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?
Under Biden no subterfuge was needed—the USDS thrived. But despite many months of effort, it could not convince Congress to give it permanent funding. With the return of Trump, and his promises to cut government spending, there was reason to think that USDS would evaporate. That’s why the DOGE move is kind of bittersweet—at least it now has more formal recognition and ostensibly will get a reliable budget line.
How will the integration work? The executive order mandates that in addition to normal duties the USDS director will also head a temporary organization “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.” That agenda is not clearly defined, but elsewhere the order speaks of improving the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, systems, and infrastructure. More specific is the mandate to embed four-person teams inside every agency to help realize the DOGE agenda. The order is very explicit that the agency must provide “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” Apparently Musk is obsessed with an unprecedented centralization of the data that makes the government go—or not. This somewhat adversarial stance is a dramatic shift from the old USDS MO of working collegially with the lifers inside the agencies.
Demanding all that data might be a good thing. Clare Martorana, who until last week was the nation’s chief information officer, says that while she saw many victories during her eight years in government tech, making big changes has been tough, in large part because of the difficulty of getting such vital data. “We have budget data that is incomprehensible,” she says. “The agency understands it, but they hide money in all kinds of places, so no one can really get a 100,000-foot view. How many open positions do they have? What are the skill sets? What are their top contracts? When are they renegotiating their most important contracts? How much do they spend on operations and maintenance versus R&D or innovation? You should know all these things.” If DOGE gets that information and uses it well, it could be transformational. “Through self-reporting, we spend $120 billion on IT,” she says “If we found all the hidden money and shadow IT, it’s $200, $300, maybe $500 billion. We lose a lot of money on technology we buy stupidly, and we don’t deliver services to the American public that they deserve.” So this Trump effort could be a great thing? “I’m trying very hard to be optimistic about it,” says Martorana. The USDS’s outgoing director, Mina Hsiang, is also trying to be upbeat. “I think there’s a tremendous opportunity,” she says. “ I don’t know what [DOGE] will do with it, but I hope that they listen to a lot of great folks who are there.”
On the other hand, those four-person teams could be a blueprint for mayhem. Up until now, USDS would send only engineers and designers into agencies, and their focus was to build things and hopefully set an example for the full-timers to do work like they do at Google or Amazon. The EO dictates only one engineer in a typical four-person team, joined by a lawyer (not known for building stuff), an HR person (known for firing people), and a “team lead” whose job description sounds like a political enforcer: “implementing the president’s DOGE Agenda.” I know that’s a dark view, but Elon Musk —and his new boss—are no strangers to clearing out a workplace. Maybe they’ll figure AI can do things better.
Whichever way it goes, the original Obama-era vibes of the USDS may forever be stilled—to be superseded by a different kind of idealist in MAGA garb. As one insider told me, “USDS leadership is pretty ill equipped to navigate the onslaught of these DOGE guys, and they are going to get the shit kicked out of them.” Though not perfect, the USDS has by dint of hard work, mad skills, and corny idealism, made a difference. Was there really a need to embed the DOGE experiment into an agency that was doing good? And what are the odds that on July 4, 2026, when the “temporary” DOGE experiment is due to end, the USDS will sunset as well? At best, the new initiative might help unravel the near intractable train wreck that is government IT. But at worst, the integration will be like a greedy brain worm wreaking havoc on its host.
Time Travel
In August 2014, I chronicled how the health care rescue team morphed into the USDS, attending a recruiting session where US chief technology officer Todd Park courted workers from the Valley’s most glamorous and lucrative companies.
“We have a window of opportunity—within this government, under this president—to make a huge difference,” Park says.
Park wants to move government IT into the open source, cloud-based, rapid-iteration environment that is second nature to the crowd considering his pitch tonight. The president has given reformers like him leave, he told them, “to blow everything the fuck up and make it radically better.” This means taking on big-pocketed federal contractors, risk-averse bureaucrats, and politicians who may rail at overruns but thrive on contributions from those benefiting from the waste. It also will require streamlined regulations from both the executive and legislative branches. But instead of picking fights, Park wants to win by showing potential foes the undeniable superiority of a modern approach. He needs these coders to make it happen, to form what he calls a Star Wars-style Rebel Alliance, a network of digital special forces teams. He can’t lure them with stock options, but he does offer a compelling opportunity: a chance to serve their country and improve the lives of millions of their fellow citizens.
“We’re looking for the best people on the planet,” he said. “We have a window of opportunity—right the fuck now—within this government, under this president, to make a huge difference. Drop everything—and help the United States of America!”
Ask Me One Thing
Jesse asks, “Now that Trump is all about crypto, will it finally hit the mainstream?”
Thanks for asking, Jesse. We all know that the crypto community went for Trump big-time, a classic case of voting with their wallets. The triumphalist cheers during inauguration weekend reflected their optimism that, with a friend in the White House and the wicked witch of the blockchain—SEC chair Gary Gensler—booted from his post, a golden age of crypto was inevitable. But to date, tough regulation isn’t the biggest reason that crypto hasn’t hit the mainstream. Two factors have held it back. Besides an investment vehicle, it doesn’t have utility for most people. And too many scams have made crypto speculation a risky business.
So it was unwelcome, to say the least, that just before the Crypto Ball—the industry’s celebration of its new hero—that same figure kicked the community in the … you know what. Donald Trump signed on to what appears to be a classic memecoin scam, taking 80 percent of the tokens in a new currency called TRUMP coins, for no investment. The 20 percent put up for sale drove the valuation of that tranche to over $14 billion—boosting Trump’s stake to about $50 billion, up from zero—by simply exploiting his popularity (and possibly the chance to win his favor by buying his otherwise useless coins). For good measure, the first lady released her own currency, and the value of the circulating MELANIA coins quickly shot up to $1 billion. Trustworthy investment vehicles do not behave like that, nor do functional currencies. At the moment when the industry is hoping to attain a new level of respectability, the new president is taking advantage of the very flaws in crypto that (understandably) keep the field from prime time.
It will now be up to the crypto-friendly Trump administration to come up with regulations that encourage innovation while protecting consumers. If the regulators are really friendly, they will lean towards rigor, not laissez-faire. If their rules permit schemes like TRUMP coins to legally exist, the exercise will be a failure, and mainstream acceptance will have to wait.
Submit your questions in the comments below, or send an email to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
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Source : Wired
