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

Turning to a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like taking a single bullet out of an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the stomach. that’s it “Establishment and Implementation of the President’s Office of Government Efficiency.”The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after the memecoin), and it’s Elon Musk’s effort to cut government spending by a trillion or two dollars. Although until this week DOGE was presented as an outside agency, the move makes it an official part of the government — by embedding it into an existing agency that was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget, called the United States Digital Office. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new head will be more closely associated with 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 hardcore execution of Musk’s vision. It’s sort of the government’s version of a SPAC, the shrewd financial maneuver that launched Truth Social on the public market without ever having to disclose a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is surprising in a way, because at first glance DOGE seems more limited than its original super-ambitious move. This iteration appears more narrowly focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and cluttered IT infrastructure. There are big savings, but a handful of zeroes is less than a trillion. It is not yet certain whether Musk will become the administrator of DOGE. It doesn’t seem big enough to him. (USDS’s first director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “‘I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on promoting him to my old job.'”) But reportedly Musk insisted on it structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I hear there are numerous pink slips in the Executive Office Building claiming a place even beyond the USDS grounds, including one such note for the enviable office of the former Chief Information Officer. So perhaps this could be a launching pad for a larger effort that would dismantle entire agencies and change policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which is not surprising given that there are dozens of other orders that also require explanation.)

one thing is 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 enthusiastically covered since its inception. The 11-year-old agency emerged from high-tech rescue squad salvaging the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the abject failure of a website that almost failed the Affordable Care Act. This intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of programmers and designers who used Internet-style techniques (cloud, not mainframe; the agile “agile” style of programming instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government technology as elegant 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 headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. USDS typically took on projects that were bogged down in multi-million dollar contracts and never completed—delivering superior results within weeks. It would be implemented its employees in agencies who asked for help, being careful to work in conjunction with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved creating DOD military medical records compatible with the various systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with the cool geek.

During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat – that was it a rare Obama initiative that he survived. His second-in-command, Haley Van Dyke, cleverly got buy-in from Trump’s domestic fixer, Jared Kushner. When at the beginning of 2017 went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record chat, ran into Van Dyke in the West Wing; she gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were working out, at least for now. Still, Trump’s four years have been a balancing act of sharing the agency’s accomplishments while remaining somewhat under the radar. “At the Disney theme parks, they paint things they want to be invisible this certain color green so people don’t notice it,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves that green color.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as the USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birks to gather statistics — some of which the administration was reluctant to publish.

By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint had faded. A source told me that at one point a Trump political appointee noticed—not too happily—that USDS was recruiting at lesbian and minority tech conferences and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointee accepted this, but asked if instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the recovery line, could they just say LWT?