Elon Musk plays DOGE Ball and hits America’s Geek Squad

Invoking a single executive order from Donald Trump’s storied early days is like firing a bullet from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. That is “Establishment and Implementation of the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.”The acronym for the name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it’s an effort led by Elon Musk to cut government spending by a trillion or two dollars. Although DOGE was billed as an outside agency until this week, the move makes it an official part of the government — by bringing it into an existing agency that was part of the Office of Management and Budget, formerly 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 likely turn its past laser focus on creating cost-effective and well-designed software for various agencies into a rigorous implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s kind of like the government’s version of a SPAC, a risky financial maneuver that launched Truth Social on the public market without ever revealing a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is somewhat surprising, as DOGE seems more limited than its original super-ambitious pitch. This iteration focuses more on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and unwieldy IT infrastructure. There are huge savings, but trillions are far less than zero. For now, it is unclear whether Musk will become the DOGE administrator. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (First USDS director Mikey Dickerson joked on LinkedIn, “‘I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.'”) Musk pushed for it structure as a way to place the DOGE in the White House. I hear there are numerous pink Post-it notes inside the Executive Office Building demanding space beyond the USDS lawn, including one in the enviable office of the former chief information officer. Perhaps this could be the launching pad for a larger effort to abolish all agencies and change policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to respond to questions, which is not surprising given that there are dozens of other orders that require just as much explanation.)

Something does clear – it ends the United States Digital Service as it existed and marks a new and perhaps dangerous era for the USDS, which I have passionately covered since its inception. The 11-year-old agency took off high-tech rescue team Save the mess that is healthcare.gov, a hellish failure of a website that nearly violates the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small team of coders and designers using internet-style methods (the cloud, not the mainframe); flexible “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government technology as good as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked in the agency’s cobblestone headquarters on Jackson Place, north of the White House. USDS would take on projects that were typically mired in cent-million contracts and never completed—with outstanding results within weeks. That would be it places its employees in agencies He asked for help, being careful to cooperate with lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved interoperability of DOD military medical records with various systems used by the VA. The USDS has become a favorite of the Obama administration, a symbol of its connection to cool nerddom.

Skillful maneuvering during the first Trump administration kept the USDS afloat—that was it a rare Obama initiative that survived. His second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, smartly bought off Jared Kushner, Trump’s domestic fixer. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record chat in early 2017, I bumped into Van Dyke in the West Wing; he gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were going well, at least for the moment. Even so, the four Trump years have been a balancing act in sharing the agency’s accomplishments while remaining somewhat under the radar. One USDSer told me, “At the Disney theme parks, people paint things they want to be invisible with this certain green color so people don’t notice it when they walk by.” “We specialize in painting ourselves green.” When Covid hit, USDS worked closely with Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, to gather statistics — some of which the administration didn’t want to make public.

By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint had thinned. One source tells me that at one point, a Trump political appointee noticed that USDS was being recruited at tech conferences for lesbians and minorities and asked why. The answer was that it’s an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointee accepted this, but asked if they could just say LWT instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the reimbursement line.