Dominic Cummings, An Underrated Precedent for DOGE

What Right-Wing Office of Personnel Management Reform Could Be, Unburdened by What Has Been

The recent news cycle around young DOGE hires reminded me of a conversation several years ago. The conversation is between

Dominic Cummings

and

steve hsu

, about the UK Government’s Data Science Team. Here is an important quote, edited for clarity.

But we declared the number 10 to date service team to be extremely successful, amazingly cheap, not very big as it shouldn't be. That sort of thing should be small and elite and then outside that we recruited some other people as well.

I mean we generally encouraged people to just go through the mainstream systems rather than to do it ad hoc. So a lot of the weirdos and misfits are regarded by the Civil Services as normal employees, which is also good.

The sad thing is that a lot of the very smartest people who came in most of them have left now. Because by definition, the people with the greatest number of options as to what to do, some of them have left and gone to the valley, inevitably, some of them have gone back to academia. And people like that, you know, they don't want to just sit in rubbish institutions watching things be closed out.

With Vivek Ramaswamy out of the picture, DOGE seems to be focused on streamlining payments and removing bureaucratic obstacles, both to efficiency and transparency. The legal structure for DOGE comes from the US Digital Service, a service with a similar purpose to Cummings’ Data Science Team.

Sec. 3. DOGE Structure. (a) Reorganization and Renaming of the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.

The UK’s rapid adaptation differs from the American bureaucracy’s resistance. Why?

There are several reasons. First, the UK has a more centralized political system, with the party controlling the House of Commons always controlling the Prime Ministership by definition. Secondly, these changes occurred during the Covid crisis period. Third, the UK had less transparent and overburdened hiring procedures. “We generally encouraged people to just go through the mainstream systems rather than to do it ad hoc,” Cummings said. This would not be possible in the American system.

Many of these obstacles are explained by

Jennifer Pahlka

in her book Recoding America. I’ve written about the book positively in American Mind. Pahlka has been reaching across the aisle with encouraging and genuinely merit-improving solutions:

But why do so many HR teams insist on a process that results in these unqualified candidates and the failure of half their hiring actions? Unhelpful and overly restrictive interpretations of the principle of equity collide with large candidate pools to create a decidedly inequitable and inefficient process.

…

SME-QA is one example of the seeds of change Mr. Kupor has to work with as he takes on leadership of OPM. These seeds, and the people who champion them, need water, sunlight, and fertilizer. SME-QA started over five years ago, and it hasn’t meaningfully scaled. OPM and GSA published data in 2020 that show that 90% of competitive jobs rely entirely on resume screens and self-assessments. The number of hiring actions that use SME-QA is still quite small, and is unlikely to have moved that overall number at all. Progress is painfully slow, in part because no one has tackled the underlying conditions: the control HR staff have over the creation of the cert that excludes the judgement of the hiring manager, the difficult and finicky processes that make assessments far more time-consuming than they are in the private sector, the unreasonable and unhelpful rigidity of the entire process.

Elon’s bet is that radical changes to OPM, GAO, and OMB are a prerequisite for enabling basic, bipartisan talent reforms at scale — something Pahlka may not entirely agree with. Coming from a more right-wing perspective, I would double down on Elon and Cummings’ approach. I believe significant civil service reforms are necessary even to get to the position Cummings’ was in prior to starting the Data Science Team. As I wrote last year,

There is a misconception that fundamental reforms such as Schedule F are synonymous with grand ideological change. In reality, fundamental reforms are necessary for a goal as simple as increasing government competence with software. Prematurely taking them off the table will make even a moderate good governance agenda impossible.

Of course, other intellectual and practical lineages, such as Curtis Yarvin, Steve Bannon, and Elon himself remain important. They’re close to correctly rated at this point.