Righting Wrongs with the Stroke of a Presidential Pen

The pens of U.S. Presidents have extraordinary power. How much power they have can be seen in the short history of a small agency within the office of the U.S. President. That history began in 2013 when the U.S. government launched the most visible website ever: Healthcare.gov. Spawned by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the site had been in development for three years. It was critical for President Obama’s plan to establish a monopoly digital marketplace as the only place Americans could access subsidized health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Millions of Americans tried to sign up for coverage on the day it launched, and it crashed. It was a digital disaster that dragged on for weeks and months.

To fix the very visible problem it became, President Obama turned to a “small team of America’s best digital experts.” After several months of effort, their work made the site and its supporting databases functional.

Recognizing the talent of those digital experts, President Obama soon found more ways they could impact government operations. On August 11, 2014, he created the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) with a stroke of his pen. The USDS’s purpose was “to improve the usefulness and reliability of the country’s most important digital services.”

The USDS Is Redeployed

In 2017, President Trump redeployed the USDS to fix another very visible digital problem. Websites and databases operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs to help veterans get timely appointments for health care at VA facilities weren’t up to the task. Veterans in need of treatment had to wait weeks and months to get appointments. The USDS went to work and succeeded in getting the waiting time for veterans to get appointments down to a matter of days.

In 2025, the USDS is still pursuing its original mission. Only now, it is focusing on the usefulness and reliability of the country’s most important digital services related to the spending of taxpayer dollars, as it has once again been redeployed.

With a stroke of his pen, President Trump renamed it and refocused its efforts. It is still the USDS, but now that it stands for “United States DOGE Service,” where DOGE is the acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency.

It’s already achieving significant results. A prime example is the fast-moving collapse of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a clearinghouse for disbursing foreign aid established by a stroke of President Kennedy’s pen in 1961.

USAID’s Haystack of Wasteful Spending

For years, USAID’s bureaucrats have served up a growing list of examples of its wasteful spending. Senator Rand Paul’s 2024 “Festivus” report prominently featured USAID’s spending of $20 million to produce “Ahlan Simsim”, a clone of the Sesame Street children’s show, for Iraq.

Of course, Iraq is an oil-rich nation with a GDP of $250 billion in 2023 and whose government expects revenues exceeding $37 billion this year. If the people of Iraq really want a Sesame Street knockoff, they can completely fund it themselves. No U.S. foreign aid was needed for that purpose, but they got a $20 million check for it anyway.

That’s a small amount of money in the grand scheme of U.S. foreign aid. Still, it is also just one of many such episodes in which USAID’s spending worked to contradict U.S. national interests. Like the straw that broke the camel’s back, the accumulation of straws does the damage. USAID’s bureaucrats spent years building a large haystack full of examples of wasteful spending.

At a minimum, the agency was in need of substantial reform to make U.S. financial aid to foreign nations more effective. Having its responsibilities absorbed by the Department of State is a major step toward achieving much needed reform.

Multiply that need for spending reform across multiple government agencies, and you will start to understand the scale of the problems caused by excessive government spending. Establishing more control and restraint over the growth of that spending is essential to righting much that is wrong with how the U.S. government operates today. That’s become the core mission of the USDS.

All it took was a stroke of a President’s pen to make it so.