Reinventing The Wheel, With Corruption Added

 

TechDirt gives us an under-the-radar example of how the Malignant Fascist's regime is busy reinventing yet another wheel that Elon Musk's DOGE broke, of course with a corrupt twist.  Welcome to the "Tech Force"!

Here’s a fun game the Trump administration keeps playing: destroy a successful government program, wait a few months, then breathlessly announce you’ve “invented” the exact same thing but with obvious corruption mechanisms baked in.

Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new “Tech Force”—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade. You know, until Elon Musk and DOGE gleefully fired the entire 18F team in March and gutted USDS into a husk of what it once was.

USDS and 18F were genuine success stories. Obama-era programs that brought engineers from Silicon Valley into government to help all Americans by modernizing creaking federal systems. [snip]

That institutional knowledge, that decade of learning what works and what doesn’t, that careful balance between public service and private sector expertise? All gone. Torched by Musk as part of his faux “efficiency” crusade earlier this year.

And now they’re reinventing it. Badly. I used to joke that the Elon Musk Twitter era was all about throwing out all of Twitter’s carefully thought out ideas and then bringing them back in a dumber, more dangerous way. This seems like that, but in the federal government.  [snip]

The value of tech expertise in government is real. That’s why USDS and 18F existed and succeeded for over a decade. What made those programs work was their careful construction to minimize conflicts while maximizing the transfer of knowledge and expertise.

This isn’t that. This is a hastily rebuilt version of a program they deliberately destroyed, now run by political appointees from the very industries that will benefit, with explicit mechanisms that invite corruption. They gutted the institutional knowledge, fired the people who knew how to do this right, and replaced it with a system where people from private companies get guaranteed access to government data and decision-making through employees who are explicitly planning to return to those same companies.

That doesn’t seem like innovation. It seems much more like regulatory capture with better branding and a cool “force” name.  (our emphasis)

Remember how cutting spending by rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse was the purported target of the ignorant DOGE vandals who rampaged through the Federal Government last Spring and Summer?  What they didn't tell us was that they were creating waste, fraud, and abuse. 

Looking at the bigger picture, the DOGE amateur hour resulted in 270,000 Federal employees losing their jobs either through reduction in force, firing, or early retirement.  We don't know how many private sector jobs depending on government work and workers were lost as well.  At the same time, government spending has increased 6 percent (looking at Homeland Security and DOJ).  Elect a clown, get a circus.

(Photo: a stupid person's idea of a smart person)