When news first broke about Elon Musk’s tech takeover of the United States government, a number of people who had spent years trying to transform federal IT practices were surprisingly hopeful. Maybe, they dreamed, Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would provide a long-needed jolt to an intransigent and antediluvian bureaucracy.
“It’s beyond debate that a more aggressive approach was necessary if we were ever going to make any progress in our lifetimes,” says Mikey Dickerson, who was the founding administrator of the United States Digital Service, which has now been refashioned into Musk’s US DOGE Service. (He left in 2017, before Trump was inaugurated the first time.) Dickerson says the executive order that Trump issued on day one of his second term, which established DOGE as a temporary organization within the government, was actually something he would have liked to see in Obama’s founding charter for the agency. He particularly liked the paragraph that forced agencies to give USDS teams access to systems and records. “That wouldn’t have been a magic bullet, but it would have created a strong presumption that they needed to cooperate,” he says. “We didn’t really have that, so it was pretty much optional whether anybody wanted to work with us.”
Some of the outgoing leaders of the government tech team, who were both proud of their accomplishments and frustrated by their inability to truly transform the opaque mess of federal IT, shared similar hopes. Outgoing USDS director Mina Hsiang called DOGE’s power “a tremendous opportunity.” Former federal chief information officer Clare Martorana expressed excitement that the order would force agencies to share budget data with DOGE, seeing it as an opportunity to pull back the shroud and finally figure out where these agencies hide waste. This information could inform wise decisions on what needs cutting, with the North Star being value to the American people. “I’m trying very hard to be optimistic about it,” she told me.
Before the inauguration, Jennifer Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer under Obama and one of the USDS founders, wrote an essay called “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,” which summed up the feeling: “A lot of the government tech community … don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void.”
If any of those former officials really believed that Musk was going to run with the opportunity to constructively reform the government, those fantasies have now been shattered. Musk and DOGE brought in a team of young techies and experienced executives who could have seized the moment to focus on making government work better. But to date they have used their access and power to indiscriminately drain the federal workforce and defund programs for ideological reasons, seemingly without giving even casual thought to the consequences. Yes, Musk professes to be a champion of the people against the bureaucratic state: “If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” he asked during a bizarre Oval Office appearance this week while Trump looked on and Musk’s 4-year-old son X fidgeted. But the actions actually taken by DOGE don’t sync with this sentiment, especially when the moves seem to contravene measures passed by Congress and signed into law. That’s not terribly democratic. “I think government is a good thing, and it needed massive transformation, far more quickly than anyone in political leadership had any appetite for,” Pahlka tells me. “Since we didn’t do it, this seems to be what we’re getting.”
Ann Lewis, who until late last year headed the Technology Transformation Services, an agency devoted to using modern tech to make government accessible to its citizens, also tried at first to see the DOGE takeover in a positive light. It didn’t take long for that light to dim. “The model of bringing in private-sector people who have a fresh perspective and skills and who want to help is a great idea,” she tells me. “But we’re not seeing people from the private sector with lots of experience who want to understand how everything works.”
It’s overstating the case to describe Pahlka, Dickerson, and Lewis as disillusioned, because it was obvious all along that Musk’s dreams didn’t involve things like single sign-on for government services, or direct tax filing, or creating a universal feedback loop so agencies could better serve their constituents. These are all examples of the kinds of efficiencies that serve people no matter where they stand politically. “I don’t believe for a second that they’re taking seriously the idea of making government more efficient,” says Dickerson. “If you were trying to do that, then you would start with the big programs, not these little things around the edges like USAID. There’s like 12 people outside Washington who could have told you what that agency was three weeks ago. And why would you need access to the Treasury payment system? No one thought there was anything wrong with the Treasury payment system. That’s for some other purpose.”
To be fair, Musk does make a case for read-only access to the Treasury system: It can help to identify fraud and waste. (The case for DOGE’s youth squad to have the ability to change the system is something else.) During the Oval Office appearance, he told horror stories of federal employees possibly enriching themselves with tens of millions of dollars. But he hasn’t provided evidence and doesn’t seem to be referring cases for prosecution. And defining waste sometimes depends on who’s assessing the claim. A number of his charges about supposedly illegal expenditures from USAID have turned out to be misrepresentations of reasonable grants, some of which weren’t made by that agency at all! Yet he called USAID “a criminal organization” and said it was “time for it to die.” Considering that Musk rails against the bureaucracy for wielding unelected power, that’s an odd justification from an unelected official negating the will of elected representatives. (A federal judge has temporarily blocked a decision to put thousands of agency workers on leave.) DOGE did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
One goal Musk doesn’t hide is cutting the federal workforce to the bone—even if it means that critical talent goes out the door. Lewis told me she heard from friends at USDS and people she hired at TTS about their interactions with DOGE people. “These are people with decades of experience, like an AI executive from Netflix, or an early Microsoft engineer,” she says. “They were in 15-minute interviews with DOGE staff, who are almost entirely in their twenties, white, male, and inexperienced. They were asking people who used to be on the level of their former boss’s boss’s boss, ‘What are your skills? Why do you think your projects are important? And who do you think we should fire?’ When these senior engineers answered the questions and told the DOGE staffers about things like software architecture and product management and system monitoring and production system scaling, the 20-year-olds hadn’t heard of these things, because they haven’t had that experience in their own tech careers yet. So the experience was humiliating, and I think intended to drive people out.”
Minutes before my conversation with Lewis this week, DOGE began attempting to fire people at TTS. “There are plenty of arguments for smaller government, but cutting people with no thought or care to what skills they have?” she asks. “That’s taking a machete to something as opposed to making surgical cuts that try and improve the functioning of the government.”
For those who spent a good chunk of their lives pushing for reform, and ultimately concluded that only radical measures could tame the bureaucratic beast, Elon Musk’s youth crusade represents a heartbreaking squandering of a generational opportunity. When Dickerson recruited for USDS, he would say to young techies, “Only come here if you want the opportunity to work on the most important problems in the country. I guarantee you if you come here for that, you’re going to get it. If you come here for anything else, I promise you nothing.”
It’s hard to determine what Musk’s junior minions are thinking of their work. (If you are one of them, please ping me at stevenlevy.72 on Signal. I promise to listen.) They may well believe that they are purging evil from a deep-state conspiracy that deserves to die. But as a matter of fact, they are contributing to efforts to shut down Head Start programs, halting initiatives to monitor potential global pandemics in Africa, and creating the conditions to restore indefensible late fees on credit cards. By the time they’re done, the rest of us might be pining for the good old sclerotic bureaucracy.
Time Travel
In 2016 I interviewed Mikey Dickerson and his second-in-command Haley Van Dyck about the progress of the US Digital Service. Among other topics, we discussed dealing with entrenched bureaucracy,
Steven Levy: Besides the technical challenges, what are the biggest obstacles? Do you encounter foes dedicated to the status quo?
Haley Van Dyck: The biggest foe is generally risk aversion. People in government are trained to not do things differently, because there’s often really bad consequences when you try something differently and it fails. We run up against this all the time.
Mikey Dickerson: I wish there were bad guys with top hats and handlebar mustaches, because if there was some supervillain behind a humongously dysfunctional project, all we would have to do is identify that person and take them out and everything would get better. That’s not the problem. The problem is just all of the things that inevitably happen when you try to coordinate 60,000 people in the VA to do the same thing at the same time. Even when somebody looks like they’re being a big pain, it’s just a function of their position in the bureaucracy and their role. Their interest is almost always wanting the same thing that we want, which is that they want the veterans to get a better experience, they want the disability claims to be adjudicated faster, but to them that doesn’t mean the same thing necessarily that it means to the person next to them.
Ask Me One Thing
B.J. asks, “How much input, if any, did you have on the Hackers movie?”
Thanks for asking, B.J. I had zero input on that 1985 flick. If they had asked me for my input, here’s what I would have said: “Please do not steal my book title for your unexceptional movie.”
Seriously, Hackers the movie had nothing to do with Hackers the book, and the former offered no ideas about computers or hackers. We both know you wouldn’t be asking me about it if Angelina Jolie wasn’t in it. Peace out.
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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