As former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Jen Pahlka helped to create the U.S. Digital Service (USDS). Today, the USDS houses Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), hell-bent on quick, disruptive change. Pahlka shares why the motivation behind Musk’s disruption of the status quo isn’t necessarily wrong, arguing that we must clear the “sludge” out of government processes to finally create the conditions for substantive change.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
When we last spoke, it was 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. Now, the U.S. Digital Service has been renamed the U.S. DOGE Service, housing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. When and how did you first learn that USDS was going to change into something else?
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.
Do you take it personally? I mean, it was a lot of work that you put into creating the U.S. Digital Service.
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: 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 is just associated with things like stopping payments to USAID, which is really not at all what USDS is about.
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.
They sure do. USDS has been able to do some great stuff. You know, 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 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?
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, “the layers of process and procedure that encrust so much of government operations.” It’s strong words.
Yes, I think what I said about motivations was 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.
In the article, you called your goal “de-proceduralization.” That’s a long word. Can you explain what you mean by that?
To define de-proceduralization a little bit . . . I mean, during the pandemic, you know, 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.
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.
Right. And I think one of the things that Elon seems to be recognizing in real time is 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.
