Insights from the inside: How former feds think we ought to reform the federal government

We surely haven’t suffered from a lack of ideas for fixing what ails the federal government. There was DOGE, with its campaign to take a chainsaw to federal employment but which in the end saved little money. The conservative Cato Institute’s analysis concluded that its impact on federal spending was negligible and, in fact, that anyone looking at the long-term trend in federal outlays wouldn’t be able to tell when DOGE started.

In a January deposition, former DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh was asked, “Did you reduce the federal deficit?” Cavanaugh replied “No, we didn’t.” Never was so much blood shed for such little result. The Office of Management and Budget is now back with a Presidential Management Agenda to take another crack at the problem — in one page.

But despite the problems with DOGE, there’s no doubt that the federal government needs serious fixing. Last December, seven former senior feds gathered to ask, given their decades of experience, what it would take to fix it.

“Or in other words, what would we have changed if we had the power entrusted to DOGE but defined efficiency in terms of effectively delivering value?” they asked.

They marked the first anniversary of the launch of DOGE on Jan. 20, 2026, with a remarkable 39-page report, written by April Harding, entitled “We the Doers.” Their goal was to write a game plan on “how to achieve real government reform in a post-DOGE world.”

Outsiders’ perspectives on reform are easy to come by, from the right, left and center, in which I happily implicate myself. But we’ve never seen anything quite like We the Doers. As Government Executive profiled them back in January, Harding, Maureen Klovers and five other former feds felt “sort of unleashed,” now that they no longer work for the federal government, and they’ve produced a truly important report. A former IRS employee, Harding was told “as a favor” that the administration was eliminating her position. The real favor is to us.

They identify four big problems that the system must, in their view, confront:

• The bottom line is undefined: We have lots of performance data, but the data we’ve got doesn’t drive meaningful results because, in their view, the leading current performance system, the Government Performance and Results Act, “has devolved into a bewildering, uncoordinated profusion of metrics, siloed by program and not validated by a uniform methodology that is understood or valued by the American public.” The key, they concluded, is to identify what citizens want and then measure how well the government delivers programs in ways that demonstrate a return on taxpayers’ investment.
• There’s no feedback loop with Congress: Legislation tends to be overly prescriptive, with requirements that pile on instead of producing results. Congress has the need for effective oversight but, by the same token, it ought to listen to the doers about whether what it wants is doable. The key, they concluded, is to link what’s desired with what can be done.
• The budgetary process is broken: Congress’s budgetary dysfunction, meanwhile, undermines the ability of the doers to manage contracts because the start/stop, lather/rinse/repeat saga of budget battles makes it impossible for government managers and their private partners to deliver value. The key, they concluded, is to focus on the metrics that the public wants and to focus on a return on the public’s investments.
• The bureaucratic culture is built around compliance, not delivery: The report sadly concludes, “Even though the members of We the Doers were part of the federal bureaucracy, the truth is we spent much of our time battling it”. There’s grand policy, emanating from OMB and OPM, but the policy often bounces against implementation barriers that the top agencies had never considered. The result is a system increasingly trapped in rules that spin off unintended consequences and lack common sense, especially in the hiring arena, where the result too often is that no one gets hired for important positions. “Government is a gullible customer” in dealing with contractors, and too often “leadership doesn’t lead.” The key, they concluded, is to rebuild a culture based more on delivery than on compliance.

And then, toward the end of their report, the Doers point to the need to “get good at technology.” That’s a need growing exponentially, and it’s a place where the government needs to run to catch up. Government needs to smash the boundaries that too often separate the budget, people power, decisions and measurement and focus all of them toward the outcome the government wants to produce. It needs to grow past cool websites to an experience that weaves together the people with the service the government is providing. It needs to bring more of its IT work in-house, so it’s no longer as captive to private contractors, and to boost its cybersecurity. It needs to make data sensible to ordinary members of the public, to reinforce its clarity on the inside. And it needs to “declare bankruptcy” on existing, sprawling IT systems, both hardware and software.

This is a broad and ambitious agenda. Some of the points are familiar; all of them, as the Doers lay out in the report, have a real-world grounding that’s reinforced by the experience that backs them up. It’s all the more ambitious because it stretches so far what the 2027 budget proposes. When it comes to the “results” of the budget, it focuses on “Buy America.” When it comes to people, it calls for “removing poor performers and limiting hiring to essential jobs”.

For anyone truly interested in reforming what ails the federal government, this report is essential reading. It provides insights from the inside about how to make changes from the outside in. The authors certainly aren’t circling the wagons in defense of the current system. And their report shows what DOGE done right would look like.