In fact, for this reason DOGE was not a brand new department but the result of Trump taking over the United States Digital Service, hollowing it out, and turning the shell into the United States DOGE Service. This was a tragedy because the USDS was doing genuinely useful work by bringing in people from the industry to use their experience to improve the incredibly crappy government digital services that exist. I was fortunate enough to see a talk by one of the founding people of the USDS (before it had official existence), and it was inspiring hearing how much of a difference he was able to make and how it made a real impact on the lives of veterans who were dependent on the service that was collapsing.

Additionally, this was also a tragedy because other departments had essentially been gradually coaxed into granting the USDS access to their data so that USDS could make improvements to their systems, which DOGE immediately took advantage of to get direct access to all of this data after it took over the USDS.