Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like singling out one bullet in a burst from an AK-47. 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 memecoin), and it’s the Elon Musk–led effort to cut government spending by a trillion bucks or two. Though DOGE was, until this week, pitched as an outside body, this move makes it an official part of government—by embedding it in an existing agency that was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget called the United States Digital Service. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new head will be more tightly connected to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.
The new USDS will apparently shift its former laser focus on building cost-efficient and well-designed software for various agencies to a hardcore implementation of the Musk vision. It’s kind of like a government version of a SPAC, the dodgy financial maneuver that launched Truth Social in the public market without ever having to reveal a coherent business plan to underwriters.
The order is surprising in a sense because, on its face, DOGE seems more limited than its original super ambitious pitch. This iteration seems more tightly centered on saving money through streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and messy IT infrastructure. There are big savings to be had, but a handful of zeros short of trillions. As of yet, it’s uncertain whether Musk will become the DOGE administrator. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (The first USDS director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.”) But reportedly Musk pushed for this structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I hear that inside the Executive Office Building, there are numerous pink Post-it notes claiming space even beyond USDS’s turf, including one such note on the former chief information officers’ enviable office. So maybe this could be a launch pad for a more sweeping effort that will eliminate whole agencies and change policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising considering that there are dozens of other orders that equally beg for explanation.)
One thing is clear—this ends United States Digital Service as it previously existed, and marks a new, and maybe perilous era for the USDS, which I have been enthusiastically covering since its inception. The 11-year-old agency sprang out of the high-tech rescue squad salvaging the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that almost tanked the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who used internet-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; the nimble “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government tech as nifty as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, were lured 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 mired in centi-million contracts and never completed—delivering superior results within weeks. It would embed its employees in agencies that requested help, being careful to work collaboratively with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the different systems used by the VA. The USDS became 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 that survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got buy-in from Trump’s in-house fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record talk early in 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 moment. Nonetheless, the four Trump years became a balancing act in sharing the agency’s achievements while somehow staying under the radar. “At Disney amusement parks, they paint things that they want to be invisible with this certain color of green so that people don’t notice it in passing,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves that color of green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx on gathering statistics—some of which the administration wasn’t eager to publicize.
By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was wearing thin. A source tells me that at one point a Trump political appointee noticed—not happily—that USDS was recruiting at 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 that but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the reimbursement line, could they just say LWT?
