Dealing with a single executive order from Donald Trump’s extensive day one edicts is like picking a bullet from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the stomach. That means “Establishment and Implementation of the Presidential Department of Government Efficiency.”The acronym for this name is DOGE (named after a memecoin) and it is the effort led by Elon Musk to reduce government spending by a trillion or two dollars. Although DOGE was considered an external entity until this week, this move makes it an official part of the government – by embedding it into an existing agency called the United States Digital Service, which was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service and its new head will be more closely linked to the President and report to his Chief of Staff.
The new USDS will apparently shift its previous focus on developing cost-effective and well-designed software for various agencies to a hard implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s something of a government version of a SPAC, the shady financial maneuver that brought Truth Social to the public market without ever having to disclose a coherent business plan to underwriters.
The order is somewhat surprising, as at first glance DOGE appears to be more limited than its original, very ambitious proposal. This option appears to be more about saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s vast and chaotic IT infrastructure. Great savings are possible, but a handful of zeros are still trillions short. It is currently uncertain whether Musk will become DOGE administrator. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (The first USDS director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn: “‘I want to congratulate Elon Musk on his promotion to my old job.”) But supposedly Musk pushed for this Structure as a way to anchor DOGE in the White House. I’ve heard that there are numerous pink sticky notes in the Executive Office Building that even take up space outside of the USDS precinct, including one such note about the former Chief Information Officer’s enviable office. So perhaps this could be a starting point for a broader effort leading to the abolition of entire agencies and changing policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which is not surprising given that there are dozens of other orders also seeking explanations.)
One thing Is Clearly, this ends the United States Digital Service in its current form and marks a new and potentially dangerous era for the USDS, which I have enthusiastically covered since its inception. The 11-year-old agency emerged from the High-tech rescue squad Saving the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that nearly brought down the Affordable Care Act. This intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of programmers and designers using Internet-like technologies (cloud, not mainframe; the nimble “agile” programming style rather than the outdated “waterfall” technology) to make government technology as sophisticated as the apps people use on their phones. His soldiers, often leaving lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked at the agency’s unconventional brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, north of the White House. The USDS typically took on projects that were in multi-million dollar contracts that were never completed – and delivered outstanding results within a few weeks. It would embed its employees in agencies who have asked for help, taking care to work with employees in the IT departments. A typical project was to make the Department of Defense medical records interoperable with the VA’s various systems. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom.
During the first Trump administration, clever maneuvers kept the USDS afloat – this was the case rare Obama initiative that survived. His deputy, Haley Van Dyck, has cleverly secured the support of Trump’s internal fixer, Jared Kushner. When I met Kushner for a confidential conversation in early 2017, I met Van Dyck in the West Wing; She nodded at me conspiratorially and showed me that at least for the moment things were looking up. Still, the four Trump years became a balancing act of sharing the agency’s accomplishments while somehow remaining under the radar. “At Disney theme parks, they paint things that are supposed to be invisible this particular color of green so people won’t notice them as they walk by,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves the color green.” When Covid hit, that was a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, to compile statistics collect – some of which the government did not necessarily want to publish.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint had worn off. According to one source, a Trump political appointee once noticed — not happily — that USDS was recruiting for lesbians and minorities at tech conferences and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The commissioner accepted that, but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the refund line, he could just say LWT?
