Bringing Elon to a knife fight: Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand the nature of government reform (Jennifer Pahlka, Dec 13, 2024, eating Policy)
I am guessing that those most worried that DOGE will succeed have never tried their hand at reforming government. It’s hard. But easier, you say, with no respect for the law, and the DOGE team will be unencumbered by such details. But that’s not true. The lawsuits will come. A lot of the government tech community is skipping the hand wringing; they’ve basically just grabbed a bag of popcorn and are watching in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolutely hated for their entire time in public service. They don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void. I am struck by how different the tone of the DOGE conversation is between political leaders on the left and the people who’ve been fighting in the implementation trenches. One group is terrified they’ll succeed. The other is starting to ask a surprising question (or at least I am): What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?
Take the issue of respect for the law. Put aside the headline grabbing issues for a second and live in the mundane world of implementation in government. If you’ve spent the past ten years trying to make, say, better online services for veterans, or clearer ways to understand your Medicare benefits, or even better ways to support warfighters, you’ve sat in countless -– and I mean countless — meetings where you’ve been told that something you were trying to do was illegal. Was it? Now, instead of launching your new web form or doing the user research your team needed to do, you spend weeks researching why you are now branded as dangerously lawless, only to find that either a) it was absolutely not illegal but 25 years ago someone wrote a memo that has since been interpreted as advising against this thing, b) no one had heard of the thing you were trying to do (the cloud, user research, A/B testing) and didn’t understand what you were talking about so had simply asserted it was illegal out of fear, c) there was an actual provision in law somewhere that did seem to address this and interpreting it required understanding both the actual intent of the law and the operational mechanics of the thing you were trying to do, which actually matched up pretty well or d) (and this one is uncommon) that the basic, common sense thing you were trying to do was actually illegal, which was clearly the result of a misunderstanding by policymakers or the people who draft legislation and policy on their behalf, and if they understood how their words had been operationalized, they’d be horrified. It is absolutely possible to both respect the rule of law, considering the democratic process and the peaceful transfer of power sacred, and have developed an aversion to the fetishization of law that perverts its intent. The majority of public servants I know have well earned this right.
DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo and yes, the people in my community are watching. While our eyes are on potential abuses, they are also on the durability of the wall generally, and with deeply mixed emotions. It must be said: the wall is a problem. It is a problem for people who value the rule of law. It is a problem for people who care about an effective, responsive government.
