The Office of Personnel Management was taken over by Elon Musk
A Political OPM: Amanda Scales, the Boring Company Chief of Staff and an Overview of Musk’s Top Plan to Take Over Twitter
Centibillionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the former US Digital Service—now the United States DOGE Service—has been widely publicized and sanctioned by one of President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. WIRED reports show that Musk’s influence goes further and further into a government agency.
Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, was an important member of Musk’s harebrained plan to take over Twitter in 2022, and he is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE.
The new OPM chief of staff is named, according to some reports, a woman named Amanda Scales. She used to work at x Artificial intelligence, a company co-founded by Musk. She was part of the talent and operations at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.
According to Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at University of Michigan, the plan to monitor and enforce loyalty has not changed since the first term.
With a New Home for Digital Service in the White House, Here’s What You Need to Know: A Doge Unified States Digital Service elon-musk Trump White House eop-omb
Customer satisfaction with the social security administration website has been increased by the new USDS annual report because of the simplification of language.
Over the last four years, the office has worked with more than 30 agencies on a number of projects ranging from urgent action items to long-term changes of digital systems, according to Mina Hsiang.
Private sector design and technology experts have been recruited to work with federal agencies on projects that make public-facing parts of the government more efficient, modern and user-friendly.
The USDS launched in 2014 by the Obama administration in the aftermath of the botched rollout of HeathCare.gov as an office to boost the digital capabilities of the federal government.
Pahlka said the office was founded “to meet the public’s expectations, or help the agencies meet these raised expectations of the public,” when it comes to digital presence.
One thing that seems obvious is that the formerly behind-the-scenes office is likely to be more in the spotlight, according to a senior fellow at Niskanen Center.
Additionally, the new USDS office is tasked with a “Software Modernization Initiative” to update software, network and IT infrastructure across the federal government. There’s still a lot that’s unknown about DOGE but there is now more insight into what it may look like moving forward.
The new DOGE teams haven’t been put in place, it’s not clear how Musk will operate in relation to the USDS, and Trump hasn’t yet named an administrator for the retooled office.
A proposed commission with a sweeping mandate to shrink federal bureaucracy and slash government spending now has a new home — and a more efficient mandate, as President Trump continues to turn campaign promises into actual policy.
Source: With a new home for DOGE in the White House, here’s what you need to know
What YOU NEED TO KNOW AT THE NEW HOME FOR DOGE IN THE WHITE HELLA — INVESTIGATION PROOPERATION, AND TECHNOLOGICAL APPROACH
It also highlighted the rollout of an Internal Revenue Service pilot to file taxes online for free and ongoing efforts to modernize the Department of Veterans Affairs and make it easier for veterans to access their health care benefits.
Hsiang adds that focusing on spending cuts without addressing things like Congressional oversight and regulation of how agencies operate won’t lead to success.
“One thing that I’m looking for is how quickly do they learn and sort of challenge their own prior assumptions?” she added. “Because everybody who goes into government thinks that it’s going to be easy to fix and everyone finds out that it is a lot harder than they thought because we have made government very, very complex.”
They will find that the questions that they think are easy to answer aren’t and the systems are the way they’re not, because it’s hard to see outside.
Hsiang and Pahlka both said the continued success of the USDS under its new mandate can only happen if the conversation with federal agencies continues to be viewed as a two-way street, and if the new leadership takes the time to understand why the inefficiencies exist in the first place.
She said that the people might be laid off if she redeployed them in higher value work. “The end result of both, though, is a kind of change that government has needed for a long time.”
Many parts of the federal government may be able to be done with computers and technology in a way that is more user-friendly, freeing up time and resources to focus on other things.
“DOGE is positioning itself — and we’ll see if this really plays out — as having far more power than USDS has traditionally did in the past, say, three administrations,” she said.
Source: With a new home for DOGE in the White House, here’s what you need to know
Elon Musk Is Running the Twitter Playbook on the Federal Government: a response to Trump’s “Resign me I” email
“There are digital transformation people in agencies now, and there always have been,” Pahlka noted. “They tend to struggle, they tend to be swimming upstream, given how risk-averse government is and how hard it is to change the culture to sort of shed the legacy thinking and the legacy ways of working.”
Elon Musk is only one week into his role in President Donald Trump’s new administration, but the US federal government is already rolling out the Twitter playbook to manage its spending and personnel. While Musk reduced the number of government employees, Trump is trying to keep those who remain loyal to the president.
Federal employees are being asked to send an email with the word ” Resign” in the subject line within the next 10 days. The president of the American Federation of Government Employees stated that the policies of the federal government will cause chaos because it will be forced to depend on dedicated career civil servants. “This offer should not be viewed as voluntary. Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”
“The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work,” reads the email, which was later published on the US Office of Personnel Management website. “Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward.”
Source: Elon Musk Is Running the Twitter Playbook on the Federal Government
Twitter vs. Silicon Valley: How CEOs Met Their Goals to Prevent Disruption at the TWELVE Symposium in December 2015
Musk and his advisors, including Trump’s newly appointed AI and crypto czar David Sacks, used a remarkably similar strategy at Twitter. Half of the workforce was laid off after the acquisition was complete. Sacks helped advise him on which teams and people would be cut.
About two weeks later, remaining employees received an email with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” Musk said that they would need to be “extremely hardcore” in order to realize his vision for Twitter 2.0. Working long hours at high intensity meant it. He noted that “only exceptional performance” would receive “a passing grade.” Employees were asked to opt into this vision via a web form. Anyone who failed to do so by the following day would receive three months severance, Musk said. Thousands of Twitter employees would later sue, arguing that they were not paid their full severance. The suit was dismissed by Musk.
“We are shaking our heads in disbelief, at how similar this is to what we did before,” says Zhou, a former principal engineer at twitter. In terms of spending, hiring, and firing, the federal government and its employees have specific laws.
