First, let's get one thing straight: I want the government to be efficient, too.
I want the line to move faster at the Post Office. I want it to be easy (not just easier—easy!) to file my taxes. I want my tax dollars to build roads and schools and fix the damage from natural disasters.
Abraham Lincoln spoke of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. This is deceptively simple but incredibly profound: The government exists for the people. Those same people who mail packages and drive on roads and go to schools and check the weather to see if they need to bring an umbrella today.
I am a federal employee, and inefficiencies slow me down every day.
Often, this looks like bloated processes. For example, before my team can build a simple app, we need to produce hundreds of pages of documentation (which may never be read) about the why, how, and where. We're incentivized to do this--we get rewarded and promoted for adhering precisely to these complex procedures, no matter the outcome. If we bypass any of the hundreds of achingly slow, overly burdensome steps, we risk our careers.
Almost every fed resents this way of working, and many actively fight against it every day. But more often than not, it's set in stone, written in regulations we don't have the power to change. If the process makes it impossible for the government to actually deliver useful software and services to the people of the United States, then so be it. The people will suffer.
This is a failure of bureaucracy, a government for the process, not for the people.
When DOGE arrived, I was hopeful. They said they wanted to fix all the same broken things we want to fix!
[DOGE will] improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, [DOGE will work] to promote interoperability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.
But DOGE hasn't gone after the processes that slow me down, and they haven't gone after the institutions and incentives that force federal workers to stick to these processes no matter the outcomes.
Instead, as far as I can tell, they've done the opposite.
The federal government fails when it values bureaucratic process at the expense of the American people. DOGE, in an attempt to avoid past failures, has instead become a slightly different version of the same issue—prioritizing bureaucratic disruption over the needs of the American people. They seem to believe that the more workers they fire, the more agencies they shutter, the more programs they defund, the better—never mind if Americans depend on these programs, or their safety is protected by those agencies, or if their local economies are powered by these workforces.
If that disruption makes it impossible for the government to actually deliver useful software and services to the people of the United States, then so be it. The people will suffer. Sound familiar? In the end, we are left with almost the same broken priorities and exactly the same broken outcomes as this administration was elected to fix.