Civic tech leaders worry DOGE is ‘tarnishing’ its tools to improve government

President Donald Trump’s creation of his promised Department of Government Efficiency within one of the federal government’s most notable civic tech organizations, the U.S. Digital Service, has sent shockwaves though a community that has long sought to use technology as a vehicle for improving customer experience.

“I think Musk and DOGE has made it difficult in some respects by tarnishing some of the tools that CX relied on to make services better, including connecting data from different sources to reduce frictions and service delivery,” Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told Nextgov/FCW.

In the wake of the Healthcare.gov crash, President Barack Obama established USDS, something he later described as “a SWAT team, a world-class technology office inside of the government” deployed to other agencies when needed.

The unit was a flagship organization in the civic tech movement, which emerged over a decade ago with the intent of improving government using technology, data and better design. On his first day back in office, Trump transformed USDS into the vehicle for billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE. 

Set up with an ostensible focus on technology and a model of bringing outside talent into the government — similar to that of its predecessor — DOGE has led efforts to shrink the size of government and hoover up agency data. Government civic tech teams, including legacy employees at USDS itself and 18F, have been downsized or eliminated altogether. 

Six months later, civic tech appears to be at a juncture, figuring out what’s next.

“The fact that modernization is a thing people talk about — that part is good,” Amanda Renteria, CEO of Code for America, said of DOGE during an interview with Nextgov/FCW at the civic tech nonprofit’s annual conference in May. 

But “right now, my worry is that the general public sees modernization as firing people and doing it in a super cruel way,” said Renteria. “I think we all wish we would’ve told our stories about what this work has been.”

Arguably, one of the civic tech movement’s most high-profile projects is Direct File, a free online tax service that was run out of the IRS last year and this spring. The tool is reportedly being shut down by the Trump administration, despite high marks from users. 

“There is no overlap” between DOGE and civic tech, Direct File’s former deputy, Merici Vinton, told Nextgov/FCW via email.

“Civic tech launches products and services that are designed with users,” she said. “DOGE hired some engineers that came into the federal government, and after asking no questions to understand mission, fired hundreds of thousands of employees, cut congressionally mandated programs, ransacked agencies, and have built nothing.”

For those interested in civic technology and service delivery, “we should view Direct File as the floor, not the ceiling, of what is possible,” said Vinton, who pointed to problems with government delivery that existed before DOGE.

“The status quo has been broken for awhile [sic] — it’s time for bold new services and agencies (where needed!) that deliver tangible outcomes and results for Americans,” she said.

“Direct File is a great product,” longtime civic tech leader Jennifer Pahlka told Nextgov/FCW via email. But “that team succeeded despite a hostile environment, and that needs to change.”

There are several factors that those behind Direct File say made it successful: a blended team with different areas of expertise, agile methodology, human-centered design and iterative development. The team also started small with a pilot instead of trying to build a giant product all at once. 

“Everything around a project like that is set up for a different process than what that team used to succeed. The staffing, the procurement, the need to start small, the oversight … it’s all mismatched to the need,” Pahlka said of Direct File. Civic tech knows how to build systems, “but it will struggle to deliver on them until we fix the people, procedure, and outdated paradigm problems.”

Pahlka helped found several civic tech organizations and is now advocating for an "Abundance" agenda, which includes a focus on dismantling administrative burdens like regulations to address scarcity of things like housing. Getting that done, Pahlka has said, will require better state capacity. 

“Civic tech needs to put itself more clearly in the service of a broader bipartisan movement, one that focuses less on the tech and more on the fundamental shift that needs to happen to update the core operating models of government,” she said.

Like Renteria, Pahlka and others worry that DOGE’s work could hurt the brand of government modernization, and that negative reactions among those who disagree with what DOGE has done could stymy future progress. 

“I expect to read a lot of ‘I told you so’ and ‘Good riddance’ from people whose careers depend on the status quo,” Mikey Dickerson, the first administrator of USDS, said in a statement. 

Musk, who is stepping away from the effort, has described monotonous work combing through line-items — “a lot of hard work” — as the biggest obstacle for DOGE. 

“But the fact that the government is so dysfunctional that not even Elon Musk can make a difference is not something to be proud of,” said Dickerson. “I'd like to hope that it drives interest in a real reform effort that is aimed at the core problems in hiring and procurement."

As for what the civic tech movement may want to take from DOGE, some may envy the aircover that DOGE had to get things done, Moynihan said.

“A consistent complaint and shortcoming of people working within civic tech was that the movement never really had a powerful champion at the heart of government,” he said. 

Code for America is planning to focus more on working with states, said Renteria. It’s currently working on improving the accessibility of government PDFs using AI, alongside Salt Lake City, Utah and the state of Georgia, for example.

“You can feel some of the fieriness here because we’ve been doing this a while,” she said of the mood at the group’s recent conference. “We know how to do it.”