Tech Policy Press “I was a founding member of the US Digital Service, the organization that as of January 20 became the US DOGE Service following an executive order under President Donald Trump. I have remained fairly silent over the past few weeks, largely because I have been processing the reality of an organization dedicated to improving government services being repurposed into the vector of destruction of those very same services. Less than a month after the renaming and restructuring of USDS, many of its employees have been fired. This includes people like the official who was in charge of information security for the Veterans Affairs website, VA.gov — one of USDS’s greatest success stories, and a website with millions of users per month, not to mention massive amounts of veterans’ personal information. At dizzying speed, we have seen the US DOGE Service take effective control of critical systems, data, and infrastructure—in a word, power—across the federal government. As I helplessly watch, I am coming to terms with the fact that the Trump Administration seems to understand something that few others do: Technical infrastructure is the infrastructure of *everything.* It can accelerate or obstruct policy goals. I, and many of my colleagues, have spent the better part of the past ten years trying to convince lawmakers, academia, and the media of exactly this. That it has been largely dismissed would be an understatement. Now, I fear the lesson is being taught in the hardest (and potentially most irreversible) way possible…”