Excellent framing and I hope more members of the public come to learn of and admire the commitment of the many Jed’s in govtech. That said, for any of the new special gov employees to learn from Jed, they’d need to WANT to learn from him. In other words, they’d need to share his goal of more effective government and…I seriously doubt they do. Their actions, the nature of their shock and awe engagement with the current staff, and the reports of who they seem to have been in private life all suggest that they are simply don’t care if they break things OR perhaps are there explicitly to break things. Dan Hon had an great thread on BlueSky that maintained it is actually the motivations of decision makers that determine the outcomes of such efforts - is there ANY indication that the folks currently involved have a goal of improving gov outcomes?
A very slightly more charitable explanation is that they are trying to fight the last war, in a sense, by replicating Elon's drastic and sudden slim-down of Twitter. That only worked because Twitter, like other large tech companies at the time, really had become overstaffed due to talent hoarding. People across the industry understood this well before Elon came along; he was just the first to act on it.
The prejudiced assumption that the federal government must be similarly overstaffed is thus likely a big part of their thinking. It is extremely inaccurate, indeed the opposite of the truth, but it will take a lot of misery inflicted on millions of innocent bystanders before they realize it.
Yes, the key difference here is the severity of the consequences from misguided policies/actions and/or any mistakes. At Twitter things could reasonably disintegrate with no real practical harm. Missed or blocked payments on prior obligations but the Treasury - or technical issues stemming from carelessness - could undermine the nations’ credit. Setting aside the constitutional issue of ignoring congress, our entire monetary and banking system are put at risk. The precise opposite of state capacity - this could crater gov effectiveness for a generation or more.
I’m kind of surprised by the tone of the comments. The fact is that we don’t know what the motivations of these people are. Perhaps they want to make things better for the people of this country and the programs that they and their relatives depend on. I guess you could argue that their motives must be bad because they were hired indirectly, most likely, by people who …have questionable motives? I would have volunteered had I the skills and as a retired fed, will be sending suggestions to DOGE for improvement.
This post is an indictment not a heartwarming story. For decades no one cared about the plumbing, now there's intense scrutiny on it. While we should celebrate the Jeds across gov for doing more with less, the actual lesson is that a systems like Jeds never should have had to happen in the first place.
Now we have an opportunity to replace them with modern design standards, and many commenters seem convinced that Jeds systems are actually sacrosanct. It's the furthest thing from the truth. These systems are defined by their edge cases, rather than the overall execution of their core purpose. It would not be hard to improve on the vast majority of them.
Thanks for this great perspective. I admire the dedication, but I also hope that we can move away from against-the-odds dedication and towards ways of working that actually… work fundamentally, not just through extraordinary duct tape. Maybe a few things need to break in order to foster that process. Having said that, I have little confidence that Doge will have a positive impact, but I am open to being shown I’m wrong.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Elon Musk's strategy for building companies to create an environment which demands, "against-the-odds dedication"?
Or, to put it another way, it's possible to find examples of organizations that have, "ways of working that actually… work" but I suspect that's the exception rather than the rule.
Agreed. The dedication is remarkable and heroic, but only because he's paddling upstream with a system pumping water against him. Elon Musk's breaking things is not going to help but we have to find a way for things to work better. Only problem is that people want it for free - they don't understand the investment that needs to take place.
Thanks for this. Part of my career in the biopharma industry dealt with electronic submissions of regulatory documents and drug safety. A lot of this focused on improving the IT capabilities of the Food and Drug Administration and implementation of industry-paid user fees helped modernize things at the agency. Later we established a pilot program to look for safety signals in large observational databases using open source tools as well as developing new ones. The FDA colleagues we worked with were all engaged in this effort but the key problem is that healthcare databases in the US focus on claims data for reimbursement whereas countries with single payer systems have core medical records. It's far easier to do the kind of work we were interested in the latter systems. Of course this is a result of policiy decisions about how countries provide for healthcare.
Recoding America has become my bedtime story (paperback arrived in the mail last week). Thank you for writing this. Once DOGE is done rampaging through the government systems and culture (and what they are doing is fundamentally aimed at breaking the culture, IMHO (am also reading Musk's bio right now)), I hope every one of the people who comes in afterwards to do the cleanup and rebuilding has read your book.
A friend sent me a link to this post and I read it and was instantly reminded of a book that some coworkers and I read: Recoding America, a relatively short book that is full of stories like this together with the context of how and why things came to be this way and the magnitude of the challenge of fixing them. It hit a little too close to home for all of us. I came to the comments to recommend it and stopped mid-draft to look up the author - who is of course Jennifer Palka.
I don’t know Jed so I can’t speak to this particular case. But in my experience as a software engineer, usually the people who are completely indispensable for the operation of some ancient system, this not necessarily a positive sign about their ability. When you’re maintaining a system it’s part of your job to keep it operational and maintainable by people who aren’t you.
Sometimes people don’t have the skill to make a system easily maintainable. Sometimes they are reluctant to document it because they want to maintain their job security or because they are just shy or inexperienced. So it’s hard to say why.
Often the best way to proceed is to force them off the project. But again hard to say in this case.
Of course. Jed, by his own account, was happy to be forced off the project. He wanted to retire. Others hold on too tightly, for sure. But it's not his fault that there was no system to replace his for so many years.
Back in the mid-1990s I had a gig updating technical documentation for NY State HESC (Higher Education Services Corporation). That's the organization that handled student loans for NY State. The machine was an old Honeywell mainframe and the code was, of course, COBOL. They had to bring in programmers from India to work on it.
That was the first time I came face-to-face with the dreaded spaghetti code. I was documenting some module and had to trace my way through a string containing, let's say, a half dozen GOTO statements. The last one pointed to a block of code that had been commented out. Whoops!
I wonder of any of the DOGE kids have even seen COBOL.
Thank you for writing this. I also just bought your book to get a better understanding of the complexities of government technology systems and the difficulty of improving them. Your empathy and that of others is inspiring, and stands in such stark contrast to the meanness of President Trump, VP Vance, Musk, and the whole array of cabinet members and Republican "leaders". But empathy is also PRACTICAL as you show here and in your book. That's what we don't see here, which convinces me that this is not reform but an outright steal by thugs.
Just fascinating how archaic most government IT systems have become. GAO has wonderful reports detailing how bad it is and how few of their recommendations have been accepted over the last few decades. Of course, we spend $100B a year according to GAO to maintain these legacy systems . Good thing the Chinese aren’t positioned to take down our networks….oh wait, they are.
I'd like to believe that the college kids that Elon Musk has empowered to vandalize the federal government are capable of the kind of introspection that Jen describes here.
Unfortunately, the early evidence is that they are MAGA'd up, overgrown teens who are hopped up on overconfidence and subsisting on a diet of Nazi memes and potentially a dose of the boss' ketamine.
Because what about any of the events of the past few weeks make you feel that these 20-something acolytes of a narcissist billionaire care about keeping these systems running? That they care about helping people? That they care about making government more efficient? That they're in the market for wise old public service mentors?
Excellent framing and I hope more members of the public come to learn of and admire the commitment of the many Jed’s in govtech. That said, for any of the new special gov employees to learn from Jed, they’d need to WANT to learn from him. In other words, they’d need to share his goal of more effective government and…I seriously doubt they do. Their actions, the nature of their shock and awe engagement with the current staff, and the reports of who they seem to have been in private life all suggest that they are simply don’t care if they break things OR perhaps are there explicitly to break things. Dan Hon had an great thread on BlueSky that maintained it is actually the motivations of decision makers that determine the outcomes of such efforts - is there ANY indication that the folks currently involved have a goal of improving gov outcomes?
A very slightly more charitable explanation is that they are trying to fight the last war, in a sense, by replicating Elon's drastic and sudden slim-down of Twitter. That only worked because Twitter, like other large tech companies at the time, really had become overstaffed due to talent hoarding. People across the industry understood this well before Elon came along; he was just the first to act on it.
The prejudiced assumption that the federal government must be similarly overstaffed is thus likely a big part of their thinking. It is extremely inaccurate, indeed the opposite of the truth, but it will take a lot of misery inflicted on millions of innocent bystanders before they realize it.
Yes, the key difference here is the severity of the consequences from misguided policies/actions and/or any mistakes. At Twitter things could reasonably disintegrate with no real practical harm. Missed or blocked payments on prior obligations but the Treasury - or technical issues stemming from carelessness - could undermine the nations’ credit. Setting aside the constitutional issue of ignoring congress, our entire monetary and banking system are put at risk. The precise opposite of state capacity - this could crater gov effectiveness for a generation or more.
The problem with this framing is that Jed is only valuable because the system is valuable. Our current overlords want to burn everything down.
If you want to burn a building down, you don’t need to stop and appreciate the architects.
I’m kind of surprised by the tone of the comments. The fact is that we don’t know what the motivations of these people are. Perhaps they want to make things better for the people of this country and the programs that they and their relatives depend on. I guess you could argue that their motives must be bad because they were hired indirectly, most likely, by people who …have questionable motives? I would have volunteered had I the skills and as a retired fed, will be sending suggestions to DOGE for improvement.
When they start with foreign aid and call USAID a criminal organization (Elon), it doesn’t inspire confidence.
They are locking federal employees out of their offices.
This post is an indictment not a heartwarming story. For decades no one cared about the plumbing, now there's intense scrutiny on it. While we should celebrate the Jeds across gov for doing more with less, the actual lesson is that a systems like Jeds never should have had to happen in the first place.
Now we have an opportunity to replace them with modern design standards, and many commenters seem convinced that Jeds systems are actually sacrosanct. It's the furthest thing from the truth. These systems are defined by their edge cases, rather than the overall execution of their core purpose. It would not be hard to improve on the vast majority of them.
Thanks for this great perspective. I admire the dedication, but I also hope that we can move away from against-the-odds dedication and towards ways of working that actually… work fundamentally, not just through extraordinary duct tape. Maybe a few things need to break in order to foster that process. Having said that, I have little confidence that Doge will have a positive impact, but I am open to being shown I’m wrong.
Completely agree we need to "move away from against-the-odds dedication and towards ways of working that actually"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Elon Musk's strategy for building companies to create an environment which demands, "against-the-odds dedication"?
Or, to put it another way, it's possible to find examples of organizations that have, "ways of working that actually… work" but I suspect that's the exception rather than the rule.
Agreed. The dedication is remarkable and heroic, but only because he's paddling upstream with a system pumping water against him. Elon Musk's breaking things is not going to help but we have to find a way for things to work better. Only problem is that people want it for free - they don't understand the investment that needs to take place.
Thanks for this. Part of my career in the biopharma industry dealt with electronic submissions of regulatory documents and drug safety. A lot of this focused on improving the IT capabilities of the Food and Drug Administration and implementation of industry-paid user fees helped modernize things at the agency. Later we established a pilot program to look for safety signals in large observational databases using open source tools as well as developing new ones. The FDA colleagues we worked with were all engaged in this effort but the key problem is that healthcare databases in the US focus on claims data for reimbursement whereas countries with single payer systems have core medical records. It's far easier to do the kind of work we were interested in the latter systems. Of course this is a result of policiy decisions about how countries provide for healthcare.
We can hope the crew approaches this mountain with respect but there’s little evidence to support it.
What an inspiring and terrifying story.
Recoding America has become my bedtime story (paperback arrived in the mail last week). Thank you for writing this. Once DOGE is done rampaging through the government systems and culture (and what they are doing is fundamentally aimed at breaking the culture, IMHO (am also reading Musk's bio right now)), I hope every one of the people who comes in afterwards to do the cleanup and rebuilding has read your book.
Yes! I am telling everyone I know to read this book.
Thank you! I hope so too. :)
A friend sent me a link to this post and I read it and was instantly reminded of a book that some coworkers and I read: Recoding America, a relatively short book that is full of stories like this together with the context of how and why things came to be this way and the magnitude of the challenge of fixing them. It hit a little too close to home for all of us. I came to the comments to recommend it and stopped mid-draft to look up the author - who is of course Jennifer Palka.
I don’t know Jed so I can’t speak to this particular case. But in my experience as a software engineer, usually the people who are completely indispensable for the operation of some ancient system, this not necessarily a positive sign about their ability. When you’re maintaining a system it’s part of your job to keep it operational and maintainable by people who aren’t you.
Sometimes people don’t have the skill to make a system easily maintainable. Sometimes they are reluctant to document it because they want to maintain their job security or because they are just shy or inexperienced. So it’s hard to say why.
Often the best way to proceed is to force them off the project. But again hard to say in this case.
Of course. Jed, by his own account, was happy to be forced off the project. He wanted to retire. Others hold on too tightly, for sure. But it's not his fault that there was no system to replace his for so many years.
Back in the mid-1990s I had a gig updating technical documentation for NY State HESC (Higher Education Services Corporation). That's the organization that handled student loans for NY State. The machine was an old Honeywell mainframe and the code was, of course, COBOL. They had to bring in programmers from India to work on it.
That was the first time I came face-to-face with the dreaded spaghetti code. I was documenting some module and had to trace my way through a string containing, let's say, a half dozen GOTO statements. The last one pointed to a block of code that had been commented out. Whoops!
I wonder of any of the DOGE kids have even seen COBOL.
Thank you for writing this. I also just bought your book to get a better understanding of the complexities of government technology systems and the difficulty of improving them. Your empathy and that of others is inspiring, and stands in such stark contrast to the meanness of President Trump, VP Vance, Musk, and the whole array of cabinet members and Republican "leaders". But empathy is also PRACTICAL as you show here and in your book. That's what we don't see here, which convinces me that this is not reform but an outright steal by thugs.
Just fascinating how archaic most government IT systems have become. GAO has wonderful reports detailing how bad it is and how few of their recommendations have been accepted over the last few decades. Of course, we spend $100B a year according to GAO to maintain these legacy systems . Good thing the Chinese aren’t positioned to take down our networks….oh wait, they are.
I share your hope. But Trump, Elon, and all their boys have nothing but contempt for civil servants. Only time will tell how all of this washes out.
I'd like to believe that the college kids that Elon Musk has empowered to vandalize the federal government are capable of the kind of introspection that Jen describes here.
Unfortunately, the early evidence is that they are MAGA'd up, overgrown teens who are hopped up on overconfidence and subsisting on a diet of Nazi memes and potentially a dose of the boss' ketamine.
This is a nice, irrelevant story.
Because what about any of the events of the past few weeks make you feel that these 20-something acolytes of a narcissist billionaire care about keeping these systems running? That they care about helping people? That they care about making government more efficient? That they're in the market for wise old public service mentors?
I am not saying they care.