Musk’s DOGE agency and the real need to declutter government

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JEN PAHLKA: I think we’ve been too protective of the status quo, and I think the result of that, that we see at this moment is, a complete disruption of the status quo, in a way that is not how I would have done it. If we learn the right lesson from what just happened with the election and what is happening now, we can have a far more responsible transformation that doesn’t have to be as disruptive.

One of the things that Elon seems to be learning is he’s actually recognizing in real time that the people that he said such horrible things about before he got into government, are the people who most want those regulations changed. So many public servants just want to do their jobs, they just want to serve the public, and they know that they’re really constrained by these huge volumes of procedure, regulation, policy, and law.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Jen Pahlka, who served in the Obama White House as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and helped create the U.S. Digital Service to upgrade the government’s tech capabilities and accelerate transformation. Now, the USDS houses Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), hell-bent on quick, disruptive change. Jen is adamant about the need to clear the sludge out of government processes, and she takes issue with fellow democrats who don’t attack the problem with urgency. But that doesn’t mean she agrees with how Trump and Musk are going about it either. If you feel somewhat confused by all of the news about Musk-led changes, Jen puts it into context and points us towards where it’s most important to look next. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Jennifer Pahlka, former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and author of Recoding America, Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age. Jen, thanks for coming back on Rapid Response.

PAHLKA: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It’s been a minute.

Copy LinkThe transformation of the USDS into DOGE

SAFIAN: You were last on the show in the early days of the pandemic to talk about a new nonprofit that paired volunteer tech pros with struggling government agencies. It was called U.S. Digital Response, modeled in part on the U.S. Digital Service, which you helped set up inside the White House to upgrade digital capacity within the U.S. government. Now, some of those listening may recall that the U.S. Digital Service has been renamed the U.S. DOGE Service now housing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. So your baby has become Musk’s baby. I have so many questions about this turn of events and this moment. When and how did you first learn that USDS was going to change into something else?

PAHLKA: I found out the way everyone else did, which was the night of inauguration, right? Those EOs started hitting, and the fact that it had actually been renamed the U.S. DOGE Service. It shouldn’t have been a shock.

Like, we should have known that was gonna happen, but I was a little taken aback. That night was crazy, right? It was just EO, after EO, after EO, and by the time I got to that one, I was sitting in bed, it was like 9:30, and I was like, “I’m just gonna close the laptop and go to bed. I’m too tired.”

SAFIAN: Do you take it personally? I mean, it was a lot of work that you put into creating the U.S. Digital Service.

PAHLKA: I mean, you can’t take anything personally. I mean, it’s something of an honor that someone with a lot of power sees a thing that you had a hand in building and says, “This is the thing that I’m going to use for my agenda.” I think that they were very smart about it for a number of reasons: One, there is great tech talent in the U.S. Digital Service — now the U.S. DOGE Service. It has the hiring authorities that they needed. They could bring Elon and his special government employees, and he didn’t have to divest from all his investments. But it hasn’t been necessarily a pleasant experience for folks in USDS — who on the one hand have really been waiting for somebody to give them more oomph and speed up the transformation that they’ve been trying to make for a long time. These new folks come in, and they’ve had very brief conversations with the team and then sort of let them go back to their work so far. We’ll see how it goes. And it just means that the USDS — where the D stands for something different now — is just associated with things like stopping payments to USAID, which is really not at all what USDS is about.

Copy LinkNavigating boundaries in government regulation

SAFIAN: When we first talked about USDS, as I recall, there were a lot of rules about what the administration could and couldn’t do. And you took a lot of care in trying to navigate that. In hindsight, were folks too beholden to those rules? Like that they were rules and not laws? I mean, the Trump administration certainly acts as if it’s unencumbered.

PAHLKA: They sure do. USDS has been able to do some great stuff. They were part of the Direct File launch last year, which was hugely successful. They did online passport renewals recently. I think that whatever you’re doing, whether it’s setting up something like USDS or trying to get Direct File working for low income Americans, there are a lot of rules.

The right way to do it is to come in with a very bold, ambitious, curious agenda and say like, “But if this is the right thing to do for the American public, right? And these rules seem to be stopping us. Let’s ask, ‘is this really a law? Is it a policy? Is it a regulation? Is it a memo?’” And figure out how you might change it legally, so that you can serve the public better. And that’s hard. It’s really hard because people will just say it’s illegal. And you have to distinguish, is it something that… So this manager over here could change just because it’s just a memo that his predecessor wrote, and it can be rewritten? Or do we have to do notice and comment rulemaking and actually go through the regulatory process and change it? Or do we have to go back to Congress, right? And that’s the work. That’s the work that needs to happen. And it needed to be happening at a far faster pace than it had. People will say, “Well, now it’s happening at a faster pace.” Yes, if you don’t count the fact that sometimes they’re just ignoring the law entirely, right?

SAFIAN: You recently wrote an opinion column for the New York Times about how you align with some of the motivations that Musk and Trump express for more efficient government. You talked about, I’m quoting here, “There’s layers of process and procedure that encrust so much of government operations.” It’s strong words.

PAHLKA: Yes, I think what I said though about motivations were that their motivations seem to be very different from mine. Stopping payments that Congress authorized or firing as much of the workforce as you can indiscriminately seems to be driven by maybe a different motivation. What I think we have in common is the tactics of bringing in talent, having a little less patience with the status quo. I think we should have had less patience with the status quo for the past, say, 20 years. And maybe we would have been able to avoid this irresponsible kind of transformation that seems to be going on right now.

Copy LinkBreaking down de-proceduralization

SAFIAN: In the article, you called your goal ‘de-proceduralization.’ That’s a long word. Can you explain what you mean by that?

PAHLKA: I am calling for a lot of things. So, I had a paper that came out in December, we said, look, this is way beyond tech, right? We need government that can do what it says it’s going to do. And if you want to be better, you can do four things: You need to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones, and that’s very hard to do in federal government today. You need to reduce procedural bloat, you need to invest in digital and data infrastructure, and you need to close the loop between policy and implementation. So I say that because de-proceduralization is part of a larger effort. It’s in service, not of a government that doesn’t hold anybody accountable, but in service of a government that actually can hold people accountable. But also deliver services and protect us from our adversaries and all of the things that we count on government to do.

To define de-proceduralization a little bit… I mean, during the pandemic last time I saw you, we had this crisis in unemployment insurance. All of the state’s labor commissioners got called up in front of their legislatures and yelled at for the backlogs that they’d accumulated. One of them was very smart: Rob Asaro-Angelo. He’s the commissioner of labor for the state of New Jersey. When he gets called up, he brings boxes and boxes of paper and puts them on the table as he’s being yelled at. And they are labeled — 7,119 pages of active regulations that govern UI in the state of New Jersey. And he just keeps pointing at the pages and saying, “You want a system that can operate at very low levels during times of high employment, and then scale apparently now to 10, even in some cases 15 times the number of claims on a dime… You have to have a simpler system for it to be able to scale.”

And who created all of those regulations that have made this system so fragile, so complex, and so non-scalable and non-resilient? Well, the state legislature, the federal department of labor, courts… The labor commissioner himself can’t do anything about that. But it does make it very hard to keep trust and faith with the American public when you can’t deliver because you’re drowning in regulations which then drive great volumes of procedure and process that mean you can’t act quickly and you can’t act in a way that people expect.

SAFIAN: We have a world that is moving really fast, and it seems like government just doesn’t have the capacity to move at that pace. And I guess what you’re saying is it’s not that the people within government don’t have that capacity necessarily. It’s that there’s so many rules and so many hoops to jump through that you just can’t move at that speed.

PAHLKA: Right. And I think one of the things that Elon seems to be learning, if you read his tweets, and I don’t read all his tweets, I can’t, there’s like too many of them. He’s actually recognizing in real time that the people that he said such horrible things about before he got into government are the people who most want those regulations changed. So many public servants just want to do their jobs, they just want to serve the public, and they know that they’re really constrained by these huge volumes of procedure, regulation, policy, and law.

Copy LinkThe complexity of passing and implementing laws

SAFIAN: Is it just like inertia? I mean, who wants all that to be there? Are there some folks who’re like, “No, we don’t want the government to be able to move too fast. Like that’s not the role of government. That’s what private industry does. It’s too risky?”

PAHLKA: Well, Democrats will blame Republicans, and Republicans will blame Democrats for this, right? And they’re both sort of right, but also the executive branch will blame the legislature, and legislature will blame the executive branch, right?

I think we all have a part in it. Why do you think you vote for one politician over another? Well, they tell you it’s because they’re going to pass some laws that are supposedly in tune with your values. Well, we don’t need more laws and policies. We need to implement the ones we have.

So my metaphor for this is like: When a politician asks for your vote, they’re basically saying “I’m going to plant these seeds, and these seeds are the bills I’m going to introduce. And if they get passed they’ll go into the soil, and they’ll grow into something that provides shade or fruit or flowers for the public, and that’s why you’ll reelect me.” But like, we all know those seeds are not growing. Most of the laws that get passed don’t really achieve their goals. I mean, in California, several hundred bills passed to increase housing in the past 10 years, and housing hasn’t budged. They’re not actually doing what they intend. And that’s because if you’ve ever gardened that planting seeds is like 0.01 percent of the work. That takes like 10 minutes. It’s tending the soil. Making sure it has the sun that it needs and the water, and very critically, weeding out last year’s plants. We don’t hold our elects accountable to that. They only add, they never subtract, and it’s not just them, right?

Then the courts, they come, and they create case law that requires this, that, and the other. The agencies are definitely very risk averse, they’re more incentivized to put safeguards in place than to move forward quickly because they get yelled at when something bad goes wrong. Some things are going to occasionally go wrong, but if we protect against them all the time, something worse goes wrong, and we’re not willing to make those trade-offs.

But ultimately, I think we have to think about this all differently. You shouldn’t be electing leaders on the basis of the laws they’re going to pass, but the outcomes they’re going to ensure we actually deliver. And that means a totally different way of governing. It means paying attention to the conditions under which those laws could have impact. And frankly, the health and well being of the civil service is that key condition.

Copy LinkThe role of state governments in transformation

SAFIAN: If we’re going to sort of muck out all of this congealed stuff that’s inside our system, do you need a little bit of a revolution or people like pushing beyond what the standard way of operating is? You’re a Democrat more than a Republican, but in some ways, there’s something a little bit Trump-like about wanting to sort of tear out all of that. I mean, maybe your definition of what the ‘swamp’ or the ‘deep state’ is, is different from his.

PAHLKA: I have been very impatient about the pace of change, but I have a different goal. I’m not only impatient, I’ve been quite frustrated actually. And it’s not just with Democrats. It’s really with the whole policy class who cares about words on paper, but isn’t caring enough about getting the actual outcomes those —

SAFIAN: About getting stuff done, getting stuff done. That’s not just something you can point to in your next campaign, but actually has an impact on the people you’re supposed to be serving.

PAHLKA: I think we’ve done a really bad job of that. I think we’ve been too protective of the status quo and I think the result of that that we see at this moment is a complete disruption of the status quo in a way that is not how I would have done it.

I think we’re at a moment now where states can really pick up the ball.

If we learn the right lesson from what just happened with the election and what is happening now, they can now go do that and show that we can have far more responsible transformation that doesn’t have to be as disruptive.

SAFIAN: But things aren’t any more evolved at the state and local level, like they need de-proceduralization just as much as the federal government does?

PAHLKA: This is a problem that crosses federal, state, and local government. But we have an enormous need to build new energy production, energy transmission, and decarbonize our entire energy infrastructure. We had a whole bunch of massive critical legislation that came down during the Biden administration, but the time to connect to the grid, for instance, has gone up in recent years, not down. The procedures to and the sort of noocracy, the vetocracy that we’ve created that keeps us from building that critical infrastructure, the states have a really big role to play in that. We desperately need them. We need to confront the law, the policy, the procedure that’s holding us back from getting that done.

SAFIAN: Jen is at heart a change agent. Even if she doesn’t quite agree with Trump and Musk, she’s adamant that the U.S. government needs to be modernized. So are there things that Musk is doing that she endorses? Could AI play a role in all this? And where does the business community fit in? We’ll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Jen Pahlka, former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, explained why and how we need to change U.S. government processes. Now she talks about the public response to Trump’s many executive orders, the role AI could play in fixing government, and what having more business executives in government could lead to. Let’s dive back in.

Like you, I am wary about a lot of the policy priorities that the Trump administration’s pushing out in these executive orders. And yet the philosophy of like, how do we move faster? It’s appealing because like you, I get frustrated that, why does it take so long sometimes for the government to do the things that it wants to do?

PAHLKA: Well, and it’s not just the stuff that people see, it’s also the challenges that our country faces. I don’t think people on a daily basis are going like, “How much clean energy production is connected to the grid,” right?

SAFIAN: Right.

PAHLKA: But we have to connect that to the grid. So it’s things people see, and it’s things people don’t see. But what they’re seeing right now is action, right? So there have been a whole bunch of polls that came out over the past couple of weeks that are showing relatively high approval ratings. Trump is approving at 50%, I believe. And what people say in focus groups is, “I don’t necessarily think that what he’s doing is wise, but at least he’s doing something, and he’s doing something that I can see.” Apparently that’s very refreshing for the public. This is a message for both parties. I think we’ve had equal introduction of sludge into government by Democrats and Republicans. And I think that means we have an equal opportunity with both parties to change their ways.

Copy LinkAI as a potential tool for governmental reform

SAFIAN: I’m curious how you look at AI’s impact on the way the U.S. government could operate. Are you uneasy about moving too quickly with AI, or do you feel like, oh, this could be like a shortcut to cut through some of this molasses that we have in the system?

PAHLKA: So I have one really great use of AI on this de-proceduralization. So you’re starting to see work out of places like Stanford’s RegLab where they can use LLMs to figure out why are there 7,119 pages and what of that could get reduced. All sorts of stuff that’s just like gunk in the system. But it’s been impossible to read 7,119 pages. But now you can get pretty quickly here’s the stuff that’s conflicting, this stuff is vestigial and like here’s some stuff that’s going to be really controversial but like you got to deal with it if you want to get this — and it’s an incredible tool for that. So we should be using LLMs for deregulation of government processes and de-proceduralization, for sure.

Copy LinkWhy government needs to move faster

SAFIAN: I alluded to this earlier, but there are folks who believe that the government shouldn’t change too fast, to protect the public. Do you agree with that?

PAHLKA: If the world is changing, government will need to change to keep up with it. I mean, it’s not like change for change’s sake. You need some degree of stability, but I think actually we have not had enough change right now. And I would say by a pretty big factor because the point of government is not to be steady or not. The point of government is to meet the challenges of the day. We have significant ones. We have a very unstable global order that we need to be able to meet. We have to deter our enemies. We have to make a transition to a low carbon economy, have incredible inequality. We have all of these challenges. And yes, it’s going to need to change if it’s going to meet those challenges. I don’t care about change for change’s sake. I care about the job that government is supposed to do.

Copy LinkThe influence of the private sector in government

SAFIAN: I’m curious, within your community of tech futurists and critics and optimists, what’s the feeling about the relationship with the business community and the Trump administration?

PAHLKA: I mostly think about sort of what they call ‘industry in government,’ which just means like the private sector contractors that work with government and the role that they need to play. But we certainly have a lot of business people in the, well, they also have like a lot of media stars in the new administration.

I’m very open to the notion that they’re going to bring a kind of expertise that policy people don’t bring, and I have high regard for policy people. But I don’t think we’re well served when we have agencies that are led exclusively by policy people when in fact a lot of what those agencies do is operational and they need operational expertise. But the role of business can mean a whole lot of things in this administration.

Copy LinkThe government disruption that Jen Pahlka is hoping for

SAFIAN: What are you looking out for from here?

PAHLKA: The thing I’m most looking for is for states and cities and counties to say, I see what’s happening at the federal level, I need to really kick in the transformation, really kick it into gear. And, they all have the seeds of that change, they just need to water them and give them the sun and maybe this is the time for like a little fertilizer that makes them grow faster than they have because I really think that we have just done too little to show the kind of wholescale transformation the public could believe in — in ways that respect the rule of law, that value the civil service.

I don’t believe that you are going to be able to do transformation without some disruption, right? You gotta crack some eggs to make an omelet. I don’t believe that you can, for instance, move to a new system in government without having some flaws, right? But I’m really looking for this moment to cause our leaders to be committed to models of change that are far more ambitious than what we’ve seen in the past but also fundamentally responsible and responsive to the American public.

SAFIAN: Yeah, because in so many ways, the American public is their customer, right? We are paying to get services, and we’re not getting what we expect, what we hope for.

PAHLKA: And we’re not getting the results of the laws and policies that have been passed. I mean, we passed the CHIPS Act, we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, we passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and we deserve to see the fruits of that incredibly difficult political process. We need to see them now in front of us soon. And that’s going to require some challenges to the status quo.

SAFIAN: Jen, thanks. Thanks so much for joining us and going through this.

PAHLKA: Thank you. It was great to see you, Bob.

SAFIAN: Jen is brave. She is willing to call out Republicans and Democrats, presidents and billionaires, in the service of better outcomes for everyone. There’s just not enough bravery among leaders these days — bravery to do the right thing, even if it’s uncomfortable for you personally. I get conflicted when I think about Elon Musk’s steamrolling through the U.S. government, because I want things to move faster and operate better. But I’m wary that his priorities aren’t focused on the broad public interest. What’s clear is that the status quo will not remain the same. There’s good in that, and bad in that, and that means we all have to keep our eyes open and exercise our own bravery in amplifying the greater good. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.