Comment by w10-1
6 months ago
The digital service did great work modernizing digital infrastructure of citizen-facing federal services.
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.
No refunds
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.
They literally published their plan and no one believed them. After COVID my expectations for our country were pretty low, but now they are even lower. My Dad who worked as a public health nurse for 20 years supported this guy who wanted to shut down the DoE and leave the WHO. I just don't understand anymore.
I totally understand your point, but Musk said this was the end game when he bought twitter.
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.
Imagine being forced to use X. That sounds horrible.
Which quote was that? Not finding anything, but then again I'm not sure exactly how to phrase the search.
multiple sources given at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/twitter-ap-elon-musk-meta...
also the whole "kitchen sink" image was probably a crude attempt at reinforcement
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And funnel inauthentic adoration in the general direction of divorced dad billionaires
Musk isn't satisfied with being an oligarch. He wants to be a dictator.
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>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.
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
> He gets a crew of talented people to report to him on day 1
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.
It does make sense on paper, but I wonder how effective they will be. USDS never really controlled much (at least when I was there). It was much more about soft power, connecting disparate efforts, establishing best practices, boosting other teams when needed.
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.
It makes sense as an agency that was already providing consultation to other agencies, and was inside the executive office of the president rather than being embedded in some other agency.
> 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.
There was already a lawsuit filed off the bat challenging the structure of DOGE, so repurposing DS might have been to preempt that: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/20/doge-lawsuits-musk-...
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...
Absolutely thought through carefully. People who think it's a joke because of the name will probably get a shock. Apparently they've been planning DOGE for months.
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.
FDR’s criticism of public unions applies more generally: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/18/the-first-b.... The elected government shouldn’t have to cajole and negotiate with unelected civil servants to execute its agenda.
The comments about Starmer are shocking. So was the “Resistance.”
> There's no relationship between bureaucracy efficiency efforts and the digital service
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.
Last Trump administration, the Digital Service decided it wouldn’t assist in certain DHS operations. I don’t know if that was just family separation stuff, of immigration enforcement more broadly.
That seemed short sighted. The employees can refuse to do something, and threaten to quit. But don’t expect your department to last long.