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The DOGE Might Succeed
Tools that work, work in anyone’s hands.
The two things that have transfixed the DC laptop class this week are Elon Musk hacking away at the career civil service with a dull axe, and Elon Musk hacking away at infrastructure like the BFS payments system with tools such as a 19-year-old high school graduate who calls himself Big Balls. These are not separate projects. Viewed as a complex system, this is a two-front push for the same goal. Most observers don’t understand, and as a result, they don’t realize that it very well might work.
The first front is the humans in the civil service. The government has always treated its own employees with a certain amount of contempt, but the second Trump administration’s explicit, public assault on the civil service has taken it to a new level. And we’re seeing all the same takes make the rounds, which mostly misunderstand what the civil service is.
The Purpose Of The Civil Service
For instance: the civic-tech/public-interest-technology mythology has always included the belief that US career employees are heroes. Overworked and underpaid, they are always ready to sacrifice to make things just a tiny bit better for the American people. This belief has always been more strategic than reality-based. No outsider effort can make progress without lots of contact with the…
