The DOGE Next Door

Report From a Nearby Universe

The book that launched DOGE in universe C-138

My interdimensional cable was installed on January 20th, allowing me to watch what's happening in parallel universes. And while I've enjoyed watching some of the shows I'd been hearing about for a while, what’s really hooked me is DOGETV, a channel devoted exclusively to covering the Department of Government Efficiency in a nearby universe named C-138. That universe’s DOGE differs from ours in fascinating and important ways.

Since neighboring universes tend to closely resemble ours, a lot of what I'm seeing on C-138’s DOGETV is familiar. There's an America there that on January 20th inaugurated a new leader — a career businessperson who’d been president once before. As is the case here, this guy does not feel much bound by precedent, the norms of the office, tradition, or long-established ways of getting things done. Staying within the limits of every regulation, statute, law, and norm is far from his highest priority.

Just as in our universe, C-138’s president struck up an alliance during the election with the planet’s most famous entrepreneur, and its richest person. This person came to America in 2002, when he was not yet 25, and since then has disrupted both auto manufacturing and space exploration and commercialization — two large global capital-intensive, knowledge-intensive industries populated by well-entrenched incumbents.

Elimination of Process

In C-138, the Entrepreneur shares the President's suspicions of received wisdom, the status quo, and existing elites, and is especially hostile to proceduralism — to the notions that:

1. There are processes in place for getting things done. These processes are often elaborate and time-consuming. They involve many stakeholders, all of whom must be involved and consulted, and most of whom can stop things from proceeding if they want to.

2. These processes exist for good reasons.

3. They should be followed. In fact, one of the core functions of government and of many people working within government is to ensure that they are followed to the letter.

4. The main way to amend them is to add to them, typically via additional multi-stakeholder processes.

To combat what they saw as harmful proceduralism throughout C-138’s federal government, the President and the Entrepreneur stood up a Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. As is the case here, they just did it. For example, President didn't much care if the Entrepreneur filled out the necessary paperwork to become a government employee, made all appropriate disclosures, took the traditional meetings and appeared at the appropriate hearings, and so on. The two of them just acted, and let the mop-up activities fall where they may. They both feel that this approach has served them well throughout their careers, and they see no reason to switch it up just because they’re now in government.

The Book that Launched a Thousand Improvements

In fact, the goal of C-138's DOGE is to bring this move-fast-and-do-things approach to all the branches and layers of the American federal bureaucracy, which is as large and sprawling in their universe as it is in ours. It’s also become bureaucratic in the worst senses of the word.¹ Sclerotic. Risk-averse. Slow. Inward-looking. Opaque. Unaccountable. Brittle. Change-resistant. Innovation-resistant.

There are parts of the federal government in C-138 that aren’t like this. And there are parts that accomplish their missions admirably, even if they do have some of the characteristics listed above. But no one in C-138 (or, for that matter, here) has made a well-supported argument that the American government actually isn't all that bureaucratic, and generally does well all the things it's supposed to do. In C-138, the President and the Entrepreneur are driven by the belief that all this bureaucracy is causing real harms to America and her people, in large part because of its undying fondness for proceduralism.

My favorite description of governmental bureaucracy's harms doesn't come from a rabid libertarian or LLM trained on the collected works of Milton Friedman. It instead comes from an old-fashioned liberal who’s animated by the belief that government can and should improve people's lives, and has devoted a good chunk of her career to helping it do so.

Jennifer Palka's fantastic 2023 book, Recoding America, is a this-universe exposé of how poorly America's government is working for its people, especially in its digital interactions with them. Dysfunctional bureaucracy is the fodder for a lot of humor, but Pahlka shows that it’s a tragedy as well as a joke. She describes, for example, how the Veterans Administration designed a process for veterans to apply online for benefits. It worked just fine on the computers at VA headquarters, and apparently nowhere else. As Pahlka writes “The team [working to improve the situation] tested the application on all kinds of computers running all kinds of common combinations of software. In none of the tests did the application [do what it was supposed to].”²

Recoding America is full of stories like this, many of which are literally unbelievable; if they were written into a movie, you'd think that the authors forgot that satire and farce only work when they’re tethered to reality. In her book and Substack posts, Pahlka shows again and again how proceduralism contributes to glacial, stultifying, unresponsive, unaccountable bureaucracies — the kind that make it not just difficult but impossible for veterans to sign up for the benefits they're entitled to.

And here’s where C-138 forks off, and becomes meaningfully different from our universe. In C-138 Recoding America had the effect of The Jungle or Silent Spring; it was a catalyst and call to action. A few other books that came out around the same time had a similar effect in our neighboring universe; they include The Conservative Futurist, Abundance, The Unaccountability Machine, and Why Nothing Works. Together, they convinced the Entrepreneur and many other techies in C-138 that the most important thing they could do — more important even than making humans an interplanetary species or accomplishing a green energy transition — was to make the federal government the most effective, efficient, and popular institution in American society. So they joined the President, spun up DOGE, and got to work.

It's early days, but I can already see impressive progress as I watch DOGETV. Every federal agency has refreshed and improved its website, some multiple times. It's easier for veterans to get healthcare, for people to get their federal marijuana possession convictions overturned, and to accomplish scores of other transactions. There are teams working on radically simplifying how we pay taxes, obtain permits, access social services, verify our identities, and so on. C-138’s DOGE has also stood up a clever, Reddit-like site where people point out problems, propose solutions, and upvote or downvote each other³

The Battle of Washington

To be sure, DOGE has plenty of detractors in C-138. America’s pre-inauguration federal technology situation might have been miserable, but it provided jobs, paychecks, careers, and opportunities for advancement to hundreds of thousands of people. Most of those folk are not cheerleaders for DOGE, which is exposing incompetence and shoddy work, slashing budgets, replacing vendors, and firing people. Opposition politicians thus find plenty to complain about. Depending on who controls Congress after C-138’s midterm elections, the opposition might also find ways to slow down the work.

Lots of agencies don’t like being told what to do, or (gasp) monitored by outsiders. But C-138’s DOGE doesn’t care. It’s already defined performance measures for many parts of the government, and created a site that publicly tracks those measures. The President and the Entrepreneur have made it clear that if those measures don’t start moving in the right direction there will be negative career consequences for the people involved, even if they are longtime public employees. So there’s a lot of anxiety and unhappiness in the federal workforce and among Beltway Bandits. Also, DOGE’s work in C-138 has raised legitimate privacy and 1st amendment concerns. Many lawsuits have been filed.

There are more to come, because both the President and the Entrepreneur have made it clear that C-138’s DOGE doesn’t just see its brief as doing existing things better. It’s also going to question which things should be done at all.

As he was disrupting multiple industries the Entrepreneur developed a long mantra, one that he repeated often enough that executives at his companies eventually mouthed it along with him as he recited it at yet another meeting. He called it the Algorithm, and it was largely about taking stuff out. Its headlines included Question Every Requirement, Delete any Part or Process You Can, and Simplify and Optimize. The Algorithm is going to make people unhappy — and make some of them unemployed — as it’s applied throughout government.

What DOGE Won’t Do

Federal employees in C-138 don’t love DOGE, but the rest of the country does. The new department is extremely popular on both sides of the political aisle in our neighbor universe’s America. Why? Because people are seeing case after case of government working better, and losing the senses of dread and learned helplessness they used to feel as they approached a federal website or office. There’s a growing sense even on the left, first voiced by brave souls like C-138’s Pahlka, that the country needed people like the President and the Entrepreneur to make this change happen. The near-immobile object that is governmental bureaucracy needed to be confronted by their irresistable force.

Recently, the Entrepreneur sat down for an interview with DOGETV’s best reporter. The consensus in C-138 is that it went so well for him that he’s now the frontrunner to succeed the President (who can’t run again, and realizes that). Here are my favorite excerpts:

Q: What’s the goal of DOGE?

A: Simple. We want the American government to work as well for the American people as Amazon, Uber, Netflix, and Doordash do.

Q: What about uncovering waste, fraud, and corruption? Isn’t that also a goal of DOGE.

A: We definitely want to fight those things, but we don’t really have to “uncover” them. The government has been tracking and reporting on improper payments for years now. In 2023, for example, there were about $250 billion of them. This is a big number and we’re going after it, but eliminating all improper payments is not going to come anywhere close to eliminating the budget deficit, which is about $1.8 trillion. Improper payments are greatly concentrated in Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, supplemental security income, and the earned income tax credit, so we know where to look first to clean house.

One place I don't think we need to go looking is USAID, which has a budget of a bit over $20B, and one that’s scrutinized to the point of immobilizing the organization. Of course USAID spends money on some dumb stuff, but most of its budget goes to things like anticipating famines, clearing landmines, and and providing AIDS medication and fighting childhood diseases in some of the poorest countries in the world. USAID is a great demonstration of America's soft power, for the low low cost of about 0.3% of federal spending. I wouldn't dream of eliminating it.

Q: Can you trim federal payrolls enough to make a meaningful dent in the federal deficit?

A: No. Again, let’s spend just a few seconds on the numbers. The total civilian workforce payroll is about $270 billion a year — same magnitude as yearly improper payments, so same opportunity to make a dent in the deficit. And about 60% of those people work for the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. Are those three places where we really want to slash headcount?

One other important point: if we fire too many people too soon, we will actually make things worse. Take the FDA as an example. A lot of what it does desperately needs to be streamlined. But if we do huge layoffs now, we'll be getting rid of the only people who know how to get things done in the current environment, so it’ll take longer to do important things like get helpful new drugs approved.

Think about a huge store with lousy customer service. If you lay off half of the people who work in the store, is the service going to improve? Absolutely not. The goal of DOGE is to improve services throughout the federal government. I'm confident we can get that done with fewer people and less spending than is currently the case, but mass layoffs are not the goal. Any idiot can fire people. We’re trying to do something harder, and more important.

Q: Do you like firing people?

A: In rare cases, yes. I've watched congressional testimony from bureaucrats who plainly state that their job is not to take care of any constituency or customer. It's to satisfy requirements. That mindset gives us systems that only “work” in meaningless senses of the word. I want to get that mindset out of government, which probably means getting some people out of government. Beyond that, of course I don't like firing people. What kind of sicko does? I'm pretty sure that most federal employees actually want to build things that help out their fellow Americans, but they're thwarted by an environment that is configured to turn out systems that only work in meaningless senses of the word. With DOGE, I want to change that environment and give people a chance to actually do their job.

I have to admit, the more I watch DOGETV the more jealous I get of the folks living in C-138.

1. “Bureaucracy” itself is a pretty benign term. It just means, as Britannica puts it, a “specific form of organization defined by complexity, division of labour, permanence, professional management, hierarchical coordination and control, strict chain of command, and legal authority.”

2. Pahlka describes how the VA was so dysfunctional that many there considered it bad news when the website for signing up for benefits was fixed, because the fix led to a rush of new applications that threatened to overwhelm other parts of the organization.

3. As at Reddit, these votes are weighted by users’ karma — a score that reflects their overall contributions to the site.