DOGE: the government’s disruptive efficiency tool

“Move fast and break things” has long been the unofficial motto of some of Silicon Valley’s most successful progenies.

President Donald Trump’s decision to empower Elon Musk, the most famous and successful Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur ever, seems to have imported the mantra to Washington, DC.

Musk leads the “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),” though it’s not a formal federal agency, nor is it the first time this kind of White House initiative has existed, it operates more as a super-task force with sweeping authority

Thanks for joining us this Saturday. Below we’ll dive into the headline-grabbing, lawsuit-inspiring, DC-busting DOGE – to offer you a look that you won’t get in other publications, one that is of high value. 

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In his biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson recounts the “surge” that would often precede some of Musk’s most impressive breakthroughs. During a surge, Musk mobilizes his team to work at breakneck pace – 15-, 16-, 17-hour days for weeks or months on end – to achieve some or another engineering goal: designing a new rocket engine, say, or ramping up Tesla production.

In just a few short weeks since President Trump’s inauguration, DOGE has moved with such pace and ferocity that by the time news outlets publish a story on one move, several other moves have already been executed.

DOGE is formally empowered via an executive order President Trump signed on Jan. 20, 2025. The order renames an existing office, the “United States Digital Service,” and reconstitutes it under the Executive Office of the President as the “United States DOGE Service (USDS).”

The USDS administrator reports directly to the White House chief of staff. It is not clear who the USDS administrator is, though it seems that Musk either formally or informally leads the effort. (A group of senators recently asked the White House, among other things, “Who is the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator?”)

Per the executive order, each federal agency is to name a DOGE team of at least four employees, including one leader, one engineer, one HR specialist, and one lawyer. The DOGE teams are to coordinate with and take direction from USDS.

Though the executive order refers only to “modernizing federal technology and software,” it seems clear that DOGE has a far more expansive remit: to mercilessly track down and eliminate federal programs that, in DOGE’s estimation, are wasteful.

DOGE first targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and things escalated quickly. It appears USAID bureaucrats were reluctant to grant DOGE operatives access to the organization’s inner workings and data. So the Trump administration effectively shut the agency down, furloughing workers and even restricting access to USAID headquarters.

In the maelstrom that followed, two narratives emerged. 1) the White House asserts USAID did indeed fund some mindboggling endeavors. And 2) the administration isn’t backing away from all foreign aid.

In an interview this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “The problem is that this foreign aid industrial complex is built up of NGOs and all kinds of groups that benefit from these programs, and they argue that you can’t get rid of a single one of them; if you cut any of them, if you even ask questions about them, you’re undermining American soft power. So, this is not – despite some of these reports, this is not about walking away from foreign aid. This is about doing the aid that makes sense and getting rid of the aid that does not make sense.”

Expect this two-act play to replicate itself in the months to come. Musk and his band of move-fast-and-break-things operators will do just that, because some things really do need to be broken. But afterwards, others will come in to partially put the pieces back together because some of the things Musk breaks shouldn’t have been broken.

USAID is but one of DOGE’s targets. The sheer volume and pace of action makes sober, fact-based reporting nearly impossible – it’s probable that no single person can fully grasp all of the second-order consequences of DOGE’s actions.

That reality is part of the rationale for DOGE’s existence: the administrative state has become such a behemoth that not even Congress – tasked by the Constitution to both fund and oversee the executive branch – really knows what’s going on.

Indeed, there is some irony in federal legislators issuing statements blasting some or another bizarre line item DOGE has uncovered. After all, if nobody has been minding the shop in the executive branch, that’s more an indictment of Congress than anyone else.

Previous presidents have launched efforts similar to DOGE. President Ronald Reagan, for example, established the Grace Commission staffed entirely by private-sector business executives. The group recommended reforms that would have saved hundreds of billions of dollars. Some were instituted; many that required congressional action were not.

In fact, presidents launched task forces and commissions to improve government efficiency every single decade since 1900. Why? Because attacking wasteful government programs is politically popular. It always has been. It’s the execution that’s challenging, and it’s only gotten more challenging as the federal government has gotten bigger.

Top speechwriters for former President Barack Obama said as much on their popular podcast Pod Save America last week.

“We tried to reorganize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It’s hard to do.”

And of their observations of DOGE: 

“Honestly, some of this stuff is pretty annoying because it’s some of the stuff we should have done.”