Dealing with one An executive order of Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like a single bullet in an AK-47 explosion. But one of them hit me in the gut. That is “Establishing and implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.”‘The acronym for that name is Doge (named after a meme), and it’s the Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by a billion dollars or two. Although Doge was, until this week, an outside body, this move makes it an official part of the government — incorporating it into 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 known as the American Doge Service, and its new head will be more closely tied to the president, reporting to his boss.
The new USD will apparently change its former laser on building cost-effective and well-designed software for various agencies to hardcore implementation of the Musk Vision. It’s like a government version of a SPAC, the nasty financial maneuver that launched Truan Social on the public market without ever revealing a coherent business plan to backers.
The order is surprising in some sense, because, on its face, Doge seems more limited than its original over ambitious pitch. This iteration seems more firmly focused on saving money by simplifying and modernizing the government’s massive and cluttered IT infrastructure. There are big savings, but a handful of zeros short of trillions. It is still uncertain whether Musk will become the Doge Manager. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (USD’s first director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.”) But reportedly Musk drove this Structure as a way to get Doge into the White House. I hear that inside the executive office building, there are many pink post-IT notes demanding space even beyond USD’s lawn, including one such note about the enviable office of the former chief information officer. So perhaps this could be a launching pad for a more sweeping effort that will eliminate entire agencies and change policies. (I couldn’t get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising considering there are dozens of other orders that similarly beg for clarification.)
One thing is Clear – this ends US Digital Service as it previously existed and marks a new, and potentially dangerous, era for the USD, which I have enthusiastically covered since its inception. The 11-year-old agency emerged from the high-tech rescue squad salvaging the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that nearly tanked the Affordable Care Act. That brave team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who used web-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; The Nimble “Agile” Programming Style Instead of the outdated “waterfall”) to make government ie a technique as disgusting as the programs people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, 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 USD typically participated in projects that were involved in hundreds of millions of contracts and never completed-delivering superior results within weeks. It would Incorporate their employees in agencies That asked for help, making sure to work collaboratively with the living in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the different systems used by the VA. The USD has become a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom.
During the first Trump administration, disgusting maneuvering kept the USD afloat – it was the A rare Obama Initiative that survived. Its second in command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly obtained a buyout from Trump’s insider, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record speech in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; She gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were looking up, at least for the time being. However, the four Trump years have become a balancing act of sharing the agency’s achievements while somehow staying under the radar. “At Disney theme parks, they paint things they want to be invisible with this certain color of green so people don’t notice it walking by,” one USD told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves that color of green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USD worked closely with White House response coordinator Deborah Birx on gathering statistics — some of which the administration didn’t want to make public.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was wearing thin. A source tells me that at one point Trump’s political appointee noticed – not happily – that USD was recruiting at ie 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 accepted this, but asked if instead of putting “lesbians who ie techniko” on the reward line, could they just say LWT?
