DOGE is Here
A quick review of the Executive Order establishing DOGE
DOGE is officially here thanks to an Executive Order signed by Trump shortly after his inauguration on January 21, 2025. The EO is short—only 658 words total. Here’s a quick rundown of the text and some thoughts on what it might mean:
Section 1. Purpose.
Here’s the full section text:
This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.
That’s it. Modernizing federal IT to improve government efficiency is a worthy task, but it’s much narrower in scope than the expansive DOGE discourse aiming at the deficit, corruption, and overregulation.
Section 3. DOGE Structure
There are three subsections. The first interesting note is that DOGE is created as a temporary organization inside an existing one: the United States Digital Service (USDS).1 This makes sense given the relatively narrow scope of the purpose statement. Subsection (a) symbolically renames the United States Digital Service to “United States DOGE Service”.
Subsection (b) explains that this “US DOGE Service Temporary Organization” will expire after 18 months, though lessons from DOGE’s work could be adopted beyond that. While active, the USDS Administrator will lead DOGE. It’s not yet clear who this will be.
Subsection (c) gives us an actual sense of the structure:
(c) DOGE Teams. In consultation with USDS, each Agency Head shall establish within their respective Agencies a DOGE Team of at least four employees, which may include Special Government Employees2, hired or assigned within thirty days of the date of this Order. Agency Heads shall select the DOGE Team members in consultation with the USDS Administrator. Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney. Agency Heads shall ensure that DOGE Team Leads coordinate their work with USDS and advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President ‘s DOGE Agenda.
It seems each federal agency will have a small DOGE team embedded on site, working in collaboration with a central team back at “headquarters” in USDS. My initial impression is that this sounds a bit like the Palantir organizational model.
Section 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity.
The most interesting part of Section 4 is subsection (a), which offers more detail on the kind of work DOGE will do:
(a) The USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.
I’m pleased to see “inter-operability between agency networks and systems” mentioned explicitly. From my work building a data model of the SF government and my experience attending the Congressional Hackathon, it’s clear that government still does not think in systems. A core thesis of the CivLab is that government is a complex system and it must be able to coordinate effectively if we want it to work well. I’m excited to see what comes of this, though that will depend in part on the final section:
Section 5. General Provisions
It’s important to remember that DOGE has little formal power. To the extent that its mission requires legal changes and resources, DOGE will need to get them from Congress:
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
Things to watch
I’m most interested to see how the scope of the DOGE project changes over time, if at all. Is Elon settling for something more manageable, or are there other threads of this project? How will the agencies react to these DOGE teams? Will they be eager to upgrade or resistant to change? Can DOGE implement both the tech infrastructure and systems-thinking mindset necessary to improve government performance?
I’m not sure, but I hope so. I’ll be watching and providing updates along the way.
USDS launched in 2014 under the Obama administration. It is a tech-focused team within the federal government that recruits private-sector experts for short-term "tours of duty" to modernize public services. One such service is online passport renewal, which Jen Pahlka discusses in this Statecraft interview.
SGEs are a special category of federal employee defined in 18 U.S.C. § 202(a). They are often experts with specialized knowledge brought in to serve short stints.
I too am very curious to see where this goes. One thing that is a bit odd to me is the lack of any reference to the fact that software-modernization initiatives already exist—including having existed under the previous Trump administration.
My hope is that this can bring more momentum to this work. My fear is that it creates negative polarization and/or partisan bickering in Congress over stuff that used to be more bipartisan.
+1 to the point about interoperability
DOGE is an interesting and exciting project. I’m curious if there have been any initiatives undertaken at a smaller scale that may serve as a proof of concept