'DOGE' formally established under White House

Source: Roll Call

Posted January 21, 2025 at 8:04am


It’s official: There’s now a Department of Government Efficiency and it reports directly up to Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Trump late Monday issued an executive order — one of many Day 1 executive actions — formally establishing DOGE as an agency housed within the Executive Office of the President. The executive order in some ways upends the notion that DOGE would be nothing more than an unofficial advisory board with no formal role in the federal government. The group’s advertised streamlining and cost-cutting role would still be temporary, and actual policy decisions would have to be made by Congress, the agencies and higher-ups in the White House.

Nonetheless, housing the agency within an existing federal office could help deflect legal challenges that DOGE, as a private entity, was not abiding by federal transparency rules. Several suits filed Monday within minutes of Trump’s inauguration claim that under a 1972 law governing federal advisory committees, DOGE meetings and records should be available to the public and that the group’s members should represent a “fair balance in viewpoints.”

Instead of operating as an outside agency, DOGE is replacing the old U.S. Digital Service, a part of the Office of Management and Budget that President Barack Obama established in August 2014, staffed by information technology experts that helped fix initial glitches in rolling out the 2010 health care law’s exchange portal, HealthCare.gov.

The new DOGE appears to be keeping some of the old Digital Service’s mission, which is to “deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design,” according to its website. Trump’s executive order says the agency’s job will be to help implement his agenda by “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” But the similarities are likely to stop there for the new agency, which is keeping the “USDS” initials but is now officially called the “United States DOGE Service,” Trump’s order says.

Read more: https://rollcall.com/2025/01/21/doge-formally-established-under-white-house/