Elon Musk plays dose ball—and hits America’s geek squad

Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s massive first day orders is like firing a bullet from an AK-47 in a burst. But one of them hit my stomach. That is “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.”‘ The acronym is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it’s an Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by a trillion or two. Although DOGE, until this week, was created as an external agency, the move makes it an official part of the government — embedding it into an existing agency that was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget, known as the United States Digital Service. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new chief will be more tightly linked to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.

The new USDS will apparently shift its former laser focus on creating cost-efficient and well-designed software for various organizations to a hardcore implementation of Mask’s vision. It’s more like a government version of a SPAC, a shrewd financial strategy that launched Truth Social on the public markets, without disclosing a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is surprising in a sense because, on the face of it, DOGE seems more limited than its original super-ambitious pitch. This iteration appears to be more tightly focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government’s vast and cluttered IT infrastructure. There are huge savings, but trillions to zero. As of now, it is 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 reported Push the musk for this Formation as a means of embedding the DOGE in the White House. I heard that inside the Executive Office Building, USDS has numerous pink Post-it notes demanding space beyond the turf, including one in the enviable office of former chief information officers. So maybe this could be a launch pad for a more comprehensive effort that would shake up entire organizations and change policies (I was unable to get a White House representative to respond to questions, which is not surprising given that there are dozens of other orders that equally beg for clarification.)

one thing is Clear—this ends the pre-existing US Digital Service and ushers in a new, and possibly dangerous, era for the USDS, which I’ve been covering enthusiastically since the beginning. The 11-year-old came out of the agency High tech rescue teams Healthcare.gov was the mess to rescue, a hellish failure of a website that nearly tanked the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid group of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small team of coders and designers who used Internet-style techniques (the cloud, not the mainframe; Agile is the “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 Silicon Valley jobs, are 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. USDS typically takes on projects stuck in centi-million contracts and never completed—providing superior results within weeks. it will be Embed its employees in organizations Be careful to work collaboratively with those in the IT department who requested help. 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, symbolizing its attachment to the quiet sewers.

During the first Trump administration, deft tactics kept the USDS afloat—it was Obama’s rare initiative that survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyke, shrewdly got buy-in from Trump’s in-house fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record talk in early 2017, I ran into Van Dyke of The West Wing; He gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were looking up, at least for the moment. Even so, the four Trump years have been a balancing act in sharing the agency’s accomplishments while somehow staying under the radar. “At Disney amusement parks, they paint something they want to disappear with this particular color of green so people don’t notice it when they walk past it,” one USDSer told me. “We’ve become good at painting ourselves green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as the USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Burks on gathering statistics — some of which the administration was reluctant to publicize.

By the end of Trump’s tenure, the green had thinned. A source tells me that at one point one of Trump’s political recruiters noticed — not happily — that USDS was hiring 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 recruiter accepted but asked, instead of putting “Lesbian Who Takes” on the return line, could they just say LWT?