■ In this week’s Backchannel:A small, influential team is cooking up a plan to reverse Trump’s DOGE damage and make the US government better serve its citizens. One hitch: it only works if Democrats win the White House in 2028.
The past year has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team’s former coders, designers, and UX experts have watched in horror as Donald Trump rebranded the service as DOGE, effectively forced out its staff, and employed a strike force of young and reckless engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of the Trump initiative triggered envy in tech reformers: the Trump administration’s fearlessness in upending generations of cruft and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used that decisiveness and clout in service of the people instead of following the murky agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?
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