Source: https://www.channel4.com/news/doges-approach-to-efficiency-inefficient-says-former-staffer

Merici Vinton is a senior official who until a week ago worked at the US Digital Service – a White House tech unit which was taken over by Elon Musk’s Doge.

She agreed to do her first TV interview since quitting and I began by asking for her initial reaction to the discovery of Musk’s takeover of her workplace.

Merici Vinton: We had absolutely no idea that this was coming. So it was roughly the evening, afternoon, evening of Inauguration Day, January 20th. We were completely stunned to see that in the executive order that, what effectively was US Digital Service, was now the US Doge Service.

Cathy Newman: Well, how did the process of being re-interviewed for your jobs come about?

Merici Vinton: So on the first day of the administration, which was January 21st, all 162 USDS employees were brought in for 15-minute interviews. My observation – it didn’t really feel very serious. I was kind of working with people who I didn’t get the sense that they’d ever kind of understood what it would take to do really large, complex projects in government.

Cathy Newman: And these were quite young people doing the interviews, weren’t they?

Merici Vinton: Yes, they were pretty young and everyone only provided their first names, which was, again, you want to meet your new teammates, but it didn’t feel like it was fully a two-way conversation.

Cathy Newman: You weren’t one of those fired. Your contract was coming to an end anyway. But when did the firings begin? How did that come about?

Merici Vinton: So after the interviews… we didn’t really, we were kind of rudderless for a while – until Valentine’s evening, Valentine’s Day evening, around 8 o’clock. Suddenly, I was actually out to dinner with my husband, my phone was on silent, – and we were joking around about taking some pictures. I pulled up my phone, and it was, the notifications were just insane. It was about a quarter of the team had been fired, and they were immediately cut off from all systems.

Cathy Newman: But there is quite a lot of public support for tackling government inefficiency, isn’t there? And Donald Trump talks about how he and Elon Musk have caught so much fraud and waste and employees who never showed up to work, for example.

Merici Vinton: I love efficiency. That’s why I joined the government. I joined the government to make those interactions simpler. And so I think that their approach to efficiency has actually been pretty inefficient. Now a lot of employees that have been probationary are being rehired – or are being told to be rehired – because the process by which they were fired was illegal.

Cathy Newman: What do you think the point of what they were doing? What were they trying to do in your view?

Merici Vinton: Disrupt. I think it’s really easy to disrupt and I think it’s really easy to destroy or to bulldoze – and it’s going to be very difficult to rebuild.

Cathy Newman: A federal judge has found that Musk’s role in dismantling the US Agency for International Development violated the US constitution. Do you have any hope that the judiciary will stop Musk and Trump in their tracks?

Merici Vinton: I do have hope. What I do hope is that the courts and judges still manage to look at the law, look at the statutes that created these organisations, and make sure that they’re still able to do their job.

Cathy Newman: You know, there’s a lot of talk that Elon Musk is going to move back to Tesla, that he’s looked at what’s happening to his company’s share price, and that that’s what he really cares about. Would you be triumphant if that happened? What do you make of that?

Merici Vinton: If he leaves after six months, I don’t know how we’re going to rebuild. And so that is one of the things that we are all watching with concern because, again, it’s easy to bulldoze and it’s gonna be really hard to build. And if there’s no one left to do it, I don’t know what it looks like.