The real DOGE – Washington Examiner

The short version is that it is a group of impressive, serious people who are doing serious work to improve the functioning of the government. A few examples:

Joe Gebbia, a co-founder of Airbnb, described the ancient, paper-based system the government uses to handle the records of federal employees. There is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government, Gebbia explained. Now picture this: This giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper. It is a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn t changed in the last 70 years. DOGE is working to modernize the system to make it far easier for 21st-century federal workers to negotiate. We really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience, Gebbia said, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.

On a similar theme, another DOGE worker, Aram Moghaddassi, described being astonished by the Social Security system s computers. The first thing that got me really excited about DOGE was learning basically the state of government computers, Moghaddassi said. By some estimates, government IT costs about $100 billion. Its funding systems are over 50 years old in the case of something like Social Security or the IRS. So really critical systems are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain, and the efforts to improve them are often very delayed. So I thought, I m a software engineer that maybe could make a difference here.

Another example came from Brad Smith, who is examining the Department of Health and Human Services, which is basically a network of separate duchies that don t communicate with one another. There are 700 different IT systems today at the National Institutes of Health, Smith said. Software systems that can t speak to each other. They have 27 different CIOs. Baier interrupted to ask, Twenty-seven different chief information officers? Smith answered, Correct.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com

Byron York.