Hopefully Elon gets to the Harlem Shake or Gangam style soon.
I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind.
Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed.
that's at least 500k in salaries even for the lowball public sector, and there are at least 230 federal agencies, which you can be damn sure are gonna interpret this as broadly as possible, i.e. including the subagencies that's 400+ under 5 USC § 551 (see https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies)
nothing like kicking off your "efficiency" drive with a $200m+ expense
Here's a good starting point: "Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight": https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/bringing-elon-to-a-knife-figh...
The basic goal of making government work well is (or should be) bipartisan. The nuts and bolts of how you do that are really hard to get right.
also the whole "kitchen sink" image was probably a crude attempt at reinforcement
Musk, who has revolutionized two massive industries, is “serious.” The outgoing administration was cosplaying seriousness. America didn’t want to reelect Trump. They did it because the “grownups in the room” were a tire fire that managed to do almost everything wrong, from immigration to foreign policy.
It’s also possible DS had a critical mass of SV people that wasn’t beholden to existing bureaucracies. The structure of the DOGE teams embedded in each agency makes me think that someone thought through this quite carefully: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-inauguration-presiden...
The comments about Starmer are shocking. So was the “Resistance.”