The DOGE Squad Is Squandering a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity

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 ...