Last week? Last month? Last year?
Nope!
How about … 2011? And guess who launched it, and who got put in charge?
I have already written a couple of times about the origins of the US DOGE Service, which began in 2013 as the US Digital Service with a mission to fix the disastrous ObamaCare portal. Barack Obama then expanded its authority to the entire executive branch with a mission to modernize IT systems throughout the government. Donald Trump simply renamed it while keeping its access and authorities intact, and had Elon Musk bring in a team of data scientists to take the mission seriously.
However, it turns out that DOGE goes back even further in the Obama administration. This video comes from 2011, in which Obama decries all of the money being spent on absolute nonsense, as well as the surfeit of unneeded facilities for which the government was paying. He pledged to do — well, pretty much what Trump and Musk are doing right now:
OMG this is not AI, it’s real. It’s a must watch.
2011. Obama announces a DOGE department and puts Joe Biden in charge of it! 😂
“Nobody messes with Joe.” 🤣 pic.twitter.com/obGsYHzmMr
— MAZE (@mazemoore) March 14, 2025
“Nobody messes with Joe.” Ha!
Speaking of which, watch Biden’s part of this video carefully, for two reasons. One, notice how clear and coherent he sounds in 2011, compared to just eight years later when he first ran for office. Even by that time, his cognition had clearly declined as well as his physical stamina. And then marvel at the people who propped Biden up for another run at the presidency, and the massive cover-up that almost pulled it off. It’s like watching an entirely different man.
The other point from Biden’s portion of this video is his insistence that success in this effort would require “relentless focus” and “new sophisticated methods.” That’s exactly what Trump and Musk brought to bear on the same mission, and that Obama and Biden failed to do — either by choice or incompetence.
“Choice” is the correct answer here, even if “incompetence” is always an option when Biden is involved — even at that time. Neither Biden nor Obama took this mission seriously, but they wanted to virtue-signal on fiscal responsibility because it plays well with voters. However, it also raises expectations with voters too, which sets virtue-signalers up for failure when they don’t deliver on those promises.
Obama and Biden promised taxpayers a DOGE-esque housecleaning. They conceded the point of its necessity. Eventually, voters were going to demand delivery on those promises. They whetted the appetite for an outsider to come in and clean house — and even then, it took Trump a second opportunity to make good on it.
To be fair, though, Obama and Biden weren’t the first to virtue-signal on that point. Bill Clinton and Al Gore made a big production over their study on “reinventing government,” launching what certainly looked like a DOGE-esque effort to put the recommendations into action. Like Obama, Clinton put his VP in charge of the effort, which went exactly nowhere after the press conference announcing it. It sure seems like a consensus existed for a major executive branch overhaul for decades before Mr. Musk came to Washington.
