Trump just rebranded the U.S. Digital Service as ‘DOGE’
President Donald Trump has brought the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to life—simply by renaming an existing government agency.
The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) is now known as DOGE, due to executive order Trump signed Monday that renamed the executive branch’s technology agency. The USDS website has not been updated at time of writing. A landing page at doge.gov displays its new logo, featuring a puppy holding an American flag.
The order states that federal agencies will each establish their own DOGE teams made up of a team leader, engineer, human resources specialist, and attorney who will coordinate with the USDS administrator. That administrator is tasked with starting a software modernization initiative “to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems” and “promote inter-operability” between agencies, according to the order.
In short, the administration is co-opting USDS’s brand and infrastructure to form DOGE. This now makes DOGE as a concept sound less like the groundbreaking, red tape-cutting initiative first conceived than it does USDS under new name with a mission to improve the federal government’s IT. Fast Company reached out to USDS asking if there is a plan to merge the two sites, and it did not respond to request to comment by time of publication.
A PLAN TO IMPROVE EFFICIENCY, TEN YEARS AND GOING
USDS originally launched in 2014 during former President Barack Obama’s administration, and created standards to guide federal web design. It also worked to overhaul the federal government’s 26,000 websites and cut through longstanding digital bureaucracy. Former President Joe Biden, meanwhile, launched the U.S. Digital Corps in 2021 to recruit young tech talent into government.
There are ways that the department could deliver on its mission to make government leaner and more cost-efficient through improvements to its tech and web infrastructure—say, by making the delivery of social security more efficient and less onerous. But to make services more efficient, you need great people and great tech. Whether that happens remains to be seen.
DOGE’S EVOLUTION
Already, DOGE has taken on a different form than its original chairs, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, first envisioned. (The name itself was a bit of a misnomer, as only Congress has the power to crate new government departments.) Musk and Ramaswamy had previously said in a November Wall Street Journal op-ed that DOGE would be an outside advisory group, which would recommend government reforms and $500 billion in annual spending cuts.
But in that form, DOGE already faced lawsuits. One group alleged that, as an outside advisory group, it operated as a federal advisory committee in violation of federal law. DOGE, as it’s described in the executive order, gets around that by becoming an official government agency. (Ramaswamy has also left DOGE as he pursues a run for Ohio governor.)
Musk responded to a post on X about the executive order establishing DOGE, writing “Legit.”
