2025 Weeknote 04 : Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

January 20 – 26

My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work. Learn more about the weeknotes concept here.

About this week’s subtitle

That’s a snippet from Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl (1956) and it felt like a crystalline reflection of this week in history, with the re-ascendance of Donald Trump, the havoc he’s wreaking on parts of the federal government, and the breakdown of our broader culture. Trump, his three boys, and particularly Elon Musk all fit into that short line in so very many ways. They all “lacklove” and are “manless.” They are both products and producers of our present-day Moloch.

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USDS is dead. May the new USDS die far sooner.

The news about the United States Digital Service this week was just awful. I posted about it on LinkedIn, but I also posted a longer essay here on the blog. I’ve never worked at USDS, but I did visit briefly last spring through an introduction by the Beeck Center. And I have great respect for the people who has walked the halls of USDS, going back to the founding.

Indeed, in developing the GX Foundry I deliberately used USDS as an exemplar for the mission statement and the overall goals.

So seeing USDS being used as the shell for the bullshit “DOGE” program run by Elon Musk is just an insult far beyond anything I imagined. Eff that guy and the entire Trump administration. USDS was a small team of people making big government services better for real people in multiple ways, and they used it for parts. It’s like USDS was turned into a roll of paper towels Trump chucked at Puerto Ricans after hurricane Maria. Despicable.

As for those that opined “maybe DOGE could have some positive outcomes” …I’m waiting for your “I was wrong” posts.

Eisenhower in the 21st century

Meanwhile… I had a great conversation with Kevin Hawickhorst this week, following up on his deeply revealing piece on mid-century government training efforts called Eisenhower’s Bureaucrats. Go check that out if you are at all interested in bringing digital era training to government workforces.

Along the way Kevin pointed me to a copy of the original “Work Simplification” manual from 1949, and it’s stunning to see how complete and accessible it is. (It also has a distinctive post-war design vibe.) Scanned by the University of Iowa and indexed by the Google Books program, the publication was created by the “U.S. Bureau of the Budget” and printed in Chicago in 1949.

This interests me for several reasons:

• I’m impressed the government made such a concerted—and high-quality—effort to reduce complexity and increase efficiency more than 70 years ago.
• It makes modern efforts to bring digital workflows and human-centered design and plain language and the rest seem like mere “echoes” of what came before, which is both sad that we’re having to re-learn these things, but encouraging because the problems we’re solving are not just in our heads—they are real, and have been around for generations.
• I’m hoping to continue working with Caitlyn Seifritz and Amy Martin on explorations around a unified training program for government workers, to build digital capacity directly into government teams, rather than trying to start separate digital services alone.

Between these old examples from 70+ years ago and modern training examples from Civilla, Beeck, U.S. Digital Response, InnovateUS, and others, we might be able to create a new resource to bring government workers up to speed on 21st century needs.

HBR on how to fix what’s broken

Despite the USDS setback, many of us need to keep on truckin’, and that includes making improvements in teams, services, outcomes, etc. at work. We must fix what we see is broken.

HBR’s IdeaCast this week addressed this matter head-on with a great interview with author Dan Heath: To Fix Broken Work Systems, You Need to Reset (30 min)

If you have to fix things, give it a listen.

The UK’s digital services self-assessment

I re-shared a LinkedIn post from Matt Jukes on LinkedIn, in which he was pointing to a new UK Government Digital Service report on their digital government efforts. It’s not pretty.

But the report feels good because you realize you’re not alone, and it feels like a truly honest assessment that allows for a lot of improvements. (And as noted in the podcast above, you need to know the problem clearly first.)

For example, they point to a lack of digital capacity in government leadership roles:

Digital leadership is not a consistent priority
Survey responses and interviews with senior leaders across the public sector have consistently highlighted that many non-digital public sector leaders with sizable delivery responsibilities have insufficient technical expertise or training, lack the digital orientation to implement tech-enabled programmes, or don’t fully understand mission-critical technology dependencies and high-priority opportunities such as AI. Skills programmes exist but are not consistently implemented; only around 20% of Civil Service SCS have verified themselves as ‘digitally upskilled’ relative to the digital and data essentials framework.

The whole report is awesome and worth a read for anyone on the U.S. government landscape.

By the way, Matt Jukes also released a separate post on how AI is spreading across his view of the landscape. All I could do is nod my head in agreement.

Time for a break

Well, that’s enough for this past week. This coming week I’m headed out for a brief vacation. I still plan to post next week, but it will probably be short. Unless I find myself with a lot of time to pen a bunch of additional thoughts.

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About the header photo