee accepted that but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the refund line, could they just say LWT?