United States Digital Service renamed to DOGE
whitehouse.gov
whitehouse.gov
AFAIK, it has *never* been stated publicly that DOGE or Mr. Musk would get control of this most essential service, responsible for sourcing identity verification, etc.
There's no relationship between bureaucracy efficiency efforts and the digital service. Indeed, one would have expected DOGE to be injected into the Office of Personnel Management.
It's disconcerting to see such a mismatch between rationale and deployment, particularly for a new agency with no oversight in Congress.
Disconcerting, but not surprising.
He wants x.com to be a single monolith “everything” app, just like they have in China.
The idea is to control currency, authentication, identity, reputation, commerce and communication, and to make use of it mandatory.
also the whole "kitchen sink" image was probably a crude attempt at reinforcement
That was really the part I was most curious about. As the article points out, a lot of big tech has been trying to make their app economy "indispensable" to consumers, but competition seems to have thwarted that mostly. If Elon is saying he'll make it mandatory by other means, then I'm really curious to hear what he is saying on the subject.
Can you run a business if you're not on Google Maps?
To answer your question, though, Visa doesn't process payments for the dozen or so cannabis shops in my town and they are all thriving. I'm not saying it's common, or easy, but the answer is yes.
What I hear from the marketing folks I work with is that these days it’s less about Google and more “if you’re not advertising on Facebook, you’re not advertising.” (US centric perspective.)
I think there will a be a lot of 'this isn't what we voted for' moments under this new administration, , and that warnings dismissed as hyperbolic during the campaign season will turn out to have been entirely sober and realistic predictions.
That seemed short sighted. The employees can refuse to do something, and threaten to quit. But don’t expect your department to last long.
The man has been plotting on Signal with a bunch of cronies. Of course, he was never revealing his plans.
But, honestly, this makes perfect sense. USDS is an easy way for them to backdoor their way into the technology environment of the federal government on day 1. He gets a crew of talented people to report to him on day 1 who know the ins and outs as good as anyone in the federal government.
On top of that, after 4 years, they can tout all the successes of DOGE. Hell, they might even claim it saved Healthcare.gov
The idea that it's a backdoor to government technology is something that an outsider would think. For the record this also happened eight years ago when Jared Kushner tried to put his tennis buddy in charge.
The Digitial Service was pitched initially as a way for technologists to serve the country. The payscale was peanuts compared to most tech companies. I suspect some of the best will leave if the mission no longer aligns with their values, because they certainly weren’t doing it for the money.
Really? I thought much of the value of the USDS came from consolidating technology implementations that were aging and duplicated across different agencies, providing standard platforms and access, etc.
It seems directly related to “bureaucracy efficiency.” In fact I’m sure if you went back to read comments and discussion on previous posts about the USDS, you’d find people clearly referencing this value add.
It’s also possible DS had a critical mass of SV people that wasn’t beholden to existing bureaucracies. The structure of the DOGE teams embedded in each agency makes me think that someone thought through this quite carefully: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-inauguration-presiden...
We can conclude a few things given this move, which I've been anticipating right since DOGE was first announced. It comes as no surprise. I think Elon's plan looks like this:
1. The purpose of the DOGE teams will be only partly efficiency. It will primarily be about control. Control initiatives might be disguised as efficiency initiatives in some cases.
2. The Trump agenda will be enforced by combining X.ai infrastructure with IT systems at big data scale using small projects. Think Grok reading every email sent by every federal employee looking for signs of subversion, stuff like that.
3. Targeted efforts to replace or augment key employees with LLMs, in particular to speed up approval processes in cases where Congress hasn't yet simplified the underlying procedures.
All this will NOT look like conventional government IT projects that take years and frequently stall out due to institutional inertia. They will be more like lightning strikes in which existing procedures, workflows and software are preserved but rendered essentially irrelevant by AI based automation, and which are forced on agencies by embedded outsiders given carte blanche administrator access before the middle managers even know what's happening. And maybe in some cases without the middle managers knowing what's happening.
Taking over USDS and then inserting loyal strike teams into each agency is exactly the right way to start such a strategy. You don't need many people to inject an LLM call into a teed off communication feed. USDS has people familiar with the broad outlines of the IT systems used across government.
This strategy makes sense for the Trump administration and others. Governments all over the west, not just America, are struggling with civil servants that have gone rogue and just refuse to implement direct orders or actively wage war against elected leaders. Nowhere is this more extreme than the USA, but this problem isn't unique to the right. In the UK recently some anonymous civil servants told the BBC that "there is a mood that we should just pull the plug on [Kier Starmer]". Starmer's "crime" in this case was to criticize the civil service, calling them comfortable with managed decline. I'm not a Labour supporter but he won the election fair and square. It's dystopian that elements of the civil service are openly telling high profile journalists that they are the ones in charge and can simply "unplug" Prime Ministers who mildly criticize them.
The comments about Starmer are shocking. So was the “Resistance.”
I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind.
Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed.
That would be antithetical to their new name.
that's at least 500k in salaries even for the lowball public sector, and there are at least 230 federal agencies, which you can be damn sure are gonna interpret this as broadly as possible, i.e. including the subagencies that's 400+ under 5 USC § 551 (see https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies)
nothing like kicking off your "efficiency" drive with a $200m+ expense
I'm not sure I agree with the approach, but this seems overstated. At least from an engineer perspective, there are sub-$70k engineer jobs. That four person team could be $250k. Also, they could be pulling that internally instead of external hires.
While some of them might be internal hires, to the extent that they were previously productive, those jobs will have to be replaced, and to the extent that they were not, they will be incentivized to make broad decisions whose eventual costs may fall upon the public in terms of lower responsiveness or less effective outcomes or the loss of impartiality.
The silly part of me wants to say they picked USDS because it had a D in it, but I’m guessing that wasn’t it.
After seeing so many failed "modernization" projects that just made things worse, this should be the biggest worry.
The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall terminate on July 4, 2026.
Hopefully Elon gets to the Harlem Shake or Gangam style soon.
(Worked well throughout Trump's campaign. They even printed it on red caps.)
We all saw what happened to Twitter, Inc, right?
Here's a good starting point: "Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight": https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/bringing-elon-to-a-knife-figh...
The basic goal of making government work well is (or should be) bipartisan. The nuts and bolts of how you do that are really hard to get right.
- I know words, I know the best words for I am the most stable genius.
And I don’t even know what to say about the president and First Lady releasing official meme coins…
wait, this actually happened?
Glad I'm not American, so sorry for you guys for the next four years.
We set oil burning records every year.
The people writing that agreement fly around in private jets.
Snap out of it!
Don’t be.
Democracy is not a game focused on picking the best outcome. Democracy is a game of trial and error.
Musk, who has revolutionized two massive industries, is “serious.” The outgoing administration was cosplaying seriousness. America didn’t want to reelect Trump. They did it because the “grownups in the room” were a tire fire that managed to do almost everything wrong, from immigration to foreign policy.
It’s hilarious when the campaign is focused on getting immigration, public safety and the government budget under control (all basic functions of government that haven’t been functioning) and people’s response is “i feel sorry for you”.
Uhh, ok?
If you voted for the man, you've been duped.