Griffin on Tech: DOGE and the technologists’ view of government

The US Government is in for a major shake-up with Elon Musk’s confirmation as head of a panel that will lead a major efficiency drive aimed at cutting burdensome regulations and saving taxpayer dollars.

Just how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will work hasn’t been outlined yet, but Musk and his co-appoinment, biotech entrepreneur and former Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, will sit outside the US Government offering advice. So its not an official department at all, the DOGE tag is merely a hat-tip to Musk’s favourite crypto meme coin, DOGE Coin

That arrangement will allow them to continue to run their numerous businesses but will do little to lessen the massive conflict of interest their appointments pose, particularly for Musk, a major recipient of government subsidies and contracts for its businesses Tesla and SpaceX.

Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan recently that the regulatory landscape in the US these days is like a game of American football with numerous referees on the field constantly stopping the game. Many in the US tech sector echo those sentiments, arguing that bureaucracy is strangling US innovation.

We’ve had a ‘lite’ version of this with the new coalition government’s regulatory fast-track process, the rolling back of regulations in various sectors and the formation of David Seymour’s Ministry for Regulation, which also has a mandate to drive efficiency in government.

While Musk has made some outlandish statements in interviews on X posts about targets for DOGE, such as trimming US$2 trillion from the annual US federal budget, and his desire to cut 80% of the government workforce, giving them two-year severance packages so that they have time to rebuild their careers in the private sector.

It’s like he’s planning to make a carbon copy of his restructuring of Twitter, where he cut around 75% of the workforce and slashed costs in an effort to stem losses. Twitter, now X, is still operating but is philosophically and operationally a very different company and platform today. It may well be more efficient, but what has it lost in the process? some would argue, the soul of Twitter and everything that made it a great social media platform.

Clearly, Musk and Ramaswamy will find the task of applying startup logic to the government more complex than they envisaged. But anyone in the tech sector who has had anything to do with government and particularly its procurement processes will have at least some sympathy for What they are setting out to achieve.

Christchurch-based tech advisor and futurist Ben Reid has been thinking deeply about how technology can be applied to improve both how the government bureaucracy operates and how democracy can be strengthened.

The technologist’s lens on government

“The functions of current inertia-laden Parliament, ministries and public service generally can be rapidly swapped out for a more efficient automated digital engine,” Reid writes in Fast Forward Aotearoa, his epic book about the technologies that will define the 21st century and which could transform New Zealand.

The ideas he floats are not necessarily about slashing public sector headcount but allowing more efficient decision-making and service delivery, a task Judith Collins is pursuing in her role as the minister for digitising government.

Ben’s ideas include:

Build the Govstack: co-invest with other governments in open source alternatives to global tech giants from the silicon itself, to the cloud, to large multimodal AI models. Maintain optionality, expertise, capability inside government rather than outsourcing it all. (The nascent India Stack619 is a prime example of how Open APIs and digital public goods can support economic primitives including Identity, data and payments.) Aotearoa is at risk of just falling by the wayside as many other countries leapfrog us.

Legislation-as-code: Ensure that all new legislation is not only machinereadable (not hard in the age of GPT-4) but that it can clearly and unambiguously be executed as human-readable software, with clear points of intervention for human judgement where needed.

Government-as-API: generate a complete, well-defined catalogue of all government services and digitise the hell out of them. Provide a secure API and minimum-viable-product UI for all services, then allow 3rd party software developers to innovate at the UX level.

Digital voting: Invest in a national open-source polling system which enables a shift towards quicker, more granular, more representative democracy than the current fractured and perversely incentivised 3-year MMP parliamentary election cycle. Moving from early iterations of consensus-building debate platforms (eg Pol.is) to an accessible, nationally deployed issue-by-issue opinion polling app, and finally to a full-blown national liquid democracy platform with quadratic funding.

These are proposals worth exploring and which are already being trialled in some countries. We all know there’s huge inefficiency and a fair amount of inequity in government service delivery and allocation. With an ageing population, and the costs of tackling climate change, the government budget is gonig to be under more strain than ever before in the coming decades.

The ideologically driven purge Musk and Ramaswamy are being enlisted to lead, which may also be used as an opportunity to cleanse federal agencies of so-called “deep state” operatives opposed to Trump, may end up doing more harm to the US than good. 

But there is a place for non-partisan and evidence-based efforts to improve how government operates and we should be exploring them now.