The one thing DOGE has done well -- the report card

The value of the DOGE effort is vastly overstated — see the WSJ and NYTimes assessments.

But DOGE has done something commendable — creating a public report card — with a lot of openness and clarity.  The underlying data may be full of problems, but the reporting is still highly useful.  Every government agency and project should make report cards available with this same openness and clarity. 

Let’s start with a little tour of some report cards.  

Report Cards

The DOGE report card is quite good.   It is clean, fast to load, makes good use of whitespace.   Each page has a clear goal.  Navigation around the pages is simple and always available.   Each page is focused on the bottom line for voters.   OK, it is riddled with errors, it shades the truth, and the whole effort is misdirected — but the report card itself is good.   My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t follow system settings for light/dark display.  

Now let’s contrast with the broadband buildout report card.  We established this program as part of the Biden-era Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which aims to deliver broadband internet nationwide.  Congrats to you if you can figure out how we are doing.   There is an attempt at a report card.   But it is full of jargon, it is overly long, there is no bottom-line info, it links out to many more pages with more jargon, and it links out to individual state report cards which are all different.  It just shines a light on how ineffective and ill-managed this program is.

Let’s look at the Department of Commerce.  We have significant economic challenges — manufacturing reshoring, balance of trade issues, economic growth, perhaps a recession, etc.   So you would think the Department of Commerce would be all over these challenges.   And maybe they are, and they seem to have a whole suite of report cards.   But there is no way anyone looks at these.   A sea of metrics and numbers, none tied back to the measures voters would care about — job growth, deficit, paycheck growth, etc.   There might be some gold here, but it is left as an exercise for the voter to find it.

The Department of Education maintains The Nation’s Report Card and it at least presents some clear and simple assessments of overall student performance.  But there is no tie back to budgets and programs.  What is working?   What isn’t?  How should I feel as a taxpayer?

The DOE has lots of little subagency report cards.   Here are some for the national labs.   What do these grades mean?  Is our money being well spent?   No idea.

Interested in how our Chips Act money is being spent?  Me too, and I couldn’t tell you, as there is nothing even like a report card.

Or at the state level, where is all that Washington State Capital Gains Tax revenue going?   Our schools should be supercharged now, right?   If you can find a report card on this money, let me know.

What Makes a Great Report Card

The DOGE report card stands out for four reasons — openness, clarity, simplicity, urgency.

The report card is published openly, which encourages engagement and allows criticism.  We can all poke hard at the DOGE effort because the results are being posted and shared with us.   And shouldn’t every government project do this?  It is very much inspired by open source software — when we make our data and processes public and open, we encourage criticism, which drives us towards better government.   

The report card is clear — it presents the bottom line for voters, in terms voters understand.  Dollars saved.  Contracts cancelled.  Clearly organized by department. Easily sortable by department.  Very little jargon.  Yes, the data may be completely wrong, but the clarity of presentation is good.   The only time the DOGE site slips up is with the regulations page, where it gets away from dollars and cents and starts inventing new meaningless metrics.

The report card is simple.  You can imagine the technology stack for this card and it is not complicated.  Any software engineer could bring this page up very quickly from scratch using any of N tools or tech stacks.  There is no need for complexity here.  I don’t know if the team built this themselves, or were able to leverage some code and infrastructure from digital.gov.  A standard tech stack should be available to all agencies to allow them to spin up pages like this quickly.

Finally, you can sense the urgency around the report card.  The DOGE team got it up in days.   They update it often.  Government agencies should be dedicated to getting information on our tax dollars out to us quickly, and with very low latency.  

As I’ve said many times in the past (as have many others), the whole DOGE effort is misdirected and not going to result in significant benefits.  But I hope that more programs start to report simply and clearly on their progress; we are owed at least that.

UPDATE: DOGE has updated their site, and apparently to deflect criticism, has started hiding details of their claims. Not the right direction.