An interesting perspective on DOGE

 

The Telegraph in London has an interesting article (which may be paywalled) about how the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has come to this point, and where it'll be going from here.  The author appears to suspect that Elon Musk is up to no good, judging by the headline:

Inside Musk’s White House power grab

Billionaire pushes ahead with plans to infiltrate

all parts of Trump’s administration

after axing of his co-leader at Doge

I think that's overblown, but I daresay we'll see what we shall see.

Of interest is the article's take on how DOGE will operate.

In November, the president had said Doge would advise White House officials from outside government. On Monday, he ordered that it would be part of the federal government itself.

Doge will be part of the Executive Office of the President, which is a group of federal agencies, offices and staff responsible for national security, economic, foreign and domestic policy.

Doge has swallowed the US Digital Service (USDS), which was a White House office set up by Barack Obama, the former president, to be as nimble as possible to respond to tech crises.

It is now called the US Doge Service. The office does not have the usually burdensome federal government rules for hiring staff and Mr Trump has exempted it from a federal hiring freeze he announced in another executive order on Monday.

Jennifer Pahlka, who founded USDS in 2014, told The Washington Post: “It’s a very convenient vehicle for them. If you were trying to do something ambitious across the government, USDS is a good place to do it from.”

Doge teams of special government employees – a category of temporary worker – will fan out and embed themselves in federal agencies to identify spending and red tape for the axe.

The executive order tasks Doge with “modernising federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity”.

Each Doge team, expected to include at least a team lead, engineer, human resources specialist and lawyer, must be given “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems and IT systems” to the “maximum extent consistent with law”.

There's more at the link.

I note with amusement that, by using an existing White House office and operating from within the administration, rather than as a formal advisory committee, DOGE has neatly sidestepped all the lawsuits trying to demand that it adhere to the provisions of FACA (as discussed yesterday).  Those lawsuits are now moot, as FACA doesn't apply to DOGE in its present form.  Nice legal sidestep there.

The article dwells on Elon Musk's alleged plan to grab unprecedented power in the Trump administration.  I doubt that, for two reasons.  First, President Trump is unlikely to allow anyone to usurp his powers - he saw what happened with that during his first term in office.  Second, Mr. Musk has more than enough on his plate with X, SpaceX, Tesla and other activities.  I doubt whether he has enough time or energy - and certainly not the desire - to abandon or neglect all that in order to become a tinpot dictator!

Nevertheless, I note that many mainstream news organizations seem to be eager to assert that there's tension and/or conflict between Musk and the President.  One might even suspect they want to create such tension and conflict, for their own partisan purposes.  I think we should read such reports with that in mind.

Peter