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United States Digital Service renamed to DOGE
- wumeow 2y agoNot quite, it’s renamed to United States DOGE Service. This will surely help attract top talent.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoDodgy department
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Cadwhisker 2y agoWas the font always so massive?
- einrealist 2y agoNo. If the content is thin, make a large headline. (Worked well throughout Trump's campaign. They even printed it on red caps.)
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoNope. That's new. wow. A big change in vibe/look right out the gate. Uggh.
- addandsubtract 2y ago"Big font. Much wow. Big win." - Doge
- mmastrac 2y agoI prefer when governments at least pretend to be serious. Glad I'm not American, so sorry for you guys for the next four years.
- userbinator 2y agoIt's going to be a very memorable four years a lot of us are looking forward to.
- gnkyfrg 2y ago[dead]
- passwordoops 2y agoI much prefer it when they are actually serious. Hasn't happened anywhere on a while, at least on national stages
- ffhhj 2y ago"Glad I'm not X" doesn't matter when the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement will hit the whole planet.
- parineum 2y agoWe surpassed the goals set by the accord already and other countries ignore it because it has no teeth. Nothing was lost.
- readthenotes1 2y agoYellow jacket riots?
- gnkyfrg 2y agoThat agreement does nothing but launder tax money into "green" companies. We set oil burning records every year. The people writing that agreement fly around in private jets. Snap out of it!
- terminatornet 2y ago> Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013 Hopefully Elon gets to the Harlem Shake or Gangam style soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(meme) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(meme)
- bpp 2y agoI have a few friends who were involved in the creation of the US Digital Service, and as it stands it is one of the absolute best parts of our government. Formed after the Healthcare.gov disaster, the USDS brings Silicon Valley tech knowledge to the government in an attempt to ensure that we all have the online government services that we deserve. It's a tiny agency up against a massive bureaucracy that is anything but open to new ways of doing things. And they've made progress, but not enough. I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind. Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed. [1] https://www.section508.gov/ https://www.section508.gov/
- perryizgr8 2y ago> huge influx of funding and staffing That would be antithetical to their new name.
- macintux 2y agoReality continues its convergence with The Onion.
- sho_hn 2y agoThe photo op of the US president signing the country out of the Paris Agreement in 2025, in public, to a cheering crowd is also a great fit for a Mad Max backstory intro montage.
- philistine 2y agoMax stands on a tall wall made of scrap, inside a compound protecting him from the mad man with a bullhorn and his cronies below. The broad chested mad man on the ground belows: - I know words, I know the best words for I am the most stable genius.
- faizshah 2y agoIt was surreal seeing Fox News have polymarket bets being taken on what Trump would say side by side with him speaking. And I don’t even know what to say about the president and First Lady releasing official meme coins…
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> I don’t even know what to say about the president and First Lady releasing official meme coins… wait, this actually happened?
- thesuperbigfrog 2y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/01/21/trump-and-melania-meme-coins-down-50-since-weekend-peak/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/01/21/trump-a... https://www.axios.com/2025/01/21/trump-meme-coin-crypto https://www.axios.com/2025/01/21/trump-meme-coin-crypto
- w10-1 2y agoThe digital service did great work modernizing digital infrastructure of citizen-facing federal services. AFAIK, it has *never* been stated publicly that DOGE or Mr. Musk would get control of this most essential service, responsible for sourcing identity verification, etc. There's no relationship between bureaucracy efficiency efforts and the digital service. Indeed, one would have expected DOGE to be injected into the Office of Personnel Management. It's disconcerting to see such a mismatch between rationale and deployment, particularly for a new agency with no oversight in Congress.
- rayiner 2y agoIt makes sense as an agency that was already providing consultation to other agencies, and was inside the executive office of the president rather than being embedded in some other agency.
- anigbrowl 2y agoNo refunds I think there will a be a lot of 'this isn't what we voted for' moments under this new administration, , and that warnings dismissed as hyperbolic during the campaign season will turn out to have been entirely sober and realistic predictions.
- foxyv 2y agoThey literally published their plan and no one believed them. After COVID my expectations for our country were pretty low, but now they are even lower. My Dad who worked as a public health nurse for 20 years supported this guy who wanted to shut down the DoE and leave the WHO. I just don't understand anymore.
- SecretDreams 2y ago> It's disconcerting to see such a mismatch between rationale and deployment, particularly for a new agency with no oversight in Congress. Disconcerting, but not surprising.
- hedora 2y agoI totally understand your point, but Musk said this was the end game when he bought twitter. He wants x.com to be a single monolith “everything” app, just like they have in China. The idea is to control currency, authentication, identity, reputation, commerce and communication, and to make use of it mandatory.
- easton 2y agoWas the external DOGE organization, as previously described, supposed to have a digital modernization component? It seemed like more of a project to ‘cut expenses’, like an external GAO. The silly part of me wants to say they picked USDS because it had a D in it, but I’m guessing that wasn’t it.
- inopinatus 2y ago"Agency has the meaning given to it in section 551 of title 5, United States Code" ... "each Agency Head shall establish within their respective Agencies a DOGE Team of at least four employees" ... "each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney" that's at least 500k in salaries even for the lowball public sector, and there are at least 230 federal agencies, which you can be damn sure are gonna interpret this as broadly as possible, i.e. including the subagencies that's 400+ under 5 USC § 551 (see https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies) nothing like kicking off your "efficiency" drive with a $200m+ expense
- giantg2 2y ago"that's at least 500k in salaries even for the lowball public sector" I'm not sure I agree with the approach, but this seems overstated. At least from an engineer perspective, there are sub-$70k engineer jobs. That four person team could be $250k. Also, they could be pulling that internally instead of external hires.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 2y agoThose teams will be tasted with heavy responsibilities (or at least workload) and most of them will want to compensated accordingly. Also, even for low paid jobs you're overlooking benefits, pension contributions etc. While some of them might be internal hires, to the extent that they were previously productive, those jobs will have to be replaced, and to the extent that they were not, they will be incentivized to make broad decisions whose eventual costs may fall upon the public in terms of lower responsiveness or less effective outcomes or the loss of impartiality.
- Rebelgecko 2y agoThat GS-8 or whatever making $70k probably costs 50% or double that after benefits
- riffic 2y agothis is the saddest shit, the Digital Service was something good and wholesome and valuable. We all saw what happened to Twitter, Inc, right?
- brandonb 2y agoJen Pahlka—a HealthCare.gov rescue team member who helped start the US Digital Service—has been writing a really informative series of posts that summarize what the Obama administration learned from its efforts to make government more efficient. Here's a good starting point: "Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight": https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/bringing-elon-to-a-knife-fight https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/bringing-elon-to-a-knife-figh... The basic goal of making government work well is (or should be) bipartisan. The nuts and bolts of how you do that are really hard to get right.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoI hate to be flippant, but it's just abundantly clear that Pahlka is soon going to be the newest recipient of a "fell for it again" award. I'm still an Elon fan at heart, but it's absolutely impossible to believe he's interested in the nuts-and-bolts view of government efficiency she's describing. He's repeatedly said that the problem is the government spending too much money, which he'll fix by finding employees, departments, and regulations to get rid of.
- b0sk 2y ago(Not mine) This is like buying Twitter and renaming it to X
- userbinator 2y agoThe USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software After seeing so many failed "modernization" projects that just made things worse, this should be the biggest worry.
- Freedom2 2y agoOn the other hand, it'll likely never be finished before the president's term is up, judging from my own experiences with modernization projects.
- userbinator 2y agoNot even that long: The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall terminate on July 4, 2026.
- anigbrowl 2y ago[flagged]
- Apocryphon 2y agoIs this going to be like what happened with NAFTA where something gets renamed with some token changes and then mission accomplished is declared?
- monstertank 2y ago[flagged]
- perryizgr8 2y ago[flagged]
- insane_dreamer 2y agoWhy was this flagged? Highly relevant tech news.
- stuaxo 2y agoWhat a joke.