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I know civic technology.

This is not civic technology.

• Defined in the 2010s, civic technology describes efforts to use digital tools and design processes to improve the effectiveness of government, nonprofit and community efforts.
  
  
• Elon Musk’s DOGE is formally a rebranding of the US Digital Services, an Obama-era unit that sparked today’s civic technology efforts.
  
  
• From afar, Musk’s use of startup culture and engineers to “traumatize” bureaucrats might seem a part of civic technology. Instead, its leaders call DOGE a corruption of their movement. 

In February 2011, Technical.ly co-hosted a community listening event for one of the first local cohorts from Code for America, the organization that largely defined what we today call civic technology: using digital tools and design processes to improve resident outcomes. 

The national nonprofit recruited a dozen civic-minded software developers to accept below market-rate salaries for a year and matched them with a handful of US city governments. Their remit? Make stuff work better.

At that event, we put 50 residents with roles in nonprofits, community groups, tech and government into small breakout groups led by these new Code for America 20- and 30-something software builders. We identified big problems and tiny annoyances. Several became projects that the group continued working on across their year of service. 

Technocratic optimism was alive in American cities then. The economy was slowly rebounding from the Great Recession. Many regional metros were retaining do-gooder millennial college graduates. The Obama administration was credited with following its data-backed presidential campaign with a digital-friendly government. That included the US Digital Services (USDS), a unit launched in part by tech industry exec Jen Pahlka — who went on to found Code for America. 

Computing, internet databases and accessible websites have a decades-long tradition in federal, state and local government. In the 2010s, the practice of leveraging code, web services and emerging user experience and design processes there started going by the name civic technology.

Alongside startups and software jobs, how technology could be used to make government more responsive and effective was a cornerstone of Technical.ly’s earliest coverage.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, repeat entrepreneur and self-styled engineer, is crashing the federal government via his Department of Government Efficiency, which is formally a rebrand of Pahlka’s USDS. Amid a slew of constitutional crises, DOGE could fade from a top alarm. Worse, to those farther from the conversation, one could reasonably connect the dots between the 20-something tech entrepreneurs and software builders of the 2010s to Musk and his team of 20-something technologists of today. 

So is DOGE a continuation or a corruption of civic technology? To civic tech boosters, among whom I’d consider myself, it may seem obviously a corruption of the movement — so it’s critical to say so more widely, and more often.

“Civic tech is an enabling function for the public good,” said Christopher Whitaker, executive director of the Alliance of Civic Technologists. “It’s not about efficiency. It’s about helping your neighbors.”

Not all broken systems are accidents

A US Army veteran, Whitaker started his career as an Illinois bureaucrat, working in the state unemployment office during the Great Recession — using a system built in the 1970s.

“You’d log in and see a blinking green DOS screen,” he told me. “Then you’d print out a ream of paper the next morning to check if anything was rejected. That’s how we knew if someone would actually get their benefits.”

Like thousands of other technologists, his frustration is what led him into civic tech. Whitaker later worked at Code for America, which evolved its model to include “brigades,” semi-autonomous groups of local civic technologists spread around the country (Code for DC and Code for Philly, for example). In the 2010s, lots of well-paid and highly-skilled software builders wanted to volunteer their expertise to help their neighbors. Code for America helped thousands of them do that better.

It seemed as if civic technology spirit was already taking hold at the federal level, so it was time to extend that approach to state and local governments. I first met Whitaker in 2017 when Technical.ly helped organize Code for America’s first national summit for local civic tech leaders. That brigade summit (like CfA’s current, larger, more polished national conference, next held in May) was a kind of pep rally for champions of effective and modern government services.

What often goes unsaid is something Whitaker has learned, like so many civic technologists and government insiders already know: not all broken systems are accidents.

“Some government systems don’t work by design,” Whitaker said.

I had lunch last week with a social entrepreneur, one of hundreds of founders Technical.ly follows whose company’s intent is to address some social ill by fulfilling a market niche. Social entrepreneurs are civic technologists with cap tables. Sometimes government lacks the know-how or the focus to improve a system, the entrepreneur told me, and that’s when civic technology can work well. Other times, though, government is broken exactly because someone wants it to be broken. Civic technology is much harder to take root there. 

Unemployment systems are often burdensome because enough local leaders want it to be difficult to collect benefits. In this way, these systems are working exactly as intended. Academics Don Moynihan and Pam Herd call this “administrative burden” — deliberate friction to reduce program usage. This isn’t about bugs. It’s about political intent.

DOGE is not civic tech

If DOGE really is about the efficiency of government, laying off revenue-generating IRS agents would be an unexpected choice. If DOGE really is about the effectiveness of government, effectively shuttering 18F, the federal government’s tech consultancy, would be a strange decision.

“A good product manager always asks, ‘What problem are you trying to solve?’” Whitaker told me. “DOGE doesn’t seem to be asking that.”

Or, DOGE is addressing a very different problem than more effective government services. In February, Whitaker and fellow technologist Derek Eder published a call to action: Civic tech must focus on harm reduction. Not systems for their own sake, but work that directly helps the vulnerable.

“If food prices go up, helping a food pantry get food on the table is a win,” they wrote. “If the administration targets our cities for mass deportation campaigns, every door that doesn’t open without a warrant is a win.”

They highlight groups like Civic Tech Atlanta, which recently helped a local food pantry prepare for a data migration — by cleaning up spreadsheets and validating addresses. No big reveal. Just real work. The kind that actually helps.

“It’s not about being the hero,” Whitaker said. “It’s about being the tech grunt who shows up and does the work.”

Let’s remember what we’re for

I got my civic tech start attending and hosting weekend hackathons, mostly in Baltimore and Philadelphia starting around 2010, not long after launching Technical.ly. Over dozens of these events, we didn’t talk politics much. The focus was on small solutions that might ease some far bigger problem. 

Looking back, we were generating hundreds of hours of free consulting from what were then some of the most in-demand professionals. And we mostly did it for pizza and a sense of community. 

Government, at the federal, state and local levels, will always need reform and modernizing. These systems are designed for stewardship, not disruption. The Clinton-era “reinventing government” initiative cut federal workers, slashed spending and brought in emerging digital tools. It was controversial in its day, but was done legally, and now is fairly well-regarded.

Those Code for America fellows I followed in 2011 were like so many other civic technologists I’ve come to know: smart, nerdy, motivated by a satisfaction that better systems can help more people — and cautious of how technology can be destructive. 

“This is not a good-faith effort,” Whitaker wrote in January of DOGE. “They’ve said they want bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. Civic tech has no business working with bullies.”