DOGE is real. Here's what it should do Day One.

DOGE is just another evolution of Kennedy's 'Whiz Kids' led by Robert McNamara. We should learn from the last time we took this road.

DOGE mostly operates out of an office in a small glass building on F Street in Washington, D.C. scrunched between a Walgreens and a barbershop, nominally occupied by SpaceX. But the real work is done on encrypted apps like Signal, where cohorts of tech bros reach out to “the smartest people I’ve ever talked to,” inviting them into an opportunity to make an impact on how our government is run. Like all of Elon Musk’s enterprises, he runs it from remote, but soon he will be a fixture in D.C., if not in the White House.

The small glass building is 1155 F St., SpaceX’s office in Washington, D.C. where DOGE currently operates until January 20th, when it will move into the West Wing of the White House. Image: capture from Google Maps.

Based on yeoman reporting work by the New York Times, I got a glimpse of how DOGE is forming up, and it rang my history bell. Clearly, Elon Musk doesn’t want to set up a new government agency, with all the trappings that come with government agencies. He wants to create a network within the government, specifically the executive branch, where personnel decisions are made by the White House. Musk’s vision is really to recreate the “Whiz Kids” from the Kennedy administration, but using a modern twist.

DOGE won’t be imposing itself onto federal departments. It won’t be like an inspector general, with a phalanx of auditors and investigators slamming through the doors. DOGE will be more like a parasite, or a virus, in a symbiotic relationship where the host agency welcomes the agents and gives them room to operate. Officially, DOGE agents will be highly-selected people recruited from tech, finance, and the top ranks of colleges. They will work for the agencies where they’re embedded, not “DOGE” because DOGE will not be any kind of official organization; it will be more like a network of people in a circle of trust, with access to information and resources provided by Musk’s team and the Trump administration.

The structure, operational methodology, and foundation of DOGE already exist. DOGE agents will likely operate as Special Government Employees (SGE). The NYT reported that DOGE is recruiting tech executives to work up to six month stints with no pay. Some unpaid recruits received grant money from the Thiel Fellowship. It stands to reason that if Elon Musk wants someone in DOGE, he will figure out a way to overcome obstacles, like pay. DOGE agents are being picked to be what Musk would call “hard core.” They’re expected to work 80-hour weeks.

SGE rules permit temporary employees to work up to 130 days during any 365 day period (with or without compensation). There’s no real penalty for working more than 130 days, but agencies don’t have to evaluate SGE status until the first year is up. This technically means that DOGE agents can spend six months to a year embedded at their host agency, working hard core, collaborating with other DOGE elements, before the hand of government can intervene.

How will these DOGE embeds be supported? That already exists too. After the healthcare.gov debacle, President Barack Obama created the U.S. Digital Service, a part of the Office of Management and Budget, working out of the West Wing. USDS serves as a technology consultant for the rest of the executive branch, and according to its web FAQ: “USDS is full of people who are scrappy, mission-driven, and passionate.”

We don’t look like your typical government entity (hoodies and sneakers reign supreme here) and we’ve been known to attend all kinds of events together ranging from White House ceremonies to going to the movies together.

We work hard because we know the work is worth doing and we can see the impact it makes on real people’s lives. Even if you run into roadblocks or bureaucracy, you can always rely on the USDS community to help you troubleshoot, back you up, and cheer you on.

It only makes sense that USDS will become the hub for DOGE activity in the White House. Being part of OMB only enhances the kind of data analysis and access to budget information that DOGE will need to complete its mission.

Basically, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are building a temporary, self-replenishing cadre of “Whiz Kids” to come in and reshape how agencies are funded, and in some cases, how they fundamentally work. This is reminiscent of Robert McNamara, who joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at 26 years old, with the rank of Captain, recruited to bring his mathematical skills to the art of war, which he did with cold efficiency.

After WWII, McNamara and his team sought out Ford Motor Company, over time executing a complete takeover from the inside. Just months after McNamara was named president of Ford, he left again to join the Kennedy administration as Secretary of Defense. McNamara ran the Vietnam war like he ran Ford assembly lines, with efficiency and data. Of course, running a war that way resulted in many lives wasted, because lives aren’t valued the way nuts and bolts and engine blocks are.

I would not want Elon Musk running a war for the same reason I believe Robert McNamara was the wrong person to run our military during Vietnam. McNamara is the one who came up with the plan to use B-29s for low-level firebombing over Japanese cities—based on maximizing damage to the enemy using data analysis. It was McNamara’s plan that led to our atomic bombs being dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because those two cities were reserved as practically untouched by Gen. Curtis LeMay’s firebombing, which devastated every other major city on the island of Honshu. I could see Musk coming up with similar kinds of plans.

From Day One of the Trump administration, expect the DOGE rollout to hit fast and hard. These recruits will be fast tracked for government clearances, and will have their SGE credentials quickly. They will join their host agencies possibly before Trump’s cabinet picks are approved by the Senate. They will be armed with laptops and smartphones equipped with encrypted Signal group communications, and Musk himself may choose to show up at any time, to ensure these recruits are “hard core” enough for his liking. Meanwhile, at the White House, USDS and OMB will house the paid core of DOGE, serving as the brain stem for the neural network inserted into our government.

But what will this new crop of “Whiz Kids” do? What should they do?

For one thing, they should leverage generative AI to comb through 185,000 pages of federal regulations to identify redundancies, duplicative functions, conflicting rules and offices, and inter-agency crossovers. An AI could use PACER, WestLaw or other resources to harness natural language analysis of the CFRs, along with reams of internal agency procedures and policies, mandated reports to Congress, the Federal Register, and the budget, to quickly identify areas where DOGE agents should direct their focus.

It would probably only take a few days or weeks for the AI-assisted reporting to identify areas for close examination, predict legal risks, and score offices, functions and regulations based on redundancy, efficacy, conflict severity, economic and administrative impact. There really is a lot of fluff in the U.S. government, and there’s a strong perverse incentive for agencies to spend 100 percent of their allocations, office by office, so that lobbying Congress is more effective at producing another budget, fully funded. No agency wants its funding cut, because the people who work at that agency are paid to work at their jobs.

The AI also already exists. Musk has invested billions into xAI and Grok, way more than the economic gain from such an endeavor would be worth commercially, with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and others flooding the market. But xAI might be the prime mover of DOGE, including valuable contracts with USDS, OMB and other parts of the executive branch. I would not want to hand no-bid contracts to Musk based on DOGE, even if he did it for free. That’s one area that should be closely monitored.

DOGE, comprised of SGEs who gain nothing from the agencies where they are embedded, and armed with an array of high-tech truth-seeking apparatus, will see through many of the biases and incentives built in to the funding and budgeting process. This will lead to widespread opposition from inside the agencies themselves. The biggest weapon DOGE may have is fear. Raise a big enough stink and perhaps Elon Musk might show up, and then perhaps President Trump might tweet something, and then Congress will act. Go along to get along, and hope the other guy gets the ax is likely the attitude DOGE will create—one of Stalinesque paranoia.

I am not so opposed to such an attitude within many federal departments. If the ax man is there to swing away, maybe the fine folks who occupy our federal leviathan will do a better job justifying their own existence.

Perhaps the analysis can pierce the dumb politics around agencies like the IRS. Cutting the IRS to the point where it cannot function is counterproductive. I think DOGE should not limit itself to just cuts. It should recommend ways to increase productivity and even increase funding to certain parts of the government that can help money be spent more effectively.

Like the “Whiz Kids” from the 1940s took over Ford, then came back to take over the DOD, DOGE may find itself taking over certain parts of the federal bureaucracy, if it survives long enough. At this point, it’s just an experiment, but I would not write it off as a meme. There’s plenty of real structure in the government to support DOGE, and if its SGE beginnings produce real fruit, this might end up being a permanent structure. The only thing we must really be watching is how much of Musk’s personal influence is built in to DOGE’s DNA.

The best thing DOGE can do if it succeeds is to dump its founder. I sincerely hope Musk agrees with that sentiment.

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