Yeah my first thought was that this already existed, was doing great work, and got canned by DOGE in favor of what appears to be a MUCH MUCH more expensive version of it here.
I was having a conversation with a Trump-supporting relative, who was genuinely asking me, “Don’t you think it’s great that they put a bunch of [DOGE] engineers into the government to fix things?”
When I said, “Well, we already had that - the USDS. And what has DOGE done, specifically, to fix things?” it just went right over her head. Did not even land.
Most people have very little idea how anything works. Especially in the government, but it’s fairly true in general.
Something like half of US adults don’t know how marginal income tax rates work, which is one of the very most-relevant-to-them-personally things for them to know about the federal government. The loudest ordinary citizens complaining about foreign aid or the estate (“death”, as republicans rebranded it on strategist advice) tax can’t tell you a halfway accurate thing about either, they’re just repeating what they heard, or some assumption they made (“well if [talking head] is complaining about it this much it must be really bad!”)
This doesn’t get better for any other program or tax or whatever that you can think of. Folks have no idea how anything works and the media figures and politicians they trust lie to them constantly, and are rewarded for it.
