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.
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….. 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.
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.2) 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.
Lambert here: Except for the data exfiltration. Perhaps — hear me out — that was the goal? All along? “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
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….. 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.
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.
As DOGErs found out, it still takes many months to get an ATO [(authority to operate)] 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.
Add new comment