There are a couple stories today that require understanding something about DOGE’s predecessor institution. So here goes.
Before Trump II there was something called the U.S. Digital Service. It grew out of the Obamacare exchange launch fiasco in 2014 and was a kind of elite in-house executive branch tech consultancy aimed at bringing the most state-of-the-art and user-friendly front-facing services to the American public — stuff like the national Obamacare exchange website. USDS was a little like a similarly sounding entity called Technology Transformation Services (TTS) which is housed within the GSA. (USDS was housed within the Executive Office of the President.) Those differences don’t need to concern us here. When Trump and Musk created “DOGE” they needed a shell to stick it into — because doing anything else would have required some work — and that shell turned out to be USDS, rechristened U.S. DOGE Service. (Get it? It’s still USDS. RIP USDS). Amy Gleason is from pre-DOGE USDS. It seems like she was part of USDS under Trump one (and I think Obama) and early Biden. She returned sometime late last year. Who knows how she got put forward for this job. When reporters tracked her down this afternoon she was on vacation in Mexico and apparently didn’t know she’d been announced. On its face and compared to other Trump hires she seems reasonably well qualified, which tells me her tenure won’t last long. There’s also this story about 21 DOGE operatives resigning en masse. That’s real and deeply honorable. But these aren’t one-time Musk flunkies who had second thoughts about being evil. They’re USDS people who had their workplace transformed into “DOGE.” So they’re actually pre-DOGE USDS people who probably had no taste for being evil in the first place and they bailed.
No big takeaway from this little primer. But as I said, you need to know a bit of this backstory to know what’s actually going on with a few of these stories.
