President Trump speaks to journalists as he signs an executive decree concerning the Ministry of Government (DOGE), in the Oval Office of the White House on January 20.
Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images
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Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images
A commission proposed with a radical mandate to reduce federal bureaucracy and reduce public spending is now a new home – and a more effective mandate, while President Trump continues to transform the campaign into promises real policy.
During his first day in power, Trump signed a decree This renounces the unknown but well-respected United States digital services office as United States Doge Service, referring to the Ministry of Government efficiency, an effort led by the technological billionaire and Trump Ally Elon Musk.
Unlike the initial announcement of Doge, focused on federal spending, labor and technological infrastructure of “outside the government”, Trump’s order on January 20 describes a temporary organization within the most Large office of the USDS which will be led by an appointed administrator.
THE order Also moves the USDs of the Management and Budget Office to the President’s Executive Office and orders each Federal Agency to create a “Doge team” which can include a team leader, a engineer, a human resources specialist and a lawyer To help facilitate the “Trump Doge”. “
In addition, the new USDS office is responsible for a “software modernization initiative” to update software, network and IT infrastructure through the federal government. There are still a lot of unknown things about Doge, but there is now more knowledge about what it can look like.
What office is the DOGE initiative joining?
Jennifer Pahlka, a senior member of the Niskanen Center and one of the USDS architects, said that a thing that seems obvious is that the previously behind the scenes is probably more in the spotlight.
Pahlka said the office had been founded “to meet the expectations of the public or help agencies meet these expectations raised from the public” with regard to the digital presence.
The USDS was launched in 2014 by the Obama administration in the aftermath of the botched deployment of Heathcare.gov as an office to increase the digital capacities of the federal government.
He worked as a kind of digital strike team, recruiting private sector experts in design and technology to work in collaboration with federal agencies on projects that make public parties of the government more efficient, modern and friendly.
Mina Hsiang, the most recent administrator of the USDS before the Change of Trump brand, said that over the past four years, the office has worked with more than 30 agencies on projects ranging from urgent action to longer -term revisions of digital systems.
Didn’t you hear about it? Maybe his projects will ring a bell
“The USDS has no special authorities or anything other than other parties of the government do not,” said Hsiang. “What we have is a difference in strategic perspective on how to meet these challenges.”
The last USDS annual report Vatage, for example, an increase in customer satisfaction with the Social Security Administration website after working to simplify a complicated language that has led to longer waiting times.
He also highlighted the deployment of an internal income driver to file online taxes for free and in progress to modernize the Ministry of Affairs of Veterans and facilitate access to veterans to more easily access the advantages of their health care.
“There are now people of digital transformation in agencies, and there have always been some,” noted Pahlka. “They tend to fight, they tend to swim upstream, given the way the government opposed to risk is and how difficult it is to change culture to lose inherited thought and inherited working methods. “”
What do we know about the vision of the new USDs?
Not much, beyond the text of the decree.
Trump has not yet appointed a administrator for the Retilled Office, it is not clear how Musk will work compared to the USD and the new Doge teams have not been set up in federal agencies.
“DOGE is positioned – and we will see if it really takes place – as having much more power than the USDS has traditionally done it in the past, let’s say, three administrations,” she said.
Pahlka adds that there are many parts of the federal government where computers and technology could perform tasks that are currently carried out by civil servants, releasing time and resources to focus on other things.
“My choice would be to redeploy these people in greater value work, their choice may be to put these people,” she said. “The end result of the two, however, is a kind of change that the government has needed for a long time.”
So, is it about cutting?
Hsiang and Pahlka both declared that the continuous success of the USD under its new mandate can only occur if the conversation with federal agencies continues to be considered a two -way street, and if the new leadership takes the time to Understand why ineffectures exist in first place.
“They will inevitably note that the questions they think they are simple to answer are not, and the systems are as they are, for reasons very difficult to see from the outside,” said Pahlka.
“One thing I am looking for is how quickly do you learn and challenge their own previous hypotheses?” She added. “Because all those who go to government think it will be easy to repair and everyone discovers that it is much more difficult than they thought because we made the government very, very complex.”
Hsiang adds that focusing on spending reductions without approaching things such as congress surveillance and the regulations for the operation of agencies will not lead to success.
“I cannot think of any business that builds a vision that is just reducing costs … which has a limited utility,” she said.