How DOGE could succeed — or fail miserablyhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/23/usds-doge-musk-pahlka-analysis/
Elon Musk takes the stage at a rally for Donald Trump at Capital One Arena in Washington on Sunday, a day before Trump's inauguration. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
In 2014, his administration still reeling from the colossally bungled rollout of the Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, then-President Barack Obama tapped a team of Silicon Valley techies to drag the executive branch into the digital age. His administration created the United States Digital Service, led by Mikey Dickerson, who had left Google in 2013 to help fix Healthcare.gov, and Jennifer Pahlka, who had founded the nonprofit Code for America.
Eleven years later, President Donald Trump is handing the keys of the USDS to Elon Musk, rebranding it as the U.S. DOGE Service, and making it the receptacle for the billionaire’s plan for a “Department of Government Efficiency” that would radically streamline federal operations.
As our colleagues Faiz Siddiqui, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Jeff Stein reported this week, the move follows months of tension between Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, culminating in Ramaswamy’s exit from the DOGE project to run for governor of Ohio. Now Musk, they wrote, “will be able to deploy a team of handpicked software engineers to every government agency, where under Trump’s executive order they will be granted ‘full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.’”
Musk, who has relished the limelight as a top Trump adviser, will be taking charge of a unit that won admiration within the government while keeping a low public profile.
“USDS has been one of the bright spots when it comes to government innovation over the last decade,” said Don Moynihan, professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. He cited its work in helping to create the IRS’s Direct File program and the State Department’s online passport renewal system. “If you have a complicated digital problem, they’re the people you call, and they consistently help to produce good results,” he said.
Pahlka said she and her team faced a steep learning curve when they set out to revamp government systems in 2014. But over time they learned how to work with different agencies to streamline their processes.
“It’s not just that they get something like online passport renewal working, and working in ways that people find easy to use,” she said. “But it’s that they bring these different approaches to the agency, and then the agency, in the best-case scenario, adopts them.”
Musk’s outsize profile and close relationship with Trump could turbocharge the agency’s work, experts say — if he and his deputies are willing to learn and adapt.
“The best-case outcome is that you get a sort of USDS on steroids,” Moynihan said. “You get an influx of new talent from Silicon Valley, but you also get the political visibility and momentum that Musk can bring, and you go and fix some problems with how government digital services operate.”
For that to happen, Musk and his team will need to “work with the rest of the government, rather than against it,” said Bridget Dooling, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in administrative law and regulatory policy. “There are lots of people in government who want things to work better, and this new USDS will help itself by not positioning itself as opposed to the entirety of how government works and the people in it.”
Asked what might be different about the USDS under Musk, Pahlka said simply, “He has more power.” That could be a good thing, she said, if the goal is to accelerate the transformation of government systems — including by cutting unnecessary red tape. But it depends on how he wields it.
All three experts said they could also envision the project going off the rails.
“I’ve said very publicly there does need to be a rebalancing between what I call ‘stop energy’ and ‘go energy,’” Pahlka said. You have a lot of compliance and guardrails that make it hard to get stuff done in government. But that doesn’t mean I think we should, like, fire half the workforce.”
If Musk were to “take a slash-and-burn approach and use USDS to do that,” she went on, “it would ruin USDS’s ability to partner with agencies and help them deliver better for the American public.”
Moynihan agreed, saying, “The negative side of DOGE is that it’s really an exercise in making government smaller rather than improving capacity.” That goal is not quite the same as the one taken up by the idealistic techies in the USDS who left or passed up higher-paying Silicon Valley jobs because they were “motivated to make public services work better.”
Asked for a realistic-worst case scenario, Dooling said, “They spin their wheels, waste a bunch of money and other peoples’ time reinventing policies that have already been tried, start fights in public and private about things where their knowledge is limited, and work at cross-purposes to other, more knowledgeable parts of the executive branch.”
The best chance of success might be for someone other than Musk to run the USDS day-to-day.
Some of Musk’s companies, such as SpaceX, are overseen by competent executives who stay out of the limelight. Pahlka said that could make sense in the case of USDS, allowing Musk to “stay a step removed” while “someone else who’s in his orbit” and shares his way of thinking heads up the unit.
“My greatest hope is that he and his colleagues learn, they learn quickly, but they bring this sort of audacity and connect it up with the folks that have already done a lot of that learning, and they shake things up in a really good way,” she added. “My basic sense is that in order to help people change, you need to build trust. I actually think the DOGE team will learn that.”
The question is whether they’ll learn it the easy way or the hard way.
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