DOGEs and don'ts
This week's executive orders contain some hidden clues as to how the new Department of Government Efficiency will work—and they're not good news.
So now we know what Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is going to look like and… welp, it’s not what we expected. The US Digital Service, a 230-person agency within the White House, is becoming the US DOGE Service, with a mandate, officially at least, of “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” This seems superficially similar to the mission of the original USDS, which was “to deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design.”
Until proven otherwise, though, I think we have to assume that Elon Musk, the man Trump named to run DOGE, is not suddenly about to become the world’s first centibillionaire IT specialist, but that the true aim is to make USD(OGE)S a Trojan horse for the White House to get its tentacles deep into the bowels of other government agencies so it can figure out what to cut. Here’s why.
The TL;DR: There’s every indication that the US Digital Service’s new mission has everything to do with cost-cutting and firing people, and almost nothing to do with technology—except to make it easier for government agencies to share data, which could have either positive or nefarious uses.
First, some background. The USDS was founded a decade ago under Barack Obama after the healthcare.gov debacle. It sends small teams of advisers into government agencies to help them build better digital services. Its successes tend to be things that look minor, but improve life for tens of millions of people and save hundreds of millions of dollars. (To take one example: Last year it helped the Social Security Administration cut the average wait time on its helpline from 42 minutes to 12, which seems like small beans until you learn that the SSA takes 700 million calls a year.)
It’s important for our purposes here to understand what the USDS doesn’t do, or hasn’t up to now. It doesn’t “modernize federal technology and software.”
The reason so many government tech projects suffer so many delays, cost so much and work so badly is not a technological problem, but a human and process problem. The way that laws mandating new services get turned into specifications for how the services should work, and then into contracts for the private sector to build them, is deeply broken and often produces results that bear little relation to what citizens actually need. It’s “become almost a truism at USDS that the tech is the easy part,” a former staffer explained to me. “You don’t need fancy engineers to do this stuff. The skill sets that tend to be most valuable for improving [government] services are design, UX [user experience] research and product work.”
During Trump 1.0, USDS was able to keep working much as before, in part because it had the patronage and protection of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, who became enamored of what it did. Kushner is not in the White House this time, but there was some hope that an incoming administration obsessed with “government efficiency” would want the agency to keep doing its work.
Here are the clues that this not, in fact, the plan.
Limiting the USDS to just modernizing technology and software would be a massive climbdown from the stated goals of DOGE and Musk, who was supposed to be leading a grand plan to dismantle the administrative state and lop $1-2 trillion off the federal budget.
The executive order establishing it requires other agencies to give USDS “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would be a way to give the White House “a deep look under the hood at what agencies are doing with taxpayer dollars,” as Roll Call put it.
Each federal agency will have to form a “DOGE team” consisting of a team lead, an HR specialist, an engineer, and a lawyer. You don’t bring in an HR person and a lawyer if you want to fix technology systems. You might not even bring in an engineer, for the reasons mentioned above.
The executive order also says USDS will create a “temporary organization” that “shall be dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.” Nothing in the order says what that agenda is.
However, we can guess what it is, because another executive order, which mandates a government-wide hiring freeze, says that within 90 days the Office of Management and Budget, “in consultation with” the head of USDS, “shall submit a plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.”
Meanwhile, yet another order, on “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service,” says that the head of DOGE “shall develop and send to agency heads a Federal Hiring Plan that brings to the Federal workforce only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests.”
It seems odd, don’t you think, that an agency tasked with “modernizing federal technology and software” should have so much to do with hiring and firing across the federal government?
Oh, and that “temporary organization”? It will be established “in accordance with section 3161 of title 5, United States Code.” This obscure provision basically allows an agency head to bring in an unlimited number of volunteers to work on a specific project for up to three years. What’s more, hires under section 3161 are one of the very few exceptions to the government-wide hiring freeze.
At least some people who work currently at USDS are being re-interviewed for their jobs, which reportedly did not happen the last two times a new president came in.
So here’s the scenario this seems to add up to: Musk (or whoever ends up running USDS) brings in a big shadow team of loyalists under the umbrella of the “temporary organization,” and possibly has them work for free so as not to incur fresh costs. Only the most compliant of existing USDS personnel stay on, or only those most essential to providing whatever expertise Musk needs for the plan. The “DOGE teams” fan out through the government collecting data for the plan to shrink the federal workforce. After 18 months, the temporary organization is wound up—and, possibly, so is whatever remained of the rest of USDS, sloughed off like an old skin.
There’s also a darker scenario. Other than the “modernizing federal technology and software” bit, the only software-related task the executive order mentions for the USDS is “a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization” (my emphasis). Breaking down silos between government information systems is generally a good thing, but to those of a conspiratorial mindset, it looks like a move to make government surveillance or law enforcement easier by tying databases together.
All of which leaves just one question: why put DOGE within USDS? Why not just set it up as its own agency? Perhaps because USDS staff aren’t ordinary civil servants but members of the “excepted service” with fixed-term appointments, which makes them easier to hire but also easier to get rid of. It may simply have been easier to use a convenient vehicle—and one that already has relationships with many branches of the rest of the government—than to create one from scratch.
There have been the predictable put-a-brave-face-on-it comments from people like Mina Hsiang, the outgoing USDS head (“can be a huge opportunity if executed in the right way”) and Clare Martorana, the outgoing chief information officer of the US (“I’m trying very hard to be optimistic about it.”) It’s of course possible that alongside its mission to cut government bureaucracy, the USDS will also do some fine work on streamlining processes for procuring and managing technology. But there’s very little in what’s come out so far to suggest this is one of its priorities.
This week’s links
Meanwhile, at the UK’s digital service… Britain’s equivalent of USDS is being expanded, merging with a few other agencies. There’ll be a program to overhaul digital spending across the UK government, a framework for implementing AI with less bureaucracy, rules requiring public bodies to make their data available through APIs, and some AI tools named after Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby. Good stuff… if it happens. (Computer Weekly)
Will Musk last? Robert Reich thinks he’s made things awkward for Trump so many times now, that he’ll be “gone within the week.” Bold prediction! I’m not so sure. Check back in a week. (Robert Reich)
I talked on a podcast about the state of the media. And how it needs to adapt to the challenges of a second Trump term. (Futuristic Lawyer)
This was really insightful, Gideon. Thanks!