Elon Musk is playing DOGE Ball – and hitting America’s Geek Squad

Dealing with a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like removing a bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. Is it “Establishment and Implementation of the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.”The acronym for this name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it is the effort led by Elon Musk to reduce government spending by a trillion dollars or two. Although DOGE was, until this week, presented as an external body, this move makes it an official part of the government, embedded in an existing agency that was previously part of the Office of Management and Budget called the Service United States Digital. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new head will be more closely connected to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.

The new USDS will apparently transform its former laser focus on building efficient and well-designed software for various agencies to a hardcore implementation of Musk’s vision. It’s a bit like the government’s version of a SPAC, the dodgy financial maneuver that launched Truth Social on the public market without ever having to reveal a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is surprising in one sense because, on its face, DOGE seems more limited than its original super-ambitious pitch. This iteration appears more narrowly focused on saving money through streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and cluttered IT infrastructure. There are big savings to be had, but a handful of zeros short of trillions. For now, it is not certain whether Musk will become the administrator of DOGE. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (The first director of the USDS, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “‘I want to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.”) Musk pushed for it structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I heard that in the Executive Office Building, there are many pink post-it notes that claim space even beyond the territory of the USDS, including one of these notes on the enviable office of the former head of information So maybe this could be a launching pad for a larger effort that would eliminate entire agencies and change policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which is not surprising considering that there are dozens of other orders that equally require explanation).

One thing is it clear—this ends the US Digital Service as it existed before, and marks a new, and possibly dangerous, era for the USDS, which I’ve covered with enthusiasm since its inception. The 11-year-old agency was born from the high-tech rescue team saving the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that almost killed the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the model for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who used internet-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; the “agile” agile programming style. instead of the old “waterfall” technique) to make government technology as nifty as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, were attracted 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 hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and never finished—delivering superior results in weeks. would be embed their employees in agencies who asked for help, careful to work in collaboration with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the various systems used by the VA. The USDS has become a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom.

During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat – it was the rare Obama initiative who survived. His second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, has smartly acquired Trump’s domestic fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record discussion in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; she gave me a conspiratorial look that things were looking up, at least for the moment. Still, Trump’s four years have been a balancing act in sharing the agency’s successes while staying somewhat under the radar. “At the Disney theme parks, they paint things they want to be invisible with this certain color of green so people don’t notice them walking by,” one USDSer told me. “We specialize in painting that color green.” When Covid hit, it became a success in itself, as USDS worked closely with the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx, to gather statistics — some of which the administration wasn’t keen on. of advertising.

By the end of Trump’s tenure, the green paint was 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 nominee agreed to that, but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” in the refund line, they could just say LWT?