After officially ceasing operations this past July, the Department of Government Efficiency is now the subject of two competing books. Michael Lewis’s Blockersintroduces us to six righteous deep state rebels, featuring in breathless tones “one story of the high-stakes D.C. standoff where security chief Colin O’Brien fought off DOGE operatives.”
Tyler Hassen’s Inside DOGE is a look at the U.S. Department of Interior, is less prosaic but more illuminating “18 different chief Inside DOGE information officers and more than 2,000 IT staffers across a department of 65,000 employees.”
In my 30 years as a federal employee I saw both sides of this dynamic – the dedicated Fed and the feckless bureaucracy - culminating in the January 2025 collision between the permanent establishment and move-fast tech bros. Even my own job was swept up in the upheaval occasioned by, in Lewis’s endearing terms, “Muskrats.”
Missed in all the heated commentary on both sides is that DOGE, whatever it’s excesses, was simply following up on what has been publicly available for three decades: The High-Risk List produced by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).
When I was a Capitol Hill staffer in 1990, there were 14 items on the High-Risk List. A decade I was a senior executive at GAO: 22. When a Presidential appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, 28. When I was a civil servant Fed at FDA in 2026, 38 items.
Federal civil servants might not know the specifics of this government-wide disarray but like me, virtually all have witnessed – and been frustrated by – small and large examples of the dysfunction and institutional inertia that DOGE perhaps inexpertly highlighted. Many instances are comic; alas, some are tragic.
Close to home are two of my experiences:
Six weeks into my job at FDA, a 23-year-old McKinsey & Company associate met with me seeking a “robust dialogue on cultural transformation in your space.” Stifling my surprise at a high-end firm hired by my superiors, I told her I was new to the space and thus robustly uninformed. Later, that same McKinsey contract with FDA figured in a $650 million settlement with U.S. Department of Justice; the company was simultaneously working with Purdue Pharma to transform the “culture” of FDA's drug safety monitoring
regarding OxyContin.
Readers may recall the infant formula crisis several years, sparked by a whistleblower complaint regarding unsanitary conditions at an Abbott Laboratories plant. In October of 2021, said whistleblower sent separate registered letters to seven FDA executives. As the HHS Inspector General later reported, “due to an isolated failure in FDA mailroom,” the agency’s chief food safety executive didn’t receive his letter until March of 2022. This after two infants died and others were hospitalized because of the tainted formula. Cultural change and mailrooms – where were our rebels then?
The daily and weekly absurdities were smaller: A 25-character tweet on a timely public health issue spending a week in “high-level clearance”; day-long leadership and DEI contractor seminars at which were asked to “lean in and embrace synergistic narrative fusions in the collaboration sandbox.” Check.
Then the saga known to every Fed: Never-ending office churns. The looming “ReOrgs”, sometimes the “ReInvention,” “ReAlignment” or my favorite, the Alice-in Wonderland “ReImaginings.” I had seven separate supervisors in my first year at FDA. Imagine that.
Sure, these experiences and others drove my colleagues and me nuts. But as many knew but few would acknowledge, they were manifestations of a larger bureaucratic complacency that was ripe for DOGE.
Two of most significant and enduring items on the High-Risk List are Improper Payments, including Medicare, Medicaid and government IT modernization (Hassen’s example). GAO says agencies have reported $2.8 trillion in estimated improper payments since 2003.
In fact, DOGE’s most durable legacy is in this arena. Eight months ago the “Muskrats” dumped Medicaid’s largest data set into the HHS Open Data platform, crowd-sourcing fraud and whistleblower claims, the proactive program integrity that led Secretary Kennedy and CMS Administrator OZ earlier this year to withhold $867 million from the California and $199 from Minnesota Medicaid programs. Vice-President JD Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is based on these same DOGE principles.
I know Lewis and Hassen are both right about one thing: many Fed workers are earnest and worthy. But the American public – and even the skeptics – should understand that it was only the chaotic energy of DOGE that forced the Federal bureaucracy to finally confront GAO’s High-Risk realities.
