R.I.P. US Digital Service: This is the *true* history of Elon Musk's DOGE

If you ever tried to use a US Government website prior to the Obama years, you were probably desperately frustrated. The website sucked, and it either failed with .aspx errors or it said Best if viewed with Internet Explorer 3.0.

Enter the United States Digital Service, a heroic department of some ~60 modern software engineers, launched by President Barack Obama in 2014 to bring the US Government web presence into the 21st century, making its services far more accessible and useful to us all. SSA.gov and VA.gov are two examples of websites that used to be unusable, but are now modern, responsive, fully functional, and reworked by proper UI/UX professionals.

Find out what the USDS did from their About page on their website, prior to the Trump/Musk takeover.

Most people who had ever heard of the US Digital Service probably know about it because of Matt Cutts, a celebrity of the early Internet and a Google employee, who put out videos trying to help webmasters improve their sites’ performance and to help ordinary users avoid web spam. In 2017, he announced to his enormous audience that he had decided to take a sabbatical from Google in order to serve a 3-month rotation at the USDS, purely for the opportunity to help more people. 3 months became 6 months. 6 months became a year... He was then named its second Administrator, a position he held until 2021.

The USDS soldiered on, applying modern web technologies to primitive government websites and making things better for people. Then, in 2025, they all watched bemused — as did the rest of us — as Trump appointed Elon Musk as head of a pretend new government agency named after the DOGE cryptocurrency.

But then shit got real. Trump renamed the US Digital Service to DOGE (nominally the Department Of Government Efficiency, but actually the name of a cryptocurrency that was satirical and speculative), and he appointed the racist populist Elon Musk as its new administrator, replacing Cutts’ dedicated successor Mina Hsiang. Musk added his own team of populist henchmen to DOGE. Suddenly we had this formerly dedicated team of proud and talented civil servants being tasked with an assignment completely antithetical to their founding: Fire as many civil servants as possible, without regard to anything else.

Under this absurd new order, and faced with this equally absurd new cohort of “colleagues,” 21 USDS servants resigned as what Trump/Musk had required of them was completely antithetical to why they were there. They stated they had sworn an oath to the Constitution to serve the American people but that "it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments at the United States DOGE Service."

That was abundantly clear on its face; so naturally Trump’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with: "Don't let the door kick you on the way out."

The United States is now losing critical expertise in all areas, all in pursuit of “slashing 75% of the federal payroll.” The federal payroll represents only some 4% of the total budget. So, in effect, what Trump and Musk are trying to do is to gut 75% of the government’s ability to do its myriad jobs, in exchange for a potential 3% savings in cost.

We are reminded, once again, what populism really is: stupidity on steroids.