> yes lots of cybersecurity experts were black hat hackers at one point

It makes some sense to hire a former blackhat to secure your computers, with appropriate supervision. It's a lot less reasonable to hire a former blackhat to get into your own computer and treasury systems to run audits. I could almost buy an argument like "If you have a legal right to get in but the door is locked, you hire a locksmith to crack the lock. So they needed hackers to take control of the systems away from obstructionists." But you would then send the locksmith home, not have them root through all the records in the building and decide who to fire.

> At one point Obama had then-VP Biden in charge of government efficiency efforts utilizing USDS to do it: literally the DOGE playbook with a different name, except the person in charge now actively wants to have fewer federal employees.

Could you provide more information on Biden's nominal assignment, and what exactly he was supposed to make more efficient? I couldn't find it by Googling, as everything is about DOGE now.

Anyway, on USDS in general. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service:

> It provides consultation services to federal agencies on information technology. The agency's 2014 mandate was to improve and simplify digital service, and to improve federal websites.[7][8][9] The mission of the agency is to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design."

I could agree that these could be termed "efficiency", but clearly they are very different from the goals of DOGE. USDS had a 2016 value statement that included "Hire and empower great people." So yeah, they didn't reduce the government headcount, as it wasn't their goal and that's not the only way to deliver "efficiency" or government improvement.

The Obama origins are a historical footnote and possibly done this way by Trump for legal expediency reasons. But USDS and DOGE have basically nothing else in common. Most of the USDS staff were fired, their mission statement is replaced. You're holding USDS accountable to DOGE's goals, when USDS didn't share those goals. In 2024 USDS reported "$285 million in projected estimated savings over five years in infrastructure expenses for the Social Security Administration" according to Wikipedia, so it's not like they were allergic to saving money, they just didn't do it by axing the bureaucracy.

You can think DOGE is better or more effective than USDS if you want, but it's partisan distraction to claim they are nominally doing the same work.

Here's some more information about the differences between the original USDS and DOGE: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/05/trump-doge-obama/