Mikey Dickerson did not expect Elon Musk to set up shop in his old office.
Dickerson, a former Google engineer hired by the Obama administration to help lead a tech revolution in the federal government, was surprised when he learned Musk would be launching a government-slashing operation from the U.S. Digital Service.
“I wasn’t expecting that any more than anybody else was,” Dickerson told POLITICO’s E&E News this week in an interview.
When incoming President Donald Trump announced that Musk would be leading a so-called Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE — to slash the federal bureaucracy, Dickerson had expected it to be an outside advisory effort. But on Trump’s first day in office, he issued an executive order planting DOGE inside the White House by renaming the existing U.S. Digital Service.
