Addressing one order from Donald Trump’s day one agenda is like removing one bullet from an AK-47 blaster. But one of them hit me in the gut. Which stands for “Establishing and Operating the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.” The acronym for that word is DOGE (named after the memecoin), and it’s an Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by a billion dollars or two. Although DOGE has, until this week, been set up as an outside agency, the move makes it an official part of the government—by embedding it in an existing agency that was formerly 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 closely linked to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.
The new USDS will apparently shift its previous laser focus on building cost-effective and well-designed software for various agencies to a more robust implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s like the government’s version of a SPAC, the strange financing mechanism that launched Truth Social to the public market without having to reveal a coherent business plan to underwriters.
The order is surprising in a sense because, on the face of it, DOGE appears to be more limited than its first ambitious pitch. This iteration appears to be focused on saving money by improving and modernizing the government’s large and messy IT infrastructure. There are huge savings to be had, but a few zeros short of billions. At the moment, it is not certain that Musk will become the administrator of DOGE. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (USDS’s first director, Mike Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “‘I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.”) But Musk reportedly pushed the structure as a way to embed DOGE in White. The house. I hear that inside the Executive Office Building, there are many pink Post-it notes demanding space even beyond the USDS’s turf, including one such from the envious office of former information officers. So maybe this could be the launching pad for a big effort to get rid of all the agencies and change the policies. (I couldn’t get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising considering there are dozens of other orders equally begging for clarification.)
One thing is something clear—this ends the United States Digital Service as it existed before, and marks a new, and perhaps dangerous, era for the USDS, which I have been enthusiastically covering since its inception. The 11-year-old organization came out of a group of high-tech rescuers rescuing the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that nearly killed the Affordable Care Act. That group of intrepid volunteers set the agency’s template: a small group of coders and designers using Internet-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; “quick” programming style rather than the outdated “waterfall” approach) to create government technology. as good as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving jobs that lead to Silicon Valley, are lured by the prospect of public service. They work out of the agency’s funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. USDS often takes on projects that are combined with million contracts and not completed—delivering superior results within weeks. It will put its employees in the centers that ask for help, taking care to work with those who are left behind in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD’s military medical records interoperable with the various systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of cool nerddom.
During Trump’s first administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS running — a rare Obama move that survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, shrewdly got buy-in from Trump’s personal trainer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record speech in early 2017, I met Van Dyck in the West Wing; he gave me a nod that things were looking up, for now. Still, Trump’s four years have been a balancing act in sharing the agency’s accomplishments while remaining somewhat under the radar. “At the Disney theme parks, they paint the things they want invisible this certain green color so people won’t see it when they walk by,” said one USDerer. “We specially painted them that green color.” When Covid hit, that was a surprise in itself, as the USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx to gather statistics—some of which the administration was reluctant to release.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint had worn off. A source tells me that at one point political nominee Trump noticed—not happily—that the USDS was hiring at tech conferences for gay men and minorities, and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The nominee accepted that but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” in the return line, they could just say LWT?
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