Enforcing one of Donald Trump's plethora of Day One edicts is like picking a bullet out of a burst of AK-47 fire. But one of them hit me in the heart. This is the "Establishment and Implementation of the President's Department of Government Effectiveness." The abbreviation is DOGE (named after the meme coin), the Elon Musk-led effort to cut government spending by a trillion or two. While DOGE until this week had been positioned as an external agency, the move makes it a formal part of the government — by embedding it into an existing agency called the United States Digital Service. agency, which was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget. The latter will now be known as the Office of the Governor, and its new head will have closer ties to the president and report to his chief of staff.

The new USDS will apparently transform the previous focus on building cost-effective and well-designed software for institutions into a core implementation of Musk’s vision. It's a bit like the government's version of a SPAC, a cunning financial ploy that launched Truth Social on the public markets without revealing a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is surprising in the sense that, on the surface, DOGE appears to be more limited than its initial hyper-ambitious pitch. This iteration appears to be more focused on saving money by streamlining and modernizing the government's vast and disorganized IT infrastructure. While the savings are substantial, there are still a few zeros to go. It's unclear whether Musk will become DOGE administrator. It doesn't seem big enough for him. (Mikey Dickerson, the first USDS director, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “I want to congratulate Elon Musk on his promotion to my old position.”) But Musk reportedly pushed for this structure to embed DOGE into Among white people. house. I'm told there are a lot of pink sticky notes in the executive office building and beyond USDS territory, including one about the former CIO's enviable office. So maybe this could be the starting point for a broader effort to eliminate the entire agency and change policy. (I couldn’t get a White House representative to answer questions, which is not surprising considering there are dozens of other orders that also require explanation.)

one thing yes Clearly, this ends the previously existing U.S. digital service and marks a new, perhaps dangerous, era for USDS, which I have been covering passionately since its inception. The 11-year-old agency emerged from the high-tech rescue team that was tasked with salvaging the mess of Healthcare.gov, a site fiasco that nearly brought the Affordable Care Act to its knees. This intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of programmers and designers using Internet-style technology (the cloud instead of the mainframe; a flexible "agile" programming style instead of outdated "waterfall" technology) To develop government technology that is as beautiful as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers often leave lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley, attracted by the prospect of public service. They work out of the agency's sleek brownstone headquarters in Jackson Square, just north of the White House. USDS typically takes on projects that are mired in multi-million dollar contracts that are never completed, yet deliver excellent results within weeks. It will place employees in organizations that need help and work carefully with IT staff. A typical project involves making Department of Defense military medical records interoperable with disparate systems used by the Veterans Administration. USDS became a darling of the Obama administration and a symbol of its association with cool nerds.

Flexibility kept the USDA afloat during the first Trump administration — a rare Obama initiative to survive. The company’s No. 2, Haley Van Dyck, was deftly supported by Trump’s internal fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet with Kushner for an informal conversation in early 2017, I met Van Dyke in the West Wing; she gave me a nod that said things were looking up, at least for now. Still, Trump’s four years became a balancing act, sharing in the agency’s achievements while somehow keeping a low profile. “At Disneyland, they paint things in some sort of green color that they want to make invisible so people don’t notice it,” one USDSer told me. “We specifically painted ourselves green.” When the pandemic hit, that became a feat in itself, as the USDA worked closely with Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, to compile the statistics. ——The government is not eager to release some of these data.

By the end of Trump's term, the green paint had thinned. One source told me that at one point, one of Trump’s political appointees noticed—not too pleased—that USDS was recruiting people at a tech conference for lesbians and minorities and asked why. The answer is, it’s an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointee accepted this, but asked if they could not include "Lesbians Who Tech" on the reimbursement line and just write "LWT"?