Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump's sweeping first-day decrees is like singling out one bullet in an AK-47 burst. But one of them hit me in the stomach. That is “Establishing and Implementing the President's Department of Government Efficiency.” The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it's the Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by a trillion dollars or two. Although DOGE was presented as an external agency until this week, this move makes it an official part of the government – embedding it into an existing agency that was previously part of the Office of Management and Budget, the United States Digital Service . The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and the new head will be more closely linked to the president and report to his chief of staff.
The new USDS will apparently shift from its previous laser focus on building cost-efficient and well-designed software for various agencies to a hardcore implementation of the Musk vision. It looks a bit like a government version of a SPAC, the dodgy financial maneuver that launched Truth Social into the public market without ever having to reveal a coherent business plan to insurers.
The sequence is surprising in a way because DOGE seems at first glance more limited than its original, super-ambitious pitch. This iteration seems more focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government's vast and cluttered IT infrastructure. Big savings are possible, but a handful of zeros short of trillions. So far, it is uncertain whether Musk will become the 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 Musk reportedly pushed for this structure as a way to get DOGE into the white agenda anchor. House. I hear there are numerous pink Post-it notes in the Executive Office Building claiming space even off the USDS grounds, including one such note about the enviable office of the former Chief Information Officer. So perhaps this could be a launching pad for a more sweeping effort that will eliminate entire agencies and change policy. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn't surprising considering there are dozens of other orders also begging for explanation.)
One thing is Clearly, this ends the United States Digital Service as it existed before, and ushers in a new and perhaps dangerous era for the USDS, which I have enthusiastically reported on since its inception. The 11-year-old agency emerged from the high-tech rescue team that saved the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the infernal failure of a website that nearly nullified the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers formed the foundation for the agency: a small group of programmers and designers who used Internet-style techniques (cloud, not mainframe; the nimble “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to create government technology as useful as the apps people use on their phones. The soldiers, who often left lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked out of the agency's funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. The USDS typically took on projects that were tied up in multi-million dollar contracts and never completed, delivering superior results within weeks. It would place its employees with agencies that requested assistance, working carefully with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved making Department of Defense military medical records interoperable with the various systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its commitment to cool nerddom.
During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat – it was the rare Obama initiative that survived. The second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got the support of Trump's internal fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record conversation in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; she gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were looking better, at least for now. Nevertheless, the four Trump years became a balancing act in sharing the agency's achievements while somehow remaining under the radar. “At Disney theme parks they paint things they want to be invisible with this particular shade of green so people don't notice it as they pass by,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves in that color green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx in compiling statistics — some of which the administration was reluctant to make public.
By the end of Trump's term, the green paint was wearing thin. A source tells me that at one point a Trump political appointee noticed – not happily – that USDS was recruiting at technology 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 accepted that, but asked if instead of putting 'Lesbians Who Tech' on the refund line, could they just say LWT?
