Breaking Government in Order to "Fix" It

Why the destruction of 18F, the digital services arm of GSA, is so telling--plus what Elon Musk is really after. Plus, the Democratic Party's tech debt is no longer a insider secret.

Mar 05, 2025

Hello to all my new readers! Hard to believe that when I started this newsletter at the end of 2020 it began with the 2,000 or so folks who had been reading “First Post” from Civic Hall, and any day now The Connector will top 9,000 subscribers. Just a word about this week’s issue—while my overarching theme in these days of hyper-crisis will be organizing, movements and the fight to protect democracy, from time to time I will go deeper into work that I know fairly well from years in the civic tech arena. Given what has been happening with DOGE’s engulfment of the US Digital Service, this is one of those times. But as I hope you will see, while we have to pay attention to the across-the-board assault on services the public relies on, how government uses technology isn’t just a topic for geeks—it gets to the core of sustaining trust in democracy.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) from last night, moments before a Republican lovers of free speech ripped her sign out of her hands

More than a decade ago, back when I was a senior adviser to the Sunlight Foundation and also co-running Personal Democracy Forum, I had the opportunity to meet in London with Mike Bracken, the founder and executive director of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) and his country’s first chief data officer. He had been headhunted out of his job as director of digital development at The Guardian and was in his first year or two of standing up the GDS, if memory serves. This was the first time that someone with serious tech chops and a deep commitment to public service had been given the power (a top Cabinet minister was, in effect, his sponsor) to build a skilled digital team that could overhaul how a national government was using information technology to deliver services to the public, and a lot of tech and good government leaders in and around the Obama administration were paying attention to their peers across the pond.

One thing he said then, in the course of describing GDS’s work, has stayed with me until today. No, it’s not his oft-quoted phrase, “The strategy is delivery,” which achieved gospel-like status among many who have worked on the digital modernization of government in America in the last ten years. While I don’t have the exact words, it was something like this: The UK government spends about 80 billion pounds sterling a year on information technology (roughly $103 billion). If we were allowed to rebuild all of it on using modern platforms and methods, it would cost about 800 million pounds.

My jaw dropped then, and it still drops now. The idea that upgrading how government uses technology could save 99% of what it was now spending on legacy systems was astounding. Not to mention the potential value to society from insuring, through user-centered design, that government services would actually work more efficiently and effectively on behalf of the public. As Bracken explained when he came to speak at PDF in 2014, “It’s not the headlines that are killing democracy, it’s the drip, drip, drip of inadequate services.” As he added, “because when you’re on the outside and you have great promise, and then when you get on the inside and you don’t deliver it, that damages people’s trust in government.” (You can watch his talk here.)

Screengrab of Mike Bracken speaking at PDF, June 2014

I bring up this story for multiple reasons today. First, because in the last weeks it’s become radically clear that Elon Musk and his band of youthful techie acolytes at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are not interested in any serious way in making government more efficient. They’re after something else entirely, but as they come from the Mirror World, they are relying on the same tropes of “only super-smart techies can fix what ails government” that people from the reality-based community also used a decade or so ago. This is not the first time that a White House has turned to Silicon Valley to bring in skilled technologists to fix broken systems. When the nascent Healthcare.gov website crashed in 2013, nearly destroying Barack Obama’s flagship health care initiative, people who had a track record of private sector success in health-related startups like Todd Park, then the White House chief technology officer, managed to recruit people like Mikey Dickerson, a Google site reliability engineer, to lead the effort to save the site.

But there’s no comparison between public servants like Park and Dickerson (who became the first administrator of the US Digital Service, which was largely inspired by Bracken’s GDS) and Musk and “Big Balls” (the nickname of Ed Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE coder who is now a “senior advisor” to the Department of Homeland Security). When I mentioned the parallel to a top public servant from the Biden Administration who has been a big part of this work for years, this person bristled. There’s a huge difference between having folks who are committed to building things brought into government to build and fix things, they said, then it is to bring folks who are inexperienced, both in technology and certainly in management of teams, to tear things out.

And even if Musk’s approach to “fixing” government is the radical one he used after he bought Twitter, where he literally smashed servers and canceled payment lines to supposedly figure out what parts of the company were essential and which could be discarded, that makes no sense. Customers of a private company going through a drastic overhaul can choose not to use it—especially if it is just one of many social media platforms. If government services go down, people can’t go get their Social Security check from a competing government agency down the block. Airline pilots can’t radio into an alternative air-traffic control system.

That gets to my second reason for highlighting this aspect of Trump/Musk’s power grab. The excellent work of a generation of civic technologists who went into government starting in the Obama years and even continuing through the first Trump term and then through the Biden years was never really understood or uplifted by Democrats or progressives. Late in the second Obama term a few people tried to get the US Digital Service codified into law so it would be harder to dislodge, to little avail. I can’t think of one national Democratic elected official or Cabinet member who even tried to make their name by being a champion of “reinventing government” the way Al Gore did a generation earlier.

Perhaps there are a few governors, notably Tim Walz of Minnesota, who is genuinely a mapping geek, or Jared Polis of Colorado, who created his state’s first Digital Service in 2019, or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, whose administration created CODE PA in 2023 to modernize state services, who could credibly speak about the importance of using modern methods to upgrade how government works. But it’s not a story that anyone high up in the Biden Administration thought worth elevating. And in that narrative vacuum, which, as Jen Pahlka reminds us suggests complacency about stuff we should never be complacent about, strides a Planet-Eater like Musk with his grandiose and empty promises about using AI to remake government. Assuming that people who actually believe in government service get a chance to rebuild after this spasm of country-wrecking ends, we can’t forget how vital it will be to make sure stuff really works—and to champion that work as a key plank in a Project 2029.

(Eric Reinhart and Craig Spencer, two public health experts, make a similar point in the Boston Review about the pending destruction of the National Institutes of Health. As they write, this “marks the culmination of a decades-long missed opportunity: despite being the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, the NIH has not built a broad public constituency to protect it from partisan destruction.” [Emphasis added.] Current polling from Navigator research shows that voters are more concerned about Trump/Musk shutting down NIH funding for cancer and other cure research than almost anything else, but if you knew that already, congrats, you are paying a lot of attention!)

Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?

If there’s any silver lining to the wholesale assault on government now underway, it is that it is making visible many things that people have long taken for granted. The Submerged State may include many swampy subsidies for special interests, but we’ve so far seen no sign that Muskolini is hacking away at those things. Instead, he’s “discovering” giant falsehoods about programs that benefit people far more than they cost, to the point that Don Orangeone can do things like stand up at his speech to Congress last night and peddle ridiculous lies about Social Security sending checks to millions of non-existent 150-year-olds and MAGA Republicans stand up and cheer.

As I write this, I’m seeing real-time updates about mass layoffs at the General Services Administration, which manages government properties and provides IT support across the federal system. I’m thinking of the people who were at 18F, a sub-branch of GSA that was born around the same time of the US Digital Service, who have saved the government billions of dollars over the years and worked on projects like IRS Direct File, Covid.gov (which enabled people to get free tests mailed to them) and weather.gov, only to be RIF-ed last weekend. (That’s shorthand for “reduction in force,” the lingo that Musk’s minions are using when the summarily tell people they’re being fired for being “non-critical.”) Why did DOGE kill 18F? Lindsay Young, its executive director and longest serving employee posted defiantly that it was precisely their success that made them a target: “People who own skyscrapers are afraid of 100 people who made websites better. Not because of the latest tech fad, but because we proved that the government can be fixed, the government can be made better and the government can work for the people.

So, what the hell is happening? How did Elon Musk come to be the Angel of Death for the federal government? Over the weekend, two articles came out that connected enough of the dots in ways that are pretty ominous. According to this long report (gift link) in last Friday’s The New York Times, which shared a seven-person byline, Musk’s tilt toward the hard right – which was already underway when he bought Twitter in 2022 – came into full view the summer of 2023 at a high-dollar fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy hosted by several Silicon Valley broligarchs including Chamath Palihapitaya and David Sacks. (Sacks is now at the White House as Trump’s crypto and AI czar.) It was there that Musk told other attendees about what he learned from gutting Twitter. The Times reports:

“Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government? Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.”

But it took some time before his notion for DOGE, which first surfaced publicly last summer as a proposal for a cost-cutting commission, took full form.

Who helped Musk refine the idea into an actual working organization (operating under an obscure clause in the federal code that allows “temporary” organizations to bypass all kinds of hiring and spending hurdles)? The Times says he was guided by Stephen Miller and his wife Katie, who “worked with Mr. Musk in between Mr. Trump’s terms, helping to guide his political spending behind the scenes.” Miller, if you haven’t been paying attention, is now living out the dream of his childhood, when he rebelled against the liberalism of his family and peers in Santa Monica and decided to nonconform by opposing things like his high school’s Spanish language announcements.

Wired Magazine’s Jake Lahut spelled out the Musk-Miller relationship in somewhat more detail last Thursday. After serving as a speechwriter and architect of Trump’s family separation policies in Trump I, Miller is now in a more powerful role as White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. As Lahut writes, “two sources described his current role as that of a prime minister. Katie Miller is a special government employee who functions as the top communications official at DOGE – ferrying information to and from Musk to the White House and back -- while also getting a full time salary from P2 Public Affairs.

The Times adds one more key detail, reporting that Musk has also been tutored in the workings of the federal budget and bureaucracy by Russell Vought, the self-described “Christian Nationalist” who was a lead author of Project 2025, proclaims that he wants to put federal workers “in trauma,” and has now returned to his role as director of the Office of Management and Budget, which he held during Trump I. “Mr. Vought and Mr. Musk hit it off when they met, along with Mr. Ramaswamy, at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 14,” the Times reported. “They were on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible.”

This triumvirate of Musk-Miller-Vought is now in the driver’s seat in Washington. A few weeks ago, Miller posted this statement of his political philosophy on X:

For the last four years before President Trump’s inauguration we had no democracy.
Joe Biden was a puppet in charge of nothing. The corporate media and Democrat Party engaged in a monstrous coverup to conceal this now indisputable truth.
Our government was instead run by unelected bureaucrats who ruthlessly weaponized state power against their political enemies, engineered mass illegal voting in our elections, installed a draconian censorship regime, instituted a colossal system of state-sponsored racial discrimination, orchestrated a vast border invasion to try to permanently alter the balance of power, trafficked half a million children across the border, allowed criminals to freely terrorize our citizens, and raided the treasury to fund a political army of marxist radicals in a bid for permanent control over US institutions.
President Trump saved America and democracy itself.

Musk replied, “100%.”

This all doesn’t have to end badly. On Medium, Noah Kunin writes from first-hand experience about what Musk is really after. I’ve known and been friends with Noah since his days working for the Sunlight Foundation’s labs. He’s an exemplar of the many idealistic people with tech chops who decided to go into government service during the Obama years—when the legislation creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau passed, he was among the first to go in to help build the first federal agency created using digital design principles from the start. Then he helped co-found 18F and later the Technology Transformation Service at GSA, where he served as infrastructure director.

Noah writes that it’s understandable that tech people have little patience with government regulations and bureaucracy. But since government can’t be run like a business (it has to serve everyone; it can’t reject citizens with hard problems who aren’t “profitable” the way companies can pick their customers), serious techies see government’s complexity as an understandable and solvable challenge. Musk, he says, is after something different:

The only government worth taking over is one that is small enough. Not small enough to “drown in a bathtub”. That outdated yarn? Please.
Small enough, for a single AI model to encompass.
Small enough, to fit on a single sick gaming rig.
Small enough, for one person to issue queries to said model, and get accurate answers most of the time (accuracy is less important than alacrity, after all.)
For one person to issue commands to the AI agents of the model, and see their will done, and by virtue of this person being the elected President of the United States, the will of the people!
DOGE’s goal is not for government to be small. It is for the government to be one single person.

Noah, like his colleagues at 18F, says he’s only begun to fight.

(Kunin and Julian Sanchez have started an excellent podcast called Watchcats which I recommend if you want to go deeper on all things DOGE.)

Democratic Tech Crisis Now Out in the Open

Long-time readers of The Connector are already familiar with the quiet disaster that is the Democratic ecosystem’s dependence on Bonterra/NGP VAN, the overseas private equity company that is responsible for maintaining mission-critical access to the Democratic voter file. Over the weekend, Shane Goldmacher broke a big story in The New York Times (gift link) about VAN’s near collapse last summer, when problems “grew so worrisome” that “top Democrats staged an extraordinary intervention to keep it running through the November election.” A founder of LinkedIn, Allen Blue, funded a temporary solution called the Movement Infrastructure Group, so that high demand from a variety of wholesale users of VAN’s application programming interface wouldn’t take the whole system down.

Still, Goldmacher reports, Mike Pfohl, the head of the Empower Project, which is a lead organization using voter data to do relational organizing instead of the less-effective-but-dominant traditional kinds of field organizing, was “shocked” to be asked by NGP VAN in October “to cut back on the information his group was adding to and extracting from [VAN].”

(Oh, but we were told by all the veteran political consultants at the Harris campaign that they ran a picture-perfect field operation, remember?)

Even more telling, Goldmacher reports that by early 2024, concerns about VAN’s reliability grew so severe at the DNC that there were “internal discussions” about exercising a clause in the committee’s long-standing contract with the company to demand a copy of the VAN source code—something that would be a very heavy lift to implement but a real portent of problems. A letter was prepared but never sent because unnamed party officials and the Biden re-election campaign decided it was too risky to take such a step. It’s quite interesting to me to see this wrinkle surface—a year ago when I was reporting out my “Living with VANxiety” essay, I was told this clause was still operative but basically moot since it would be quite expensive to stand up a whole new organization to run and maintain the code, and besides who could be convinced to throw good money after bad?

As best as I can tell, what is happening now is a bit of a game of hot potato. With one exception, none of the key players who are the major users of VAN – the DNC and related committee, the AFL and big individual unions, America Votes, and State Voices—have issued a peep about the Times story. The Movement Cooperative, which put out a request-for-proposals a few weeks ago asking for a “next-generation voter contact constituent relationship management system” to serve its coterie of progressive stakeholders, did have this to say, via its CEO Julia Barnes:

The progressive left's data infrastructure is, and has been, the silent engine driving every door knock, phone call, text, and vote for many, many cycles. It has been underinvested in and under-considered by volunteers, campaign leaders, donors, and elected officials for even longer, but that needs to change immediately. In fact, it needed to change years ago….TMC was created to provide and protect affordable access to organizing groups focused on the day-to-day fight of base-building, rapid response interventions, winning elections, and resistance. We are going to make sure we have the best systems in place to do that. Reevaluating our tech and relationships with current political tech options is the boldest way to say, ‘What we have is no longer working for us, and we need to build technology for the future we want.’ We want stable, secure, accessible options that go beyond the infrastructure we have so we can reestablish our edge with voters and protect our precious relationships within and between our communities.

NGP VAN has been a valuable partner of TMC since our beginning and remains one today. Their role in our ecosystem is almost beside the point. We—the entire left—must expect any company serving our movement to grow and develop with us if they want to continue in partnership with us. Additionally, we all must have a real conversation about how exclusively relying on private equity ownership models for our political tech endangers our movement’s priorities in favor of stockholder profits. We have to challenge the infrastructure that we didn't win with and that goes beyond just one tool.”

P.S. Something not good seems to be going on inside ActBlue.

Deep Thoughts

—Andre Banks, a veteran progressive communications consultant, writes in “Built for a Different War: Why Progressive Institutions Can’t Compete in Today’s Media Battlefield,” that most of us are fighting the last war. “If our ideas don’t reach people in the spaces where they actually spend their time—TikTok, YouTube comment sections, hyper-niche micro-communities—we don’t exist. There can be no counter-narrative, no persuasion, and no political power until we take control of the information pipelines that shape consciousness and worldview itself.” Or, as my friend Lara Putnam has said numerous times, we have a “last-mile” problem and no amount of message fine-tuning will matter if we don’t address that.

Shameless Plug

—If you need a cure for your insomnia, here you go!

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