MW With DOGE, Elon Musk could face a task tougher than rocket science

By Chris Matthews

The founder of the U.S. Digital Service says Musk will face challenges in government unlike any that he's seen in the private sector

Elon Musk has kept his name in the headlines in the days following President Donald Trump's inauguration by sparring with tech industry rivals like OpenAI's Sam Altman on social media and promoting the president's policy announcements, but he's provided little information as to his goals heading the new, so-called "Department of Government Efficiency."

Washington has been awash in speculation as to what exactly this entity will attempt to do in the days following its creation by Trump's executive order.

Speculation was heightened earlier this week when Vivek Ramaswamy, who was to co-chair the advisory commission with Musk, announced that he was leaving the group to run for governor of Ohio, feeding speculation that Musk and Ramaswamy had fallen out over the group's strategy.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bill McGinley, whom Trump appointed as DOGE's legal counsel in December, has also decided to abandon the effort in favor of a private-sector job.

Trump decided to house DOGE within the U.S. Digital Service, created in 2013 under President Barack Obama in order to help streamline digital delivery of public services.

Jennifer Pahlka, who helped found the U.S. Digital Service in 2013, told MarketWatch in an interview that it's likely the hard realities of government reform are likely setting in for Musk, who will face challenges in government unlike any that he's seen in the private sector.

"Government is filled with stakeholders who are resistant to change for a variety of reasons," she said. "I've worked for 15 years and have watched political leaders not take implementation of policy and delivery of services seriously."

Pahlka published a a book in 2023 called "Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better," which examines her experience at the U.S. Digital Service and working with the state of California to rescue its unemployment insurance system from crippling backlogs during during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her message to those who want to reform the public sector is that government programs fail to deliver to the American people as a result of unintended consequences of the democratic process, rather than because of corruption or incompetence.

Her book recalls many examples of well-meaning government programs paralyzed by layers of rules and requirements placed on them by elected officials and administrators who are simply trying to deliver government services in a fair and cost-effective manner.

"Lawmakers often have good intentions, but they continually add policy layers with too little understanding of (and sometimes regard for) how what they add will interact with the layers that are already cluttering the delivery environment," Pahlka wrote in her book.

These layers of policy directives, added over the decades by successive cohorts of lawmakers, are enforced by government administrators who know that there best defense against criticism from the public and elected officials is an ironclad fidelity to official protocols.

She explained that government workers are rarely fired for not effectively delivering services, but can and often are for "violations of policy, process and procedure - real or perceived."

These policy directives can come from the right side of the policy spectrum as well as the left.

Often Republicans are eager to include rules in policies for benefits like healthcare, food stamps or unemployment insurance that reduce the number of people eligible for the program, while Democrats often want to see other requirements that promote fair access, like making an application process for benefits available in multiple languages.

Pahlka called these requirements, which often build up over decade in duplicative or contradictory ways, "policy cruft."

She said that while she doesn't personally know Musk, she has learned watching him from afar that he excels at a "product model" of delivering technology rather than the "process model" that reigns supreme in government.

Musk's success at building Tesla $(TSLA)$, the largest U.S. electric-car manufacturer and SpaceX, the largest private space-exploration company, shows that he understands how to deliver valued products on reasonable timelines and under budget. But he has no experience tackling "policy cruft" or the incentives and legal structures that make democratic government inefficient, Pahlka argued.

Analysts remain skeptical that the existence of DOGE itself will do anything to overcome the many veto points in American government that make radical reform difficult.

Trump's executive order creating the agency within the U.S. Digital Service will place it within the White House "with high levels of access to the West Wing," wrote Andrew Lokay, an analyst for Beacon Policy Advisors, in a Wednesday note.

That said the department's "ultimate impact depends on the ability of the group to convince federal agencies, and Congress to implement its recommendations."

-Chris Matthews

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January 23, 2025 16:24 ET (21:24 GMT)

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