Referring to a single executive order from Donald Trump’s extensive Day 1 edicts is like selecting a single bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the stomach. This is “Creation and Implementation of the President’s Department of Government Effectiveness.”The acronym for this is DOGE (named after memecoin) and it is Elon Musk’s effort to reduce government spending by a trillion dollars or two. Although until this week DOGE was portrayed as an outside body, the move makes it an official part of the government by embedding it in 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 called the US DOGE Service, and its novel head will be more closely linked to the president and will report to his chief of staff.
The novel USDS will apparently shift its former focus on creating cost-effective and well-designed software for various agencies towards hardcore implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s a bit like the government’s version of a SPAC, the shady financial maneuver that brought Truth Social to the public market without having to disclose a coherent business plan to insurers.
The order is somewhat surprising because, at first glance, DOGE seems more confined than its original, super-ambitious plan. This version seems more focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s enormous and messy IT infrastructure. There are huge savings to be had, but the trillions are a few zeros away. For now, it is unclear whether Musk will become DOGE’s administrator. It doesn’t seem huge enough for him. (USDS’s first director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn: “I would like to congratulate Elon Musk on his promotion to my previous position.”) But apparently Musk insisted on it structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I’ve heard that there are a lot of pink sticky notes in the Executive Office building taking up space even outside the USDS property, including one in the former CIO’s enviable office. So maybe this could be a starting point for more sweeping action that would eliminate entire agencies and change the rules. (I was unable to obtain a response to a White House representative’s questions, which is not surprising given that there are dozens of other orders that similarly cry out for clarification.)
One thing Is sure – this ends the US Digital Service as it stands and marks a novel, possibly risky era for USDS, which I’ve been enthusiastically reporting on since its inception. This 11-year-old agency comes from a high-tech emergency department that is saving the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish website failure that nearly derailed the Affordable Care Act. This intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a petite group of programmers and designers who used web-based techniques (cloud, not mainframe; agile, “agile” programming style instead of the obsolete “waterfall” technique) to make government technology as nippy as the apps people employ on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked at the agency’s fashionable headquarters in a tenement house on Jackson Place, north of the White House. USDS typically took on projects that were locked into multi-million dollar contracts and were never completed, delivering excellent results within weeks. It would place its employees in agencies that asked for support, paying attention to working with IT managers. A typical project involved ensuring DOD military medical records were interoperable with the various systems used by the VA. USDS has become a favorite of the Obama administration, a symbol of its ties to the nippy nerd.
During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat, a occasional Obama initiative that has endured. Her deputy, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly gained the support of Trump’s in-house specialist, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an informal conversation in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; She gave me a secret nod that everything was looking good, at least for now. Nevertheless, Trump’s four years became a balancing act of sharing the agency’s achievements while remaining secretive. “At Disney theme parks, they paint things they want invisible a certain color of green so people don’t notice it when they walk by,” one USDSer employee told me. “We specialize in painting ourselves this color of green.” When Covid hit, that was a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx to collect statistics, some of which the administration was reluctant to publish.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was already diluted. A source told me that at one point, a Trump political appointee noticed – less than happily – that USDS was recruiting at tech 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 agreed with this, but asked if instead of writing “Lesbians Who Tech” on the reimbursement line, could she just say LWT?