Interview by Pakman of Merici Vinton, architect of IRS DirectFile. From the transcript (touched up slightly:
How does Doge first make its presence known in your day to day work?
[VINTON] [2:07] We didn’t know that USDS was going to turn in the US DOGE service. And that evening, so it was the evening of inauguration, we got invitations to meet our new DOGE colleagues. [2:18] We were told that everyone is really excited to meet us. And so the next day, [2:23] the first day of the administration, all [United States Digital Service (USDS)] employees were brought in for [2:27] 15-minute interviews with DOGE. And that was our first acknowledgement that, oh, okay, so this [2:33] is our first set of interactions. Beyond that, there wasn’t a lot of involvement in the work. [2:40] And actually that kind of remained true for the majority of the, you know, so that was January, [2:46] I left in March. The majority of time, there was not a lot of engagement, although it did pick up [2:52] around mid-February when Amy Gleason stepped in as the acting administrator of Doge. That’s [2:58] kind of when, you now, priorities became clear and the things that they wanted us to work on.
What were the priorities at DOGE [3:03] and what were those things and kind of how, how, what sort of impact did that have on your day-to-day?
[3:11] The way that I think about this actually is it’s almost like there’s different Doges, [3:17] almost like different cells. So the US Digital Service doge, a lot of the work is roughly the [3:25] same just with more engineers and fewer designers because they fired a lot of our designers. So [3:32] people were still working on stuff with the State Department on passport renewals and things like [3:37] that. There was still a DirectFile team working on IRS projects. Just again, the makeup of that [3:44] team had changed because Doge wanted it to be more engineers and they fired a bunch of people [3:49] on Valentine’s Day. But then there’s probably the more public facing Doge, which is the individuals [3:56] that go ransack federal agencies. And there was no kind of overlap of former USDS into Doge [4:03] colleagues that went and joined those efforts. It was- it was- almost two separate efforts.
Was there a honeymoon period [4:10] When this started, was there a time where you thought, oh, this genuinely does seem [4:17] like a good faith effort to make government more efficient, more, more efficient to find [4:22] and root out inefficiencies?….
[4:28] I think back to the Office Space movie, where the consultants come in. And there’s this brief moment [4:33] where it’s like, maybe these consultants are going to be great for the employees here before [4:37] syou learn that they’re there to find people to lay off.
Office Space reference:
Comment from @empiric12135:
1. Break everything
2. Wait for the public to realize things don’t work when broken
3. Offer private for-profit solution to broken things on behalf of yourself
4. Profit!
IOW, the neoliberal playbook.
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