In late November, the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) quietly disbanded months forward of schedule, with senior officers confirming that the company “not exists” in any centralized type. Its finish marks not solely the collapse of a extensively publicized initiative however one of many best missed alternatives of the Trump administration. At a second when synthetic intelligence was reworking practically each main trade, the federal authorities had a uncommon likelihood to reinvent itself. As an alternative, it stepped backward.
When DOGE launched in January 2025, President Donald Trump appointed Elon Musk — a worldwide expertise determine — as this system’s superstar face. With its rhetoric of trillion-dollar financial savings and sweeping modernization, DOGE may have turn out to be essentially the most formidable public-sector innovation venture in American historical past. But as a substitute of utilizing Musk’s technological experience — and particularly synthetic intelligence — to modernize federal operations, streamline public companies, and construct a brand new digital basis for presidency, DOGE rapidly devolved into old-school mass layoffs and headline-friendly cuts. Estimates from McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and the OECD counsel that 40% to 60% of all jobs might be reshaped by AI, however the administration traded a once-in-a-generation modernization alternative for a chainsaw.
DOGE’s most dramatic motion was the firing of an estimated 280,000 federal staff in a matter of months. This created the impression of sudden effectivity, but it surely mirrored a deeper strategic failure: DOGE selected subtraction over transformation. Packages that had been ripe for AI augmentation — veterans’ claims processing, Social Safety workflows, IRS casework, public-health analytics, fraud detection, and regulatory evaluate — weren’t redesigned or modernized. They had been merely downsized, usually in ways in which made the remaining work slower, costlier, and fewer safe. Businesses had been compelled to rehire most of the similar staff as contractors. Anti-fraud packages that recovered more cash than they value had been shut down totally. And when DOGE abruptly ended FDA and EPA user-fee packages, Congress needed to move emergency appropriations to maintain important operations operating. Essentially the most vital loss, nonetheless, was not monetary — it was the chance to make use of AI to rebuild authorities for the following era.
Reasonably than accelerating federal efficiency, DOGE slowed it down as companies confronted getting old methods, hovering service calls for, and quickly escalating cybersecurity threats. Complete cybersecurity groups had been dismantled simply as AI-powered assaults had been multiplying worldwide. Public disputes between Musk and senior officers — usually amplified throughout social media — additional undermined morale and belief. The disruption was damaging, however the deeper tragedy was the transformation that by no means even started.
This failure is very stark when contrasted with an earlier and way more profitable modernization effort. From 1993 to 2000, Vice President Al Gore led the Nationwide Partnership for Reinventing Authorities (NPR), the biggest and only authorities reform initiative of the fashionable period. NPR delivered verified, inflation-adjusted financial savings of roughly $300 billion, however its true success lay in how these financial savings had been achieved. Gore’s method was methodical quite than theatrical. NPR modernized processes, digitized operations, diminished administrative layers, strengthened customer support, and embedded reforms via bipartisan laws such because the Authorities Efficiency and Outcomes Act. Workforce modifications had been dealt with via attrition, early retirements, and voluntary buyouts — not mass firings — permitting reforms to be steady, sustainable, and non-polarizing. NPR constructed capability. DOGE dismantled it.
DOGE may have used its mandate to ask the world’s main AI organizations — OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta AI, Google Analysis, Microsoft AI, Amazon AWS AI, Apple AI, xAI, Mistral, Nvidia, and Cohere — to compete to unravel the federal government’s hardest operational challenges. Such a contest may have produced multilingual digital assistants for the American public, AI copilots for federal staff, superior fraud-detection engines able to saving billions, AI-accelerated code modernization instruments, stronger cybersecurity, and dramatically diminished backlogs throughout veterans’ companies, Social Safety, and tax processing. These instruments may have been interoperable, reusable, and transferable throughout each the private and non-private sectors. DOGE may have launched the primary AI-powered reinvention of the federal authorities — and as a substitute, it selected elimination over innovation.
By the point DOGE dissolved, the chance was gone. America was left with a federal workforce that was no more trendy, no more environment friendly, and in essential areas, considerably weaker. The demise of DOGE will not be essentially about missed value financial savings. It’s the story of a historic alternative squandered. Modernizing authorities doesn’t require chainsaws, superstar feuds, or ideological crusades. It requires imaginative and prescient, collaboration, technological experience, and respect for the institutional information essential to implement change responsibly. Above all, it requires a dedication to constructing.
Had DOGE embraced an AI-first technique, america may immediately be main the world in digital governance, providing sooner companies, safer methods, and extra clear operations. As an alternative, DOGE stands as a cautionary story — a reminder that spectacular claims aren’t any substitute for severe reform. As policymakers take into account the following chapter of presidency modernization, they’d do properly to check Al Gore’s quiet, sturdy NPR — and picture what is perhaps attainable if immediately’s most superior AI labs had been lastly invited to assist construct the way forward for American authorities.
Ed Gaskin is Government Director of Higher Grove Corridor Primary Streets and founding father of Sunday Celebrations
