As Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” prepares for its mission of slashing federal government to the bone, it’s collecting some unlikely supporters. One is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who posted on X Sunday that he hopes DOGE tackles a “defense budget full of waste and fraud.” Another is Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and former President Barack Obama's deputy chief technology officer who says that despite Musk and DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy’s right-wing lens on increasing efficiency, it could present a welcome and rare opportunity to do so.
“I would love to see an environment with less fear and more balance in which we could have this conversation, but we have not had that environment in the time that I've been working with the government,” Pahlka told DFD. “It’s not our best chance, it's just a chance.” Pahlka has plenty of tech-meets-government cred; she founded Code for America and the United States Digital Service, and organized the seminal Web 2.0 conference. She sees promise in Musk’s “algorithm” for running his companies, as well as his eagerness to kill off the high-friction bureaucratic requirements that collect around federal departments. But when it comes to DOGE’s actual plans, Pahlka very much does not approve of the scorched-earth, “founder-mode”-style campaign that Musk and Ramaswamy have discussed waging. She published a Substack essay this morning calling their strategy, as outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, a “cop-out” — and warned that rules around force reduction in the civil service will likely mean that the two will end up firing exactly the kind of flexible, tech-savvy employees they need most for their mission of reshaping government.
“If long-term gain is broadly what they want, and a shock to the system is how they want to get it, firing term appointees, those hired under special authorities, and those recently hired is a terrible way to do it,” Pahlka wrote. She pointed out that under federal regulations, employees under those categories must be first to go.
I called Pahlka this morning to discuss her critiques, and where she sees opportunities for DOGE’s stated mission. In our conversation, excerpted below, she gets into why those employees are most likely to be the ones who can bridge the “digital divide” in a government many blame for its inefficiency, why Musk’s rules for process reform are more admirable than liberals might think and how even liberal politics can get in the way of good government. This interview transcript has been edited and condensed. How pronounced is the digital divide in government right now, and what proportion of the federal workforce is subject to the risk that you describe DOGE running in kicking them all out first? We’ve made a ton of progress in getting great digital talent into agencies. Some of those people will end up being among the last to be let go. So there’s certainly a case that you'll have some great digital talent that isn't at risk.
But the people who do what I'll call for lack of a better term “digital transformation” — not just “we're putting this thing into the cloud,” but as Elon has tweeted about, taking steps out of the process by optimizing and automating, true digital transformation … those teams generally feel pretty outgunned by compliance folks who are the “stop” energy to their “go” energy. It’s more my concern that the tenure, often, of those folks who are in those compliance positions is quite long, and often longer than the folks who are the “go” energy.
What does that “stop energy” look like in practice?
One thing I've noticed in the past four years is the incredibly strict application of ethics rules. This is a tough thing to talk about, because nobody wants to say we're getting lax on ethics rules. I think part of the reason for what I see as maximalist interpretations of ethics rules in the Biden administration is a sense that you must make up for a lack of application of ethics rules under Trump, and that's fair. But I've heard of people being told, “Oh, you can't go into that meeting with this particular vendor because we went and looked in your 401k and saw that you have a little teeny bit of stock in that
company.” If the person's job is to manage that vendor, let them do the job. You want to let people do their jobs, and you want to apply ethics rules reasonably, and it's not always reasonable if you get people who sometimes are trying to exercise compliance rules for the sake of it. Given how immersed you are in these questions of process, what do you think of Musk’s self-described “algorithm” for running SpaceX? I would say those five steps are all ways to get things going better and faster, which we need in government. I am someone who believes there should be some safeguards in there, but I also believe that we have too many safeguards now.
“Make requirements less dumb” is something I think every public servant I've ever worked with cheers for. We have a lot of dumb requirements, and they make us less effective at everything, whether it's national security or benefits delivery, and they need to be cleaned up. There’s a lot that even folks who are worried about the sort of chaos that DOGE could bring, and the overly broad, overly blunt strategies they're talking about, would look at something like this and say, “We do need to make requirements less dumb.” Despite your reservations, is this the best chance for civil service reform during your time in government? It’s the first opportunity for it to even be on the table since I started working with government 14 years ago. Is it the best? I can think of a lot of better scenarios where there would be less concern about the reforms being too broad. Schedule F [a job classification created during the first Trump administration that made it easier to fire career civil servants] creates a ton of fear, and I think rightfully so, in the dialogue about civil service, although as I will keep saying Schedule F is not civil service reform. It does not actually address the issues that everybody knows need addressing. So I would love to see an environment with less fear and more balance in which we could have this conversation, but we have not had that environment in the time that I've been working with government. It’s not our best chance, it's just a chance that could go very, very sideways for a whole lot of reasons. But I think it’s a chance we have to take.
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