The efficiency comparison is interesting, since it starts relatively evenly but quickly dismisses the value of the DOGE approach. Everyone I know who worked at USDS has been talented and well-meaning, but I can't help but feel they've been hamstrung specifically by
1. Methodical improvements mostly work to improve processes as they are. They don't delete processes that shouldn't exist.
2. Agency "empowerment" often means working with a lot of incumbent teams that are simply not suited to digital work and sinks way too much time/energy into stakeholder management.
USDS has done good work, but could have done a lot more if they were actually empowered.
This is true based on the conversations I’ve had with my USDS friends too, but I’m under no illusion that DOGE will actually empower people to do the right things.
Like, as someone who is generally fairly process averse, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a huge middle ground between too much process that hampers getting things done and no process that leads to decisions that either break things, or worse, set disastrous acts in motion because basic checks or conversations with people who have more context didn’t happen.
I think if there was a good-faith attempt from the DOGE folks to audit and understand certain systems and processes, instead of gleefully dismantling and freezing programs, firing people, gleefully announcing how much money was “saved” (and often with incorrect amounts) and reflexively ripping on how terrible everything is, you’d probably get some cooperation from the people who have had to deal with bullshit bureaucracy. But that isn’t what happened.
What’s happened is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, all real security issues being completely ignored, under the guise that 19 year old crypto bros have the work experience, social skills, or common sense to foresee what is happening.
Governments are inefficient. That’s as much a feature as it is a bug. But with USDS in particular, you had people who left high paying jobs to work for the government because they wanted to make things better for democracy and the country. That is decidedly not the goal of DOGE employees, who want to out McKinsey McKinsey when it comes to just slashing and burning.
Unfortunately nuance is dead. I too wish Musk had tried to empower USDS instead of immediately alienating many of the people best positioned to improve things.
Are sweeping layoffs without any serious attempt to retain critical talent going to empower the remaining staff to do their best work? We've seen lots of examples of DOGE cutting loose important people and then flailing to hire them back. What happens when that one person who makes the whole team able to do their jobs gets cut loose? Are you empowered and productive then suddenly?
If DOGE were serious about increasing efficiency they'd be focused on process reforms. Instead they're randomly cancelling contracts, cancelling leases, and letting people go without doing the hard work of analyzing processes or analyzing organizations to figure out where the problems actually are.
It's like their philosophy is "if we cut one of the dog's legs off it'll suddenly become a more efficient runner".
I'm not here to defend DOGE, but you're making the same mistake as the article of assuming the DOGE approach has no merit.
Deleting processes somewhat randomly, then listening for the pain, is a pretty well-known technique for understanding and cleaning up legacy systems. Of course, it should only be used on systems where (temporary) failures are tolerable.
There are parts of the government where that is true, and parts where it is dangerous. The problem on both sides is assuming the same techniques should be applied across the entire government, when some services are indeed life-and-death and others absolutely should be deleted.
But DoGE is more like a PE firm that fires a bunch of people. It is less like a careful founder who hand crafts tough microdecisions that make everyone more efficient. DoGE cares about the balance sheet not the operations.
Yeah I’d say it is PE crossed with the worst management consultants. The actual health of the programs and the food to humanity doesn’t matter. It’s all about some perceived balance sheet as you say with zero care about the fallout from those decisions.
It’s easy to be efficient when you’re no longer providing any programs or services.
To me, what's happening in the US now looks very much like the wave of
hostile-takeovers that destroyed British industry through the 70s and
80s. Adam Curtis "Mayfair Set" documents it well [0].
"Efficiency", which is an empty and practically meaningless word if
you really examine it [1], was the cause celebre then too. And many
of the perpetrators were charismatic and quite loved (Stirling was an
archetypal British hero) up until the damage had been done and the
trickery exposed.
This is interesting but very much lacking in details, it needs exact examples. I really feel for the workers at USDS. I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
However, the burn-it-all down approach does have some merit that critics of Elon/DOGE never admit to. How do they propose you carefully untangle the knots of fractal bureaucracy at speed and produce results if not by just cutting them off? The previous approaches of a special committee etc. just add a another fractal and yet another process.
Sometimes I feel the critics would be content if nothing was ever accomplished, if nothing ever changed, as long as thoughtful meetings were conducted and stakeholders were consulted. There is a very real layer of inertia that needs to be punched through, velocity has merit all its own.
I am very concerned about the possible outcomes of DOGE overall but business as usual just means the US goes bankrupt slowly with all the correct protocols observed. I am glad the inertia is being punctured.
> I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
I don't know. I'm not a fan of Elon, and never really used Twitter. The popular opinion was that firing most of the workforce, Twitter would go down. That it needed god knows how many SREs to keep running.
Then Elon fired everyone and Twitter didn't go down. What was destroyed?
The business was destroyed. Like, they had finally become profitable before the acquisition. If Elon had fired less people on the business side and kept up the illusion of brand safety for advertisers, then they'd now be pretty profitable, even with no growth.
Prolonged deficit spending is by definition not sustainable.
We have been doing that for about 25 years but can’t continue indefinitely. Especially not with higher interest rates.
Government has objectively gotten worse despite massive tax revenue and is involved in a lot of endeavors that are well outside its scope IMO.
As just one of many examples: Just try to build a house pretty much anywhere and you will encounter fractal bureaucracy. This is during a nationwide housing shortage and many societal ills can be directly linked to housing costs!
Budgets are defined by the president and approved by congress; both are republicans controled. Why not turn off the tap in the traditional way instead of all this chaos?
They should be able to tell the departments their budgets getting cut and let the distributed leaders and experts evaluate the detailed logistics of how to manage the resulting budget in their own department. Elon going like by line in the US budget is like my CFO looking at my micro-service’s memory allocation, just seems silly.
Leaders should be setting high level goals and budgets and those on the ground can make the necessary adjustments to make them match.
DOGE isn't about efficiency, it is about removing checks and balances. Those are there to prevent malware like the GOP to take over the system.
I hope the people behind the submission get their message across. But you shouldn't have the conversation about efficiency. That is entirely the distraction.
Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy. It always ends in burning down the land on which it feasts.
> Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy.
Autocracies are not efficient at all. There's corruption everywhere.
The larger the state, the more opportunities for corruption. Of course, dismantling the fat state will anger many - those who are fed by it. Unfortunately some "false positives" are part of the process. All the rest is poetry.
We are so way beyond any reasonable "you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette" arguments, and those are cheap talking points that I could have gotten on fox news that you are mindlessly repeating. You are tossing the baby out with the bathwater destroying all checks and balances as you go. This is the death of reason and nuance. This is how autocracy gets a foot in the door. This is the beginning of the end of democracy. And you're cheering on the autocrats.
They should add Secure Drop support [0] - it's what Bloomberg, NYT, Washington Post, Politico, NOYB, etc use for anonymous tips.
Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton, and this very much falls close to whistleblowing.
Also, anyone who seriously wishes to say anything should probably NOT respond via IG or even follow the page. If you are whistleblowing, maintaining anonymity is critical.
> Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton
Proton is not perfect. They have surrendered recovery email addresses to law enforcement [1] and endorse Republicans through their official social media accounts [2].
I’ve been in government contracts. Been on the teams that built the websites or whatever. It’s always some massive Fortune 500 company with a VP that was college roommates with a politician or went to West Point with a general. Of course when government guys give big congrats they immediately get booked as a very well paid speaker at some useless conference.
In defense of this process is the government needs to work with stable companies that are highly likely to be in business in 10-15 years. That rules out a lot of startups.
Networks matter and trust matters, they should prefer to do business with people they know!
That doesn't mean there shouldn't be accountability and investigations into cushy speaking gigs. But the government should absolutely work with established companies run by executives they know.
The best example I can think of was the healthcare portal. It was given to a company that had no experience over Intuit who had pas performed that included Turbo Tax. The company that won the contract had a board member who was classmates with the First Lady. This is so common it’s not even news. Government tech work is all done by contractors whose connections have nothing to do with past performance or quality.
Would be nice to have anti corruption measures to prevent this kind of decentralized corruption.
But I don't think dismantling the government and giving the pieces to Musk is the solution to corruption. That just sounds like more centralized corruption.
How, exactly, do you excise entrenched corruption smoothly? The corrupt people are going to do everything they can to stop you and protest loudly in the process.
The current problem is corruption but the real problem is that corruption will always happen when the power is there. The only way to prevent it is to not place the power at that level in the first place.
Limited power is the only anti-corruption tool that works.
“… in practice it's more likely to just end up broken, or so fragile that it breaks later…”
But that’s the entire point. Every time GOP finds anything in the government that’s anywhere near productive, they intentionally destroy it. They can’t be bothered to continue improving it. The government can’t possibly be good at anything so let’s come in and make sure everyone knows that!
> There is a fundamental truth motivating the U.S. Digital Service that sets it apart from many other government agencies: You cannot build an app the same way you build a boat.
In my time in government contracting almost nobody understood or wanted to acknowledge this (at least in the Navy). You could practically play bingo with non-technical PMs talking about "increments" and "milestones" on the way to "fielding a complete capability" as though it was a weapons system that'd be stuck in the field for 30 years instead of the CRUD app that it _actually_ was. Any attempt to expediently deploy a thoughtfully-engineered vertical slice to iterate upon was stymied by year-long compliance processes and deployment procedures rooted in the year 2004. The culture is used to building tangible physical products (airplanes) and fails to comprehend that software is just bits and bytes that can be changed at will and automated. Even worse, any attempt to introduce a more sane process resulted in something that strongly resembled the status quo being repackaged and disingenuously branded "Agile" or "SecDevOps" or some other buzzword.
I'm certainly not in the "move fast and break things" npm/Xitter/Google camp but it shouldn't take 18 months to get a web app in front of beta testers. It's a real shame that the USDS is being gutted because I was very impressed with what I saw of their work and think that it's the path forward to cost savings in government software development.
I'm not a USDS employee, but I'm a federal contractor working alongside USDS employees, some of which I count as friends, and some of which have been fired. My views are my own, and take them with a grain of salt; I'm kind of an idiot.
The USDS is wonderful. Unfortunately, there are a couple factors that might have impacted its lifespan. I think the USDS has been a bit quiet about its accomplishments. One reason for that is the common public view of the government agencies as ossified and of government employees as slothful, ineffectual, and arrogant (which has not been my general experience). I think the USDS has been very willing to give its partner agencies the lion's share of the credit in order to assure future cooperation and avoid any public controversy, to refuse to play into that narrative.
Unfortunately, without a lot of publicity, I think there has been a faintness in the public perception of what the USDS does, and how well it does that.
Ages ago I worked at a DoD contractor. I was in a special projects department.
The overall company was broken up into divisions, essentially the west coast facility was its own division, the midwest, east coast had its own division. They are reasonably independent, with their own facilities, own profit and cost centers, etc.
What was telling was that they also had a "Data" division. This was a branch that had its own division level autonomy, but was installed in each of the other divisions. The Data division managed the mainframes at the time. If one of the divisions needed computing facilities, they contracted with the Data division. Considering the expense of setting up and maintaining the mainframes of the time, it made sense.
But that's where my special project group came in.
We offered internal computing services, without the Data division, for our group. We ran on mini computers and the exploding PC and workstation machines. Our boss had sales reps from everywhere dropping off new gear to evaluate.
Typically, we've all heard it before, that our group of college level "kids" was much more nimble and responsive to the needs of our group than the Data division ever could be. We were a sunk cost that could be spent on anything rather than bound by contracts and such. Specs were delivered over coffee and recorded on post it notes. Then we'd just get to work and iterate.
It seems this concept had to be continually reinvented, and rise again, and again, and again, from the ashes. Maybe its a software thing. We all know how it always seems faster to burn the old, reinvent and rewrite the new. How the "best" way to lose technical debt is to `rm -rf /` and start again. "Do it right, this time." -- again, and again.
You'd like to think there's a middle ground, but I think it's just the institutional nature of the business and the practice. Obviously, nowadays we do have some substantial, long term, long lived systems. But they're more rare than not, they're imperfect and still suffer from issues, new and old, as they evolve.
Readit News
1. Methodical improvements mostly work to improve processes as they are. They don't delete processes that shouldn't exist.
2. Agency "empowerment" often means working with a lot of incumbent teams that are simply not suited to digital work and sinks way too much time/energy into stakeholder management.
USDS has done good work, but could have done a lot more if they were actually empowered.
[1] https://www.wethebuilders.org/posts/a-tale-of-two-effiencies...
Like, as someone who is generally fairly process averse, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a huge middle ground between too much process that hampers getting things done and no process that leads to decisions that either break things, or worse, set disastrous acts in motion because basic checks or conversations with people who have more context didn’t happen.
I think if there was a good-faith attempt from the DOGE folks to audit and understand certain systems and processes, instead of gleefully dismantling and freezing programs, firing people, gleefully announcing how much money was “saved” (and often with incorrect amounts) and reflexively ripping on how terrible everything is, you’d probably get some cooperation from the people who have had to deal with bullshit bureaucracy. But that isn’t what happened.
What’s happened is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, all real security issues being completely ignored, under the guise that 19 year old crypto bros have the work experience, social skills, or common sense to foresee what is happening.
Governments are inefficient. That’s as much a feature as it is a bug. But with USDS in particular, you had people who left high paying jobs to work for the government because they wanted to make things better for democracy and the country. That is decidedly not the goal of DOGE employees, who want to out McKinsey McKinsey when it comes to just slashing and burning.
That's more of a Bain & Co speciality.
You bring in Bain to layoff the BUs McKinsey recommended your company build /s (kinda)
If DOGE were serious about increasing efficiency they'd be focused on process reforms. Instead they're randomly cancelling contracts, cancelling leases, and letting people go without doing the hard work of analyzing processes or analyzing organizations to figure out where the problems actually are.
It's like their philosophy is "if we cut one of the dog's legs off it'll suddenly become a more efficient runner".
Deleting processes somewhat randomly, then listening for the pain, is a pretty well-known technique for understanding and cleaning up legacy systems. Of course, it should only be used on systems where (temporary) failures are tolerable.
There are parts of the government where that is true, and parts where it is dangerous. The problem on both sides is assuming the same techniques should be applied across the entire government, when some services are indeed life-and-death and others absolutely should be deleted.
I think their philosophy is to replace the dog's legs with ones that run (only) where they want it to run.
It’s easy to be efficient when you’re no longer providing any programs or services.
"Efficiency", which is an empty and practically meaningless word if you really examine it [1], was the cause celebre then too. And many of the perpetrators were charismatic and quite loved (Stirling was an archetypal British hero) up until the damage had been done and the trickery exposed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set
[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/efficiency/
Dead Comment
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
However, the burn-it-all down approach does have some merit that critics of Elon/DOGE never admit to. How do they propose you carefully untangle the knots of fractal bureaucracy at speed and produce results if not by just cutting them off? The previous approaches of a special committee etc. just add a another fractal and yet another process.
Sometimes I feel the critics would be content if nothing was ever accomplished, if nothing ever changed, as long as thoughtful meetings were conducted and stakeholders were consulted. There is a very real layer of inertia that needs to be punched through, velocity has merit all its own.
I am very concerned about the possible outcomes of DOGE overall but business as usual just means the US goes bankrupt slowly with all the correct protocols observed. I am glad the inertia is being punctured.
I don't know. I'm not a fan of Elon, and never really used Twitter. The popular opinion was that firing most of the workforce, Twitter would go down. That it needed god knows how many SREs to keep running.
Then Elon fired everyone and Twitter didn't go down. What was destroyed?
Just being triggered by this phrase, the ideas that business as usual is unsustainable, and that the bureaucracy is unworkable, are articles of faith.
We have been doing that for about 25 years but can’t continue indefinitely. Especially not with higher interest rates.
Government has objectively gotten worse despite massive tax revenue and is involved in a lot of endeavors that are well outside its scope IMO.
As just one of many examples: Just try to build a house pretty much anywhere and you will encounter fractal bureaucracy. This is during a nationwide housing shortage and many societal ills can be directly linked to housing costs!
Our national debt looks like a hockey-stick: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
And we spend about as much money on the debt as our entire bloated defense budget!
They should be able to tell the departments their budgets getting cut and let the distributed leaders and experts evaluate the detailed logistics of how to manage the resulting budget in their own department. Elon going like by line in the US budget is like my CFO looking at my micro-service’s memory allocation, just seems silly.
Leaders should be setting high level goals and budgets and those on the ground can make the necessary adjustments to make them match.
I hope the people behind the submission get their message across. But you shouldn't have the conversation about efficiency. That is entirely the distraction.
Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy. It always ends in burning down the land on which it feasts.
Autocracies are not efficient at all. There's corruption everywhere.
The larger the state, the more opportunities for corruption. Of course, dismantling the fat state will anger many - those who are fed by it. Unfortunately some "false positives" are part of the process. All the rest is poetry.
Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton, and this very much falls close to whistleblowing.
Also, anyone who seriously wishes to say anything should probably NOT respond via IG or even follow the page. If you are whistleblowing, maintaining anonymity is critical.
[0] - https://github.com/freedomofpress
Proton is not perfect. They have surrendered recovery email addresses to law enforcement [1] and endorse Republicans through their official social media accounts [2].
[1] https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
Dead Comment
(Just a little infosec devil's advocate.)
Networks matter and trust matters, they should prefer to do business with people they know!
That doesn't mean there shouldn't be accountability and investigations into cushy speaking gigs. But the government should absolutely work with established companies run by executives they know.
But I don't think dismantling the government and giving the pieces to Musk is the solution to corruption. That just sounds like more centralized corruption.
The current problem is corruption but the real problem is that corruption will always happen when the power is there. The only way to prevent it is to not place the power at that level in the first place.
Limited power is the only anti-corruption tool that works.
But that’s the entire point. Every time GOP finds anything in the government that’s anywhere near productive, they intentionally destroy it. They can’t be bothered to continue improving it. The government can’t possibly be good at anything so let’s come in and make sure everyone knows that!
In my time in government contracting almost nobody understood or wanted to acknowledge this (at least in the Navy). You could practically play bingo with non-technical PMs talking about "increments" and "milestones" on the way to "fielding a complete capability" as though it was a weapons system that'd be stuck in the field for 30 years instead of the CRUD app that it _actually_ was. Any attempt to expediently deploy a thoughtfully-engineered vertical slice to iterate upon was stymied by year-long compliance processes and deployment procedures rooted in the year 2004. The culture is used to building tangible physical products (airplanes) and fails to comprehend that software is just bits and bytes that can be changed at will and automated. Even worse, any attempt to introduce a more sane process resulted in something that strongly resembled the status quo being repackaged and disingenuously branded "Agile" or "SecDevOps" or some other buzzword.
I'm certainly not in the "move fast and break things" npm/Xitter/Google camp but it shouldn't take 18 months to get a web app in front of beta testers. It's a real shame that the USDS is being gutted because I was very impressed with what I saw of their work and think that it's the path forward to cost savings in government software development.
The USDS is wonderful. Unfortunately, there are a couple factors that might have impacted its lifespan. I think the USDS has been a bit quiet about its accomplishments. One reason for that is the common public view of the government agencies as ossified and of government employees as slothful, ineffectual, and arrogant (which has not been my general experience). I think the USDS has been very willing to give its partner agencies the lion's share of the credit in order to assure future cooperation and avoid any public controversy, to refuse to play into that narrative.
Unfortunately, without a lot of publicity, I think there has been a faintness in the public perception of what the USDS does, and how well it does that.
The overall company was broken up into divisions, essentially the west coast facility was its own division, the midwest, east coast had its own division. They are reasonably independent, with their own facilities, own profit and cost centers, etc.
What was telling was that they also had a "Data" division. This was a branch that had its own division level autonomy, but was installed in each of the other divisions. The Data division managed the mainframes at the time. If one of the divisions needed computing facilities, they contracted with the Data division. Considering the expense of setting up and maintaining the mainframes of the time, it made sense.
But that's where my special project group came in.
We offered internal computing services, without the Data division, for our group. We ran on mini computers and the exploding PC and workstation machines. Our boss had sales reps from everywhere dropping off new gear to evaluate.
Typically, we've all heard it before, that our group of college level "kids" was much more nimble and responsive to the needs of our group than the Data division ever could be. We were a sunk cost that could be spent on anything rather than bound by contracts and such. Specs were delivered over coffee and recorded on post it notes. Then we'd just get to work and iterate.
It seems this concept had to be continually reinvented, and rise again, and again, and again, from the ashes. Maybe its a software thing. We all know how it always seems faster to burn the old, reinvent and rewrite the new. How the "best" way to lose technical debt is to `rm -rf /` and start again. "Do it right, this time." -- again, and again.
You'd like to think there's a middle ground, but I think it's just the institutional nature of the business and the practice. Obviously, nowadays we do have some substantial, long term, long lived systems. But they're more rare than not, they're imperfect and still suffer from issues, new and old, as they evolve.