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Elon’s time in DC is up, quite a bit sooner than the 18 months DOGE is supposed to be around. His top advisers are out too, but many DOGE team members remain. Over the course of the next few posts, I’m going to take this opportunity to look back at a few things I wrote about DOGE before inauguration, and assess where we are now. What was I right about? Wrong about? What has DOGE actually done, and what will be the longer term impacts of their time in DC? Most importantly, where does this go next? There is a year and a half before the mid-terms. If the balance of power shifts, Democrats will lose their excuse for inaction on government reform. There are three and half years left of the Trump administration, and many questions about the office formerly known as the US Digital Service. This is an important moment not just to look back, but to recognize that the work can now truly begin. What both Republicans and Democrats do now will shape the work and who gets to do it.
In “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,” which I wrote less than 6 months ago, I suggested that while many were deeply concerned that DOGE would succeed in dismantling the federal government, we might also worry about what it would mean if he failed. It’s a lot harder to change government than outsiders think. Many reformers have preceded Elon, some of them other billionaires in reform roles, others relative insiders like the team on the National Performance Review in the nineties. It would be foolish not to acknowledge the successes of these past efforts but despite them, we still found ourselves on January 20, 2025 with a maddeningly sclerotic government. That sclerosis and lack of responsiveness (always a plus when your opponent is in power, not so much when your party has the reins) set the stage for the DOGE hatchet job.
So has Elon failed? It depends on what you think he was supposed to do. Basically, he’s cut: cut staff, cut contracts, and even cut agencies. On the staff front, the firings have only just begun, which means that the bulk of them will happen months after Elon’s departure, leading me to wonder how much of this is an Elon front end with a Russell Vought back end (or in the case of the State Dept, a Marco Rubio back end.) Clearly, large reductions in force are part of the Elon playbook and what DOGE will be remembered for, but Vought’s desire to slash the workforce was there long before Elon arrived and will be there long after he has left. In other words, cutting staff is not a uniquely Elon contribution, and arguably beneath the attention of someone with his purported genius for willing disruptive products into existence.
I asked Sahil Lavingia, the DOGE engineer fired for talking to a journalist about how the VA actually works pretty well, what he thought he had been hired to do. “We were supposed to build software,” he told me. Are you sure? How do you know? He tells me that in his job interview, to the extent there was one, Steve Davis asked him a question I’ve heard he’s asked several others: “Do you know any successful tech companies that outsource their software?”
There was pretty clearly an agenda not just to cut contracts, but to do so by bringing some software development in house, which is actually very wise — and long overdue. I know of a few teams that have quietly gotten more staff since the start of the Trump term, and are delivering better results by firing poor-performing contractors and writing the software themselves. But those teams are in the minority. For most teams, their contracts have been canceled without much of a plan. Similarly, software (insourced or not) was supposed to replace people, but the people are gone without the software. They cut the workforce without cutting the work.
This rhymes eerily with what happened during the National Performance Review, which most people will recognize as the efforts around Reinventing Government under Al Gore in the 90s. John Kamensky was on Statecraft recently, and when asked about the staff cuts in that era, which mostly resulted not in a smaller workforce overall, but rather a “dark matter version of the federal workforce,” in Santi’s words (the same workers but now off the feds books and onto the contractors’), John responded:
We were hoping agencies would simplify HR and the procurement rules, which would let them do with fewer staff. But Congress ate dessert first and cut the number of people without simplifying the rules.
DOGE has done the same. In cutting the workforce without cutting the work, they, too, ate dessert first. They also don’t seem to have built much software, whether it's to save money, deliver better service, or automate work. Why?
The answer, to a reasonable approximation, is that it’s really hard to build software in government, and when the DOGE team figured that out, instead of trying to make it easier, they decided not to bother. “They’d ask me how long it would take to build something, and I’d say, well, I could get the prototype up and running in two weeks, but to do everything that would be required to ship it, it would take at least 18 months.” Sahil was referring in part to the famously lengthy and burdensome ATO (authority to operate) process that government technologists must persist through before their software can go live to the world. That didn’t scare Sahil off -– by his own account, he wanted to keep writing code. But listening to his story you get the impression that DOGE leadership just gave up somewhere along the way.
If that’s what happened, they wouldn’t be the first. It’s hard in part because at first you think, okay, we need to change some laws, but when you dig in, a lot of the constraints come not from the laws (some do), but from how they’ve been interpreted and operationalized in agencies, in a maximalist, risk-averse culture. You’re left wondering where the change really needs to happen: in statute? in regulations? in guidance? In memos? Is this just risk averse compliance officers and someone just needs to knock some sense into them? The answer is sort of all of the above, in ways that can break your brain and suck your will to live. The work is doable, but way harder than it looks.
DOGE wouldn’t be the first to be daunted, but they had the least reason to be. DOGErs serve a Republican president with a Republican House and Senate. In the beginning, enough moderate Dems were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that to the extent that statutory change was needed, they had a good chance of getting it. To the extent that compliance officers just needed to be convinced to interpret guidance more reasonably, DOGE had that power in ways that reformers working under Democrats, always conscious of propriety, did not. (See Jake Sullivan’s “self-deterrence” comment.) They had, for better or worse, Big Balls, and big balls. Except they didn’t. Elon may have brilliantly disrupted the auto and space industries, but he’s leaving DC with the status quo, at least as it relates to technology and service delivery, largely intact.
DOGE was supposed to be about efficiency. Cutting jobs without cutting the work isn’t efficiency, it’s just chaos. In the private sector, it might work to assume that if there are half the people, they’ll find the most important work to do and let the procedural bullshit fall by the wayside, but in government a lot of that procedural bullshit is Congressionally mandated, or at least some version of it is. This leaves people like me in the surprising position of having wished that Vivek Ramaswamy hadn’t been banished from DOGE for being “annoying,” since Mr. Deregulation at least understood that sustainable change comes from changing rules and procedures, not just ignoring them. One gets the impression that Vivek’s preferred strategy clashed with Elon’s because it recognized that this was going to be harder than it looked, and Elon didn’t want to hear it. Yes, our representative democracy is annoying. Ask anyone who’s ever tried to get something done in government. But that's the game. DOGE had a strong hand, and could have played it.
What DOGE should get credit for is moving the Overton window for civil servants on risk aversion. Some of DOGE’s work has been marked by enormous (and sometimes heartbreaking) carelessness, but in an environment that’s too often been careful to the point of negligence. Now I hear stories of teams who would previously have crossed every t and dotted every i pushing to JFDI, so to speak, in ways that balance the need to adhere to our nation’s laws with the need to deliver for the American people. As much as I wish the impetus had been different, the bureaucracy needed a bit of a push, and I hope those who read DOGE as a signal to move a bit quicker will win out over the reactionary forces.
Obviously, if we’re evaluating the Trump administration’s overall impact, it’s way too early to tell whether whoever fills the DOGE void will meaningfully dismantle the barriers that need dismantling, or just continue with the chainsaw approach. They would have done everyone a favor, for instance, if they’d used their power to lobby Congress to change the rules around reductions in force, which require a “last in first out” approach that has resulted in firing some of the people federal government has needed most. But Elon has called it quits with the job not even close to done. So have his top advisors, though the team itself remains. So was I right when I predicted that the world’s richest man would meet his match in government reform? Largely, I think I was. The mistake I made was assuming he would actually try.
Where that leaves me, at least, is with my eyes on the work still to be done. Everyone’s talking about the rebuilding that will eventually need to happen. The workforce will need to be rebuilt, indeed, especially if the layoffs that are coming in the fall cut as deep as they are planned to. But rebuilding right requires some (thoughtful) dismantling that hasn’t happened yet. You simply can’t restaff federal agencies under current hiring practices, for example. They’re a shamefully over-proceduralized, inefficient, and anti-meritocratic kabuki dance that serves no one, and DOGE has done little about it. (OPM, to be fair, recently issued some guidance with steps in the right direction, though it’s mixed in with some ethically questionable and probably pointless patriotism tests.) We’ve cut staff but left low-value processes like Paperwork Reduction Act compliance intact, so those left can’t choose the most important work. As DOGErs found out, it still takes many months to get an ATO before you can launch a website. The bad news is that the work of right-sizing those burdens is undone. The good news is that someone else could still do it. Republicans and Democrats should both be jumping at the chance.
Stay tuned for more thoughts on the road ahead.
