Pushed out by DOGE, former feds now feel ‘unleashed’ on improving government efficiency

A group of former federal employees has a suggestion for the Department of Government Efficiency on how to make federal agencies operate more cost-effectively: talk with them. 

“We have such an outflow of really talented former civil servants who have decades of experience — who've seen reform agendas come and go under Democratic and Republican administrations — who understand why they haven't worked,” said Maureen Klovers, a co-founder of We the Doers, a new nonpartisan start-up of former civil servants focused on improving government operations. “All these folks were constrained when they were in the civil service about how critical they could be and how outspoken they could be. Now we're sort of unleashed.” 

Klovers was a senior operational official at the Agriculture Department before she participated in the deferred resignation program rather than be reassigned outside of the Washington, D.C., area to an undetermined location. 

Before that, in the midst of managing her agency’s return to office, Klovers was briefly fired as a result of the mass terminations of newly hired or promoted employees in their probationary periods. While she has 14 years of federal experience, Klovers at that point had been in the Senior Executive Service for less than a year. 

Klovers met April Mohr Harding, the other co-founder of We the Doers, through the Departure Dialogues Project, an initiative of the modernization nonprofit POPVOX Foundation to solicit suggestions from former feds on how to improve government programs.  

A former user experience official at IRS, Harding said that she participated in the deferred resignation program after being told “as a favor” that her position was slated to be eliminated as part of workforce reductions. 

“Initially, I thought that she and I could help each other with our job searches,” Klovers said. “So we met up for coffee, and it very quickly turned into less about our job searches than just some of our shared frustrations of working in the federal government, and our frustration that we could have achieved so much more if there hadn't been so many constraints and our frustration that DOGE was really a wasted opportunity.”

The coffee chat led to another discussion with five other former feds who Klovers and Harding reached out to that, in turn, set the foundation for We the Doers’ first report, which was released on Tuesday, the one-year mark of Trump’s second term and the anniversary of DOGE’s establishment. 

While it spearheaded headcount reductions across government at the start of the year, DOGE’s significance decreased following the departure of its head Elon Musk. 

In its report, We the Doers broadly calls for overhauling how agencies measure their performance, increasing connections between lawmakers and civil servants, modifying the budget process and transforming government’s culture to focus on delivery. 

Klovers and Harding said that reorienting agency performance based on metrics that would be tangible to the American public is their most important recommendation. 

“The incentives are such that most [civil servants], to succeed, do not succeed in a way that the American people would see and feel and understand,” Klovers said. “They may succeed based on the narrow expectations of their performance plan, and they may succeed by being overly risk avoidant and preventing something from being in The Washington Post, but they're not really succeeding on delivery.” 

As an example, Harding recalled needing to spend 10 months to get her staff access to a common software program. 

“This should have been a half day of my brain space but ended up being 10 months of blood, sweat and tears,” she said. “Well, not blood, but there were tears and there was sweat.” 

The federal government’s complicated systems, Harding argued, dissuade even well-intentioned civil servants from attempting to implement new ideas. 

“Moving through that process, most rational people would give up because you can't do that your whole life,” she said.

Going forward, Klovers and Harding hope to capitalize off of the public’s attention on government efficiency and hold town halls to solicit public feedback on improving agency services. They’ve also been surprised at the support they’ve received so far.  

“It's been wonderful and overwhelming to see how many people in this community — inside this bubble of civil service — are really energized by the opportunity to really tackle this in a meaningful way,” Harding said. “But for me, what's been really exciting is when we talk to friends and family outside that bubble of different political stripes, different backgrounds, different perspectives…people are so excited. The response tends to be, ‘Finally, yes, this is how this should be approached.’”