We shouldn’t deal with bullies. Recently, Jen Pahlka wrote a blog post where she states:

“I am going to give Elon and Vivek the benefit of the doubt that some of you may not be so generous to extend: that they don’t actually want to destroy everything they see, despite the rhetoric, that they are willing to break some things in the short term for the promise of building something leaner, more focused, and less kludgy in the long run”

100% disagree with Pahlka here. I’m not giving DOGE any grace whatsoever. DOGE is not a good faith effort. Any benefit of the doubt evaporated when Musk started using X to bully individual civil servants. 

For context, this is not the first time Musk has bullied people using X – The Verge notes that this is a pattern – I hadn’t seen one hot take about anyone being surprised by this.  

They’ve said “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” – What does it say about our field if we’re taking the side of the bullies? I am not here for that. There’s a difference between wanting to overhaul policy and making public servants miserable.

When people tell you who they are, believe them. We don’t need to show any generosity to somebody who is getting billions in taxpayer dollars only to turn around and harass civil servants. 

And let’s be clear, you don’t need to harass employees to make this work. The PPBE Reform Commission was a yearslong bipartisan effort to reform the way that DOD does budget planning which is about half of the US federal discretionary budget. It’s GREAT and meets a lot of the goals of the reformers – Take that and just slap your dog sticker on it. Problem solved. 

I suspect that a lot of this is aimed at hollowing out the government so that agencies will be forced to subcontract everything to private companies – which will make a lot of rich people even more money.  And that works in the exact opposite direction of the goals of #civictech which has been to bring talent in so that they can call bullshit when private companies try to bamboozle them. DOGE is also problematic in several other ways that other experts in public administration and law  have pointed out at length including Don Moynihan – go read his stuff.

But I’m not making a policy argument here – I’m making a values argument. And that argument is that #civictech has no business working with bullies.