Elon Musk Plays DOGE Ball—and Hits America’s Geek Squad

Talking about one piece of legislation from Donald Trump’s first-day executive order is like taking one bullet out of an AK-47. But one of them punched me in the gut. That is “Implementation and Implementation of the President’s Mission to Effectively Operate the Government.”‘ The acronym for this name is DOGE (pronounced memecoin), and it’s an effort led by Elon Musk to reduce government spending by a trillion or two. Although DOGE was established, until this week, as a foreign agency, the move makes it an official part of the government – by placing it in an agency that was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget called the United States Digital Service. The agency will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new head will be closely related to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.

The new USDS will change its old philosophy of creating low-cost and well-designed multi-agency software to meet Musk’s vision. It’s like the government’s version of a SPAC, a financial model that launched Truth Social on the public market without disclosing the joint business plan to underwriters.

This law is surprising in a way because, on the face of it, the DOGE seems to be less than it was before. The review appears to be focused on cost savings in maintaining and replacing government IT equipment and infrastructure. There are huge sums to be saved, but zero minus trillions. At this point, it is unclear whether Musk will be in charge of DOGE. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (USDS’s first CEO, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly wrote on LinkedIn, “‘I’d like to thank Elon Musk for being promoted from my old job.”) But he says Musk pushed for this plan as a way to install the DOGE in the White House. I understand that inside the Executive Office Building, there are a lot of pink Post-it notes that require more space than USDS, including this one for the office of the former chief executive officer. So maybe this could be the start of a broader effort that would eliminate all institutions and change policy. (I couldn’t get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising considering there are many other laws that also require clarification.)

One thing and clearly – this ends the United States Digital Service as it was before, writing a new one, and perhaps the terrible season of USDS, which I have been explaining with pleasure from the beginning. The 11-year-old organization came out a high-tech rescue team saving the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the website failure that nearly destroyed the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid group of volunteers established an organizational template: a small group of coders and programmers using Internet technologies (the cloud, not the mainframe; nimble “agile” programming style. instead of the old “waterfall” approach) to make government technology as good as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, who often leave Silicon Valley’s lucrative jobs, were lured by the prospect of public service. They operated out of a funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. USDS often took on projects that had multi-million dollar contracts but were not completed – producing positive results within weeks. They would integrate its employees into organizations who asked for help, care to work in cooperation with lifers in IT departments. A typical project that involves creating DOD medical records to meet the various systems used by the VA. The USDS became a favorite of the Obama administration, a symbol of its connection to good nerddom.

During the first term of the Trump administration, the management of the USDS was moving – it was needed Obama initiative who survived. His deputy, Haley Van Dyck, shrewdly bought it from Trump’s estate agent, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for a press conference in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; he admitted to me that things are going well, for now. However, Trump’s four years have been similar in sharing the agency’s achievements while remaining under the radar. “At the Disney theme parks, they paint things they want to hide with a different color green so people don’t notice,” USDSer told me. “We did a special job of painting the green color ourselves.” When Covid hit, this proved to be a success, as USDS worked closely with White House response coordinator Deborah Birx to gather statistics – some of which the administration did not want to publicize.

By the end of the Trump era, the green paint had thinned. A source tells me that one time Trump’s political appointee noticed—not happily—that USDS was recruiting at technology conferences for gay women and minorities, and asked why. The answer was that it was a good way to find sales managers and producers. The candidate accepted this but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” in the return line, he could just say LWT?