For more than 15 years, I have been a practitioner of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), the discipline of making software reliable, scalable, and adaptable. As an employee, advisor, and investor, I’ve worked with software companies ranging from five-employee startups to behemoths like Google/Alphabet.
In the wake of the chaotic launch of President Obama’s healthcare.gov initiative, many of my Google colleagues volunteered for the all-hands-on-deck effort to fix it and for the United States Digital Service (USDS) organization that came afterwards and brought industry experts into government. When they returned from their assignments, they impressed upon their colleagues how crucial it was that government systems stay reliable. One United States Digital Service alum shared with us that if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) delayed in submitting its list of approved reimbursements by just 48 hours, it could shave several percent from the US GDP for that year as hospitals failed to make payroll and doctors’ offices closed.
I have taken risks and gotten egg on my face for breaking production as an enthusiastic but inexperienced developer. But the only damage was to my ego; no one was harmed because I worked within the bounds of change control, and our systems at Google had sufficient safeguards to undo my mistakes. Unfortunately, government financial systems are not nearly as forgiving, and the methods that young DOGE engineer [Marko Elez] has reportedly employed to make changes directly to live environments without testing or review go far beyond the pale, in my opinion, even for the “move fast and break things” community epitomized by the early Facebook.
Individual engineers experimenting directly upon real, live systems without first validating their changes or seeking peer review violates every best practice for controlling risk in the industry. Elon Musk says he wants to run the government more like a business, but no business operates this way.
If and when one of DOGE’s changes—or an unforeseen interaction between its code and normal business processes—triggers a malfunction, all payments could fail to be disbursed—not just those that Elon Musk and President Trump disapprove of, but to all payees and creditors of the United States…. This scenario is orders of magnitude worse than the potential Medicare payment delay that my Google colleagues worked to avert as United States Digital Service volunteers during the Affordable Care Act rollout.
Americans may have voted to reduce government waste, but they certainly did not vote to roll the dice on a catastrophic collapse of our economic system.