But we do need to talk about government reform, and while I’m sorry the conditions are quite a bit less than ideal, I think it's time we admitted they were always going to be. Democrats did not do this work. Many wonderful public servants made valiant efforts and scored some great wins, but Democratic leadership did not make it a top priority to clear out the underbrush that jams the gears of government. (...)
I am guessing that those most worried that DOGE will succeed have never tried their hand at reforming government. It’s hard. But easier, you say, with no respect for the law, and the DOGE team will be unencumbered by such details. But that’s not true. The lawsuits will come. A lot of the government tech community is skipping the hand wringing; they've basically just grabbed a bag of popcorn and are watching in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolutely hated for their entire time in public service. They don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void. I am struck by how different the tone of the DOGE conversation is between political leaders on the left and the people who’ve been fighting in the implementation trenches. One group is terrified they’ll succeed. The other is starting to ask a surprising question (or at least I am): What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?
Take the issue of respect for the law. Put aside the headline grabbing issues for a second and live in the mundane world of implementation in government. If you’ve spent the past ten years trying to make, say, better online services for veterans, or clearer ways to understand your Medicare benefits, or even better ways to support warfighters, you’ve sat in countless -– and I mean countless — meetings where you’ve been told that something you were trying to do was illegal. Was it? Now, instead of launching your new web form or doing the user research your team needed to do, you spend weeks researching why you are now branded as dangerously lawless, only to find that either a) it was absolutely not illegal but 25 years ago someone wrote a memo that has since been interpreted as advising against this thing, b) no one had heard of the thing you were trying to do (the cloud, user research, A/B testing) and didn’t understand what you were talking about so had simply asserted it was illegal out of fear, c) there was an actual provision in law somewhere that did seem to address this and interpreting it required understanding both the actual intent of the law and the operational mechanics of the thing you were trying to do, which actually matched up pretty well or d) (and this one is uncommon) that the basic, common sense thing you were trying to do was actually illegal, which was clearly the result of a misunderstanding by policymakers or the people who draft legislation and policy on their behalf, and if they understood how their words had been operationalized, they’d be horrified. It is absolutely possible to both respect the rule of law, considering the democratic process and the peaceful transfer of power sacred, and have developed an aversion to the fetishization of law that perverts its intent. The majority of public servants I know have well earned this right.
DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo and yes, the people in my community are watching. While our eyes are on potential abuses, they are also on the durability of the wall generally, and with deeply mixed emotions. It must be said: the wall is a problem. It is a problem for people who value the rule of law. It is a problem for people who care about an effective, responsive government. (...)
It's really hard to have an accurate model for why change is so hard in large bureaucratic institutions, and specifically for public sector ones, where the differences in governance really do matter. On the one hand, I do still believe that the first order problem is simply lack of attention by people with power. If politics and policy take their fair share of your oxygen, there's really just very little left for the implementation. What is available gets used on getting that particular thing done, which usually means a hack around the system instead of permanently changing it so it can be easy next time. At its worst, the hacks to get it done this time actually make it harder on an ongoing basis. (...)
Is someone against these minor and helpful changes? You could say that the vendors profit from government’s slow and poor process for hiring, but I struggle to imagine this was high on any lobbyists’ target lists. It's far more likely that there is just a perplexing combination of legitimate and imagined reasons for caution, and review by a staggering array of stakeholders. As I talked about in my book, outsiders (and certainly the right) imagine dangerously concentrated power in the executive branch, and seek to limit it. The reality is shockingly diffuse power. The bad outcomes they are fighting to prevent — burdensome, overreaching government — are the product of exactly the conditions they help create. Neither the left nor the right really has the mental models (nor, perhaps the desire) to effectively challenge the status quo of the technocracy.
You can tell a credible story about the resistance to change that doesn’t require any dirty tricks on the part of the incumbents, and I’ve often left it at that, in part because the vendors don’t come at me. I don’t threaten them. But they do go at those who do threaten them. Oracle recently admitted to some very dirty tricks in trying to keep their competitors from winning the Jedi cloud contract at the DoD. (More to say about this in a future post, perhaps. Or perhaps I’ll be too scared to attract their ire. It happens.) It’s not that they succeeded in getting the contract — they’d already lost it. They were just following their scorched earth policy of ensuring that if they couldn’t have it, no one could. And by no one, they meant their competitors, but the result is that the DoD still doesn’t have the access to the cloud that Jedi architect Chris Lynch envisioned. Our national defense is that much slower and less secure because Oracle can’t lose. These are some of the conditions under which change in government is supposed to take place.
We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully. However we got here, we may now be in a Godzilla vs Kong world. Perhaps we’re about to get a natural experiment in which Elonzilla faces off with Larry ElliKong. One of the things we need to be ready to learn is that Elonzilla could lose. Or worse, since Elon and Larry are friends, the expected disruptive could get co-opted. And what would that say about the problem? Conjuring Elon is not bringing a gun to a knife fight. It was never a knife fight.
by Jennifer Pahlka, Eating Policy | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Dated (Dec. 2023) but still relevant, especially now that Elon has retreated, tail between legs, to shore up his severely damaged reputation and tanking car company (more here). But his minions and various unqualified political appointees are still in place so dysfunction will likely be the default (deep) state going forward. It's always easier to break something than repair it. See also: The Water is a Mirror (EP):]
***
"There is waste, fraud, and abuse in government, to be sure. Medicare and Medicaid fraud is real, and we should make it easier to prosecute these cases. (Elon thinks you just catch the fraudsters and lock them up — in fact, you spend years building a case and refer it to the Department of Justice, and let the wheels turn at the speed they may. There should be a middle ground.) But a lot of what people perceive as government waste is stuff like this — just unwise use of resources directed by very smart, dedicated people. Why would smart, dedicated people do this? Because in American culture, the people don’t trust their government.My point is actually this: an enormous amount of the waste in government (and what some might call abuse) comes from people trying very hard to avoid the perception of waste and abuse. We’ve made it a first order thing. Most people who work in government (and make less money than they could) do so because it means something to them to serve the public. But serving the public turns out to involve catering to a deeply ingrained mistrust, which distorts the work, leaves soldiers thirsty, and drives further mistrust. Looking for someone to blame?
My point, dear reader, is that this starts with us."
***
[ed. And, this just in - May 27, 2025:]
Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.
The administration sustained more losses today.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional. (...)
Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.
***
[ed. And the hits just keep coming (this time, the TACO trade): May 28, 2025:]
Judges continue to decide cases against Trump, with a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruling today that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs are illegal. (...)
Tariffs were in the news today in another way, too, as Wall Street analysts have begun to talk of “TACO trade,” short for “Trump always chickens out.” The phrase was coined earlier this month by Robert Armstrong of Financial Times and refers to Trump’s habit of threatening extraordinarily high tariffs and then backing down. Armstrong noted that investors have figured out that they can buy stocks cheaply immediately after Trump’s initial tariff announcement and then sell higher when stocks rebound after he changes his mind. (...)
Tonight, after news broke that the judges had ruled his tariffs illegal and after he had reacted angrily to a reporter’s question about the “TACO trade,” a weakened Trump reached out to his alt-right base as he appeared determined to demonstrate dominance. He posted a meme on his social media account showing an image of himself walking toward the viewer on what appears to be a wet, nighttime city street. Pepe the Frog, a symbol of the far right, stands in the background.
Above Trump, in all capital letters, are the words: “He’s on a mission from God.” Below his feet, also in all caps, the message continues: “& nothing can stop what is coming.” This is a phrase from the right-wing QAnon conspiracy community and refers to the idea that members of the “Deep State” and its collaborators will soon be arrested.
***
[ed. Finally, it's not just tariffs. The bumbling and backtracking re: Ukraine is the TACO trade in foreign policy:]Trump’s mistake has been to assume that his self-proclaimed deal-making genius, supposed rapport with Putin and massive leverage over Volodymyr Zelenskyy (the US has provided Ukraine with more weaponry than the other allies combined, though less total aid when humanitarian and other support is included) would together yield a diplomatic success, perhaps one that would even land him a Nobel peace prize. (...)
Now Trump is outraged – Putin, he wrote on his social media platform, has “gone absolutely CRAZY” and is “needlessly killing a lot of people” – and, when asked whether he was thinking of tightening sanctions, replied: “Absolutely.” But this isn’t the first time Trump has warned Putin to cease targeting his missiles and drones on Ukraine (remember his “Vladimir, STOP!” post late last month?) or threatened additional sanctions. (...)
However, even if Trump moves beyond social media posts and words and actually does impose additional economic penalties on Russia this time round, the fighting won’t stop – for at least two reasons.
