DOGE is not new?
President Trump renamed and repurposed President Obama's stealth startup named US Digital Service
In his Executive Order President Trump renamed and repurposed President Obama's stealth startup named US Digital Service (USDS) to be the US DOGE Service (USDS).
In June 2015 Fast Company reported about Obama’s Stealth Startup, United States Digital Service:
President Obama has quietly recruited top tech talent from the likes of Google and Facebook. Their mission: to reboot how government works.
These are people whose pedigree in Silicon Valley gives them the whispered reputations of gods and goddesses. I look at Eric. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt; his sparse hair is seriously matted down. Did he sleep lately? Exercise? Shave? All debatable. “Ever wonder what you’re doing here?” I ask him. He was the 13th engineer hired at Amazon, the first operations director at Twitter. Like everyone else on the stealth team that President Barack Obama is amassing and deploying inside the government, he never imagined he would live and work in D.C. “I guess I just like to fix things that are broken," he says, shrugging.'
Fast Company gave details about many of those joining Obama’s US Digital Service:
Here’s why these techies chose to leave startups and top tech companies to serve the public good.
...when President Barack Obama was elected into office, he issued a similar call to America’s scientists, but this time, there is a different mission at stake. Today’s government scientists are tasked with deploying the latest technology to bring the government into the digital era, allowing it to more effectively deliver services to the American people.
Mikey Dickerson was the first administrator of the US Digital Service. Haley Van Dyck was the first Deputy Administrator. Todd Park was the first CTO.
Dickerson’s USDS currently employs 37 people, but it is only one aspect of an endeavor that has grown organically and sprawls all over Washington...
Park tends to describe the new tech corps as a 'three-layer cake.' USDS is the first layer—a group of technologists who strategize about what projects should become government priorities and which people should work on them.
The second layer is 18F—a group of 90 technologists and designers who work within the General Services Administration a few blocks away. 18F takes its name from its address (the GSA building is at 18th and F Streets) and has informal ties to USDS, but it is essentially a service agency. The group can take on jobs from anywhere within government that’s in need of digital help. Unlike USDS, it doesn’t necessarily follow the president’s political priorities.
And the third layer? That would be the tech teams, ranging in size from five people to 50, that will be installed within 25 government agencies over the course of the next 18 months. These teams will consult regularly with USDS for guidance and may utilize 18F for its services.
From a Fast Company interview with President Obama:
We can get a really big payoff.
...the architects of the USDS—especially [Todd] Park, [Mikey] Dickerson, and [Haley] Van Dyck—made sure that their bureau was ensconced within the Office of Management and Budget, which gives the techies muscle within various agencies and an ability to influence various IT budgets and lines of command.
What’s more, with the solid backing of the president and his chief of staff, the USDS has enough of what Dickerson calls 'hard power' to fix important problems around town. Quite simply, the president can (and does) ask his cabinet secretaries to take seriously any USDS overtures to work on projects within their agencies.
It’s unclear how GSA’s 18F is being utilized by DOGE today.
Related
She helped create the U.S. Digital Service. Now it’s become the U.S. DOGE Service, Robert Safian, Fast Company, Feb. 14, 2025.
The new DOGE website is now active:
Democrats screaming, crying, and whining the most about DOGE need to be investigated first because when all the crooks are mad, you know something is going right. https://tinyurl.com/tnvy436u