Georeactor Blog

After being in the civic tech world, it's bizarre to see USDS repurposed as DOGE, and 18F getting dismantled. Before I say my piece, shout-out to former USDS staffer Rebecca Williams for "How Congress Can Delete DOGE"

There's this Frankenstein's Monster narrative where USDS -> DOGE can be seen as an overpowered cross-govt agency gone separate from its creators, though it's also clearly something else (dismantling foreign aid or the weather service). My thought process as a city-level Code for America fellow in 2012 was that the tech that local governments needed didn't exist, or was too expensive, and could benefit from open source. But it was naive for me to think that government would be made high-tech and efficient without firing people. This got more clear as startup tech became more prevalent, or when you talk about federal government which of course can afford custom tech solutions.

I have no useful info about how the Healthcare.gov rescue team formed, but it also feels DOGE-y in retrospect. Obama went on The Daily Show and shrugged off a suggestion about having his campaign tech whizzes drop in and fix Healthcare.gov, when basically yes, that was close to the mark.

I've also been reflecting on Andrew Yang. As of August 2019, Musk supported his campaign. In September 2020, Yang got interviewed about the campaign experience and gov tech (I would start an hour in). He talks about politics being staged "values statements", and Ezra Klein suggests progressives abandoned "a theory of technology". There's also disappointment in how 18F and USDS have turned out (a little unclear for me how to read this as it was during Trump's first term). Yang wants to run a new tech agency, with a larger workforce. He also seemed unaware of 18F having an SF office.
I think this narrative of, our government is low-tech, or if a team already exists it must be failing, is more relevant to Musk deciding 18F must be too "far left", than the 2023 dinner party origin story given by the recent New York Times story.

Before I bring up Grimes here, I want to clarify here that we don't know what ideas Grimes introduces to Musk or vice versa, but they often are in similar circles and acquire specific political takes (at least, that's what it sounds like in the Grimes subreddit and the Lex Fridman appearances).
In summer 2021 Grimes wrote a comment about technocrats and communists getting along. By 2022, Grimes was talking about identifying as a technocrat. (21:00 "Martian technocracy" and 1:28:10 on gov/tech, video and transcript )
This is the kind of stuff that I think back to with this weird expression of, didn't someone say they were going to do this... but it's obviously not just Grimes, but a general tech reform movement from throughout the tech world? Which means it's important to say no, the current system is not bringing technology or efficiency into government. We had a system for that and it didn't involve throwing everyone's job into an LLM , but building some form of understanding for each puzzle piece so it didn't reinvent the same problems. When it came to bringing modern technologists in to oversee massive technical systems, I suppose there's an argument to be made that it let server/systems contractors feast on government funds, like a new class of defense contractors, and IDK maybe that's the case, but there was a real/true problem with those massive systems.