Can we imagine a progressive version of DOGE? Almost: Here's how it would work

By now, the American people have had about enough of Elon Musk’s DOGE. Enough of the destruction of things they care about, and the threats to so much more. The Hands Off demonstrations, up to 5 million strong, reached even into previous Trump strongholds. A few weeks earlier, a mid-March Quinnipiac poll found that 60% of voters disapproved of DOGE’s mass firings of federal workers, while just 36% approved. 

But the idea behind DOGE — that there’s massive government waste, which could easily be slashed — remains stubbornly popular, driven by generations of conservative messaging and neoliberal me-tooism. As Paul Krugman noted in December, a Reagan-era commission of nearly 2,000 business executives organized into 36 task forces "mostly came up empty" after 18 months of investigation. As Krugman noted, “most government spending happens because it delivers something people want, and you can’t make significant cuts without hard choices.” The conservative fantasy of “waste, fraud and abuse” evades that fundamental fact. That’s how you get the mass dismissal of IRS workers, which will cost the government $500 billion in revenue, presented as an example of conservative efficiency. 

Breaking DOGE’s momentum and reversing the damage done are the highest priorities, but serious long-term counter-measures are needed as well. Messaging clearly needs to be a big part of it, but so does actually making government work for people, in an effective and visible way. We need a different DOGE — let’s call it here the Department of Government Effectiveness — oriented toward promoting the general welfare. As I’ll argue below, that necessarily means involving the public directly in the process. 

Political scientist Henry Farrell suggested as much in a February post that combined critical analysis of DOGE with the question of whether there's a more democratic alternative. The answer, so far, is no — and I’m not here to offer one, for reasons suggested by Farrell’s post. As he points out, “Power fantasies are a bad idea,” whoever’s they may be, adding, “If you want a better alternative to DOGE, it has to involve some form of democratic steering.” In other words, developing that alternative must be a democratic process, not just one person’s bright idea. What I will offer are some foundational ideas that may be vital for that enterprise, and may encourage others to pursue it further. Some of them Farrell described in this post and an earlier one last year, which I'll explore below.

Effectiveness subsumes efficiency as a goal — of course we want to do things efficiently, but we want to do the right things, not things we have to undo later because they’ve caused even more problems than they solve. And being effective in the long run often means seeing the short run differently. The climate crisis presents the most obvious example. In January, risk management experts at Britain’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries warned that the global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, along with billions of deaths. In early April, a top insurer warned of even worse coming even sooner: At 3℃ of global heating, which is definitely possible in that timeframe, climate damage can’t be insured against, either privately or by governments. “That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”

If government cannot protect us against such a disastrous future, any talk of efficiency is just a distraction at best. What we need is effective government action to ensure we even have a future. That’s not some high-minded ideal — it should be the bare minimum.

To craft a sound progressive anti-DOGE focused on effectiveness, there are at least four foundations we should draw on: 

1. The hands-on experience of government employees who already working on enhancing government effectiveness and efficiency before DOGE fired them. 
2. A general recognition of the value of resilience in government, which must have the capacity to respond to dire emergencies, both foreseen and unpredictable. 
3. New information and new ideas about how to empower government decision-makers at the appropriate levels. 
4. A frank recognition of the role of political power in limiting or expanding government effectiveness and efficiency. 

What already works

The place to start with developing a Department of Government Effectiveness is with what already works — or at least used to work, until Musk and DOGE destroyed it: the technology problem-solvers with more than decade of experience at the U.S. Digital Service and 18F, both of which were created in 2014 after the failure of healthcare.gov. As explained by Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, in early March: 

Both organizations use similar managerial technologies, which includes agile, iterative design, a user-centric approach, a reliance on data-driven decision making, directly managing relationships with vendors, favoring open-source solutions, the prioritization of platform models, and a flatter organizational culture.

He also notes that these programs weren’t adequately staffed and “lacked power to make big changes.” But they had a considerable track record, which offers a foundation for how to further government effectiveness in the future. And despite being sabotaged by DOGE, they continue to inform the public online along with other current and fired federal workers at We the Builders. 

One enlightening post contrasts the USDS with DOGE, explaining that the former was “precision engineering for public good” with an approach defined by empowering agencies, transparency and collaboration, and delivering meaningful value rapidly. In contrast, DOGE’s disruption is characterized by lack of understanding, closed-door decision-making, superficial agility and eroded government capabilities. “Rather than making government more efficient,” that post continues, “their actions dismantle agencies' ability to perform the very services they were designed to provide to help the American public.”

Resilience, not "optimization"

The value of resilience, rather than “optimization,” is laid out by Brian Klaas in an early January post. He makes the argument at multiple levels, writing that both in larger social terms and our individual lives, “we are over-optimized, courting disaster because we are deliberately slicing away the sinews that make ourselves and our world sturdier.” 

He pointed to the example of the Ever Given container ship, which was hit by a gust of wind in the Suez Canal in 2021 and got wedged sideways between the canal banks. That blocked the pipeline for 12% of global trade, at a cost estimated at $73 billion. By contrast, when a power cable linking Estonia and Finland was severed in December 2024, it took several months to repair but caused no blackouts. “Unlike the Suez Canal incident, the Estonian power grid was resilient, able to withstand an unexpected blow,” Klaas notes. 

On a more philosophical level, Klaas writes that it’s a “tragic mistake” to believe that “'survival of the fittest’ — with overtones of relentless, flawless optimization” fairly describes evolutionary principles. “A hyper-optimized species that can only survive in one environment will get wiped out if that environment changes,” he notes, and “lasting species are defined not by optimal solutions, but by 'good enough' ones. It’s not survival of the perfectly optimized, but survival of the resilient, as only the most robust inherit the Earth.”

The argument for resilience applies at all levels, but is even important for government than for business. A failed business will be replaced by more successful competitors; a failed government is a societal catastrophe. We can’t tolerate optimization as a core principle of government, without putting ourselves — and the shared democratic values government is supposed to protect — at great risk. 

Empowering decision-makers 

I noted above that USDS and 18F were unable to make “big changes,” and surely we’d want a progressive DOGE to do more. I want to draw on two sources of ideas about that, both discussed by Farrell in a post last year about Dan Davies' book "The Unaccountability Machine" (published this month in the U.S.). The first is the stream of thought going back to Ross Ashby known as “management cybernetics,” which Davies clarifies. Most crucial is Ashby’s “Principle of Requisite Variety,” which argues that we live in a complex world which produces successive waves of variety, which come with many surprises. To anticipate and manage those, Farrell explains that you need complex systems built into your organization, which must be "as complex as the system that you’re trying to manage."

There are two main strategies: First is “attenuation” of the variety of environment, such that “that the system produces fewer possible states of the world to be anticipated or managed.” In other words, fewer and more manageable surprises. Second is “amplification” of the variety within your organization so it “better matches the variety of the environment.” That often means  “building better feedback loops through which different bits of the organization can negotiate with each other over unexpected problems.” 

As Davies makes clear in a discussion in the Niskanen Center’s Hypertext newsletter, he sees management cybernetics as a remedy to the problem of outsourced government functions, which has resulted in a “decentralized” bureaucracy that “is a disaster in terms of accountability while failing to deliver the goods in terms of efficiency.” 

Farrell also more briefly discusses a second source of ideas, Jennifer Pahlka’s book "Recoding America," which offers, he says, “an applied informational theory of the state”:

Jen argues that we need to move away from top down decision making, to systems that will allow bureaucrats a lot more autonomy. She frames her argument for change in terms of “agile” software design. … The solutions that Jen emphasizes — bringing policy design and implementation into much closer contact; identifying bottlenecks and chokepoints; allowing people far greater flexibility to do needed stuff towards the shared end goal, even if no one anticipated this stuff was needed — are just the kinds of solutions that a cybernetician would press for too.

Politics and power

As Margaret Levi notes in an online discussion of Davies’ book, it advocates “improved communication,” which is surely important, but largely avoids questions of “politics and power.” Farrell agrees, noting that the "cybernetic vision" will work best “in a world of less unequal power relations…. Power relations are about many things, including basic human dignity and autonomy. But they are also about information, in the sense that systems with horribly unequal power relations are extremely unlikely to have good feedback.”

A progressive version of DOGE would require either a more equitable political environment or, more likely, it would work to create one by increasing the decision-making power of ordinary citizens and literally empowering the powerless. Doing that will require a clearer understanding of what government already does — and what more it can do. 

I’ve written previously about the use of Athenian-style citizens’ assemblies to make governmental decisions. These assemblies are chosen by lot from the citizenry at large and deliberate on matters of policy, much as trial juries deliberate on matters of civil or criminal liability. These remain largely experimental or hypothetical, but represent an instructive ideal we can keep in mind when considering other forms of public engagement and how they might be improved. 

Federal, state and local governments already allow for citizen input in a variety of different ways — public comments, stakeholder groups, advisory committees, citizen initiatives, town halls, etc. One task for a progressive DOGE could be a systemic review of all such bodies with the aim of making them truly effective, both in giving citizens more say and in solving the problems they’re meant to address.  

One common form of public engagement is the public-comment phase of regulatory rule-making or other decision-making processes. On the federal level, they are broadly required by the Administration Procedures Act. Recently, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that his department would end this practice on regulations affecting government benefits and grants, including National Institutes of Health funding. An activist, progressive DOGE could either veto such an autocratic action outright or force Kennedy to justify it in federal court. It should be obvious to almost everyone, regardless of party politics, that true government effectiveness should make it easier for citizens to comment, rather than easier for political appointees to ignore them.

Empowering the powerless

While enhancing the power of citizens should be a major concern, it’s not enough to address concerns of unequal power. Consider the history of Colorado Basin water management, discussed by Levi in the forum mentioned above: Throughout the process, those with more power gained and those with less lost. Land and water rights were taken from Native Americans and apportioned to white settlers, but in turn most of the small farmers failed, “and the result was the agglomeration of land by wealthier farmers,” Levi notes. As competition for water intensified, “demands by powerful farmers and urbanites drove costly infrastructure projects such as dams. The ultimate result was the draining of the Colorado River Basin.”

This was a story of successive unjust decisions, which appear obvious in hindsight. Undoing any particular injustice along the way appeared difficult or impossible, and allowing them to accumulate ultimately contributed to an unequal and increasingly unsustainable status quo. The Bible offers a solution for this: the tradition of Jubilee, a 50-year ritual of debt forgiveness, land restoration and the emancipation of slaves and indentured servants. Of course we can't return to Mosaic law, but there’s evident wisdom here: People’s futures should not be foreclosed forever because of past injustice. 

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Debt forgiveness is a powerful concept with a long history in many cultures and traditions, but the larger issue is redressing the dramatically unequal distribution of power. If we can’t accomplish that, we’re headed for social catastrophe, as forecast in Peter Turchin’s "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration" (Salon review here), based on the evidence of hundreds of civilizational cycles. Turchin argues that the greatest problem repeatedly facing human civilizations is the creation of a perverse "wealth pump" that siphons money away from the common people and redistributes it upward, to the rich. One way or another, that pump must be shut off or reversed; otherwise the result is social breakdown, civil war, even national destruction. One in five civilizations succeeds in such a reversal, as the U.S. during the Great Depression. But the odds of doing it again aren’t in our favor.  

There’s no silver bullet available, although raising taxes on the rich and raising the minimum wage would help a great deal. Typically, such major change requires an ensemble of different measures, motivated by changes in attitude that reflect widespread recognition of the dangers. Our progressive anti-DOGE could help find solutions and then help build consensus around them. In recent history, we've seen numerous potentially popular progressive initiatives be sidelined, suppressed or watered down through a combination of conservative fear-mongering and establishment resistance. 

Consider the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, far and away the largest wave of public demonstrations in American history, representing a mass awakening to historic, systemic injustice and a desire to redress it. What happened since then offers clear evidence that our political system is set up to thwart such awakenings of conscience. That’s the opposite of how an effective democratic government should operate — it should welcome an honest reckoning with history, reform of the criminal justice system and effective alternatives to mass incarceration. 

Something is profoundly wrong when the country that defines itself as a beacon of freedom has 20% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s population. Effective democracy would involve learning from other countries that do a much better job protecting public safety without sending millions of people to prison. 

Reality and realism

In March, Renée DiResta wrote that “internet fantasies have become a sufficient pretext for crippling the government,” citing Elon Musk’s claim that “There are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” which was rapidly debunked but still made it into Trump’s address to Congress. If fantasy is the lifeblood of DOGE, then reality must be the lifeblood of a progressive alternative— especially one that prioritizes effectiveness. Three principles follow from this.

First, what government actually does must be made visible and legible to the American public. Over a decade ago, Suzanne Mettler’s book “The Submerged State” revealed that Americans often don’t recognize what government does, even if they directly benefit from it.

“Until political leaders reveal government benefits for what they are by talking openly about them, we cannot have an honest discussion about spending, taxes or deficits,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed at the time. “The threat to democracy today is not the size of government but rather the hidden form that so much of its growth has taken. If those who assume government has never helped them could see how it has, it might help defuse our polarized political climate and reinvigorate informed citizenship.” This should be a major part of the mission for a left alternative to DOGE. 

But realism also requires recognizing that there is significant government waste — not due to inefficiency or waste in the Republican sense, but because political power too often serves private ends. In December, Krugman cited the example of Medicare Advantage, which may overbill as much as $140 billion a year, a result of privatization and politics, rather than inefficiency. 

Another huge source of waste is military spending. In 2016, for example, the Pentagon buried its own study that revealed $125 billion in bureaucratic waste. That’s the kind of wasted expenditure Musk claims to be rooting out, but it exists largely because of the immense political power of the military-industrial complex. And there’s more: Katerina Canyon of the Guardian described a range of major spending problems ignored by DOGE, including “failed weapons programs [the $1.7 trillion F-35, originally budgeted at $200 billion], an overreliance on private contractors [almost half of all military spending], unnecessary nuclear expansion [$756 billion through 2032] and a Pentagon budget so massive that it has never passed an audit.” No other government department has any comparable problems, which are direct results of the growing power that Dwight Eisenhower warned against 65 years ago.

Finally, there’s the cost of inaction against climate catastrophe, which could destroy the global economy, as mentioned above. As far back as 2004, another buried Pentagon report argued that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.” Given the Pentagon’s problems just described, it’s not surprising the report was essentially suppressed and there’s been little or no follow-through. A progressive DOGE would make sure that such gross failures would never happen again. 

As I said earlier, I’m not proposing a democratic alternative to DOGE, but rather some foundational ideas: We need to start by appreciating what already works, strive for resilience rather than optimization, adopt a management-cybernetics approach to empowering government decision-makers and confront the barriers of unequal political power. That last task is by far the most challenging. We must empower citizens in general, and the most powerless among us in particular, and we must commit ourselves to realism. It’s a tall order, to be sure.  But it’s a rewarding opportunity to move away from what we’re against, and focus on building a shared future we can support.