Item — HN Reader

This is specifically about US Digital Service

This LinkedIn post says it's 33% of the USDS staff: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathankamens_around-50-us-d...

As someone who admired the USDS and had hoped to one day apply to them, this is very sad. It also makes me feel like DOGE is deeply unserious about their stated goal, because the US Digital Service staff is surely some of the most efficient money spent in government IT.

1 comments

Its not about efficiency of operations, its about efficiency of applied ideology, Musk and his cohorts' ideology to be more precise.

It's a pity, because it would be cool if it was what it proclaimed to be.

If it was what it proclaimed to be, from an IT point of view, I am guessing they could have done a lot of good work by growing the existing US Digital Service.

You can in fact grow a service through efficiency and structure - as opposed to just adding warm bodies … which seems to be what the government usually does!

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...

I don't know, according to this chart it looks like the size of the federal workforce is at 1986 levels despite US population growing by 100 million since then. Unless I'm missing some trickery in how the counting happens?

What do you base that claim on?