One of the most clever and effective surprises of the new Trump Administration has been the implementation of the famous (or infamous) Department of Government Efficiency. The idea sprang to fame among conservatives last fall, when then-candidate Donald Trump announced his intention to form an outside-of-government entity that would advise the White House on matters relating to federal agencies and budgeting. This new DOGE Department, you may recall, would allegedly be co-chaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Now, one decisive electoral victory and an inauguration later, DOGE looks slightly different than the concept pitched pre-election, but the results are more effective than many America First believers could have hoped for. There are a few mundane differences, such as the exit of Vivek Ramaswamy from the advisory side. But one of the most exciting and surprising pieces of the Department of Government Efficiency is just that: that the advising committee is but one piece of DOGE. Careful readers of President Trump’s executive order on “Establishing and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’” noticed a detail that the left discovered quite shocking just weeks after President Trump took office.
The Trump Administration’s order reorganized and renamed the United States Digital Service (USDS), a creation of Obama’s Administration in 2014 to help “improve and simplify” digital services across federal agencies. The new name is the United States DOGE Service (still USDS). Basically, President Trump repurposed an Obama-era backdoor IT service to help him downsize and even shutter federal agencies. By the time the left began shrieking about supposed “rogue teenagers who work for Elon Musk” illegally accessing federal systems, the reality of what happened came to light.
The Trump Administration is wasting no time or opportunity in attacking and cutting down to size the Administrative State. Trump himself has admitted that their first term was plagued with “not knowing what they were doing.” It seems that the Trump team used the last four years wisely. Combined with Elon Musk’s ingenuity, they are using the Deep State’s own tangled web against them.
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/national-sovereignty/america-first/dogeing-the-executive-branch/
