What DOGE Can Learn From Robert McNamara

Nothing about a youthful group of unorthodox government workers coming to DC armed with a disruptive mandate for change is new. In the early 1960s, Defense Secretary Robert S McNamara’s “Whiz kids” were a very similar group of system wreckers who also attracted anger and frustration from the military officers then in charge of the Pentagon. The DC power structure of the 1960s underwent a change, as young PhDs in their early thirties were empowered by a new presidential administration to boss senior generals and admirals around.

The entry of the Whiz Kids into the DC bureaucracy built the bureaucracies that exist down to the present day. Just as the Whiz Kids fundamentally changed government during the twentieth-century industrial age with tools gained from elite university educations, can today’s DOGE team remake government in the image of their Silicon Valley tech startup origins, with far-reaching effects over the twenty-first-century Digital Age?

Like the DOGE analysts who have come from the world of software engineering and computers, the Whiz Kids came from outside Washington, DC to impose a new regime on the nation’s defense organization.

The Whiz Kids returned to academia, business, think tanks, and other nonprofits, developing second- and third-generations of successors who further populated government over the years.

The last remaining McNamara-era analysis organization in the Pentagon is the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office, under the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It was formerly known as the Program Assessment and Evaluation (PA&E) Office, which was first established in 1961. CAPE still exerts major influence over defense budgeting over 60 years after its founding. Defense budgeting is still governed by PPBS, and McNamara’s “government by expert analysis and data” has been one of the foundations of bureaucratic governance, extending far beyond the DOD. Some have called it a “dictatorship of data.”

While the immediate effect of DOGE may be jarring, there is also the possibility of long-term cost reduction and an improvement in the government’s ability to deliver the effects that voters desire. The British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke said, “The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.” This is playing out once again in the nation’s capital, with yet unseen but possibly hopeful results.