Comment by rayiner

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.