In the midst of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s headline-making actions, it’s a good time to remember that DOGE’s mandate is to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity” by “modernizing federal technology and software.” Federal IT is a worthy target for Musk and his team of efficiency hackers. It’s overpriced, with various estimates pegging the government’s costs at two to four times the private sector’s. It underdelivers compared to what’s available outside of government, as anyone who has held positions in both sectors will attest. And it is difficult to defend against cyber-attacks — not least because IT vendors upcharge for security features against flaws in their own products.

I contributed to two efforts that chipped away at the cybersecurity aspects of the problem: President Obama’s Cybersecurity National Action Plan and President Trump’s executive order on cybersecurity. After I left the White House in 2017, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration both made additional, incremental progress, especially in migrating agencies to the cloud. And yet federal IT has proven remarkably resistant to reform while also facing the most challenging cyber threat environment of any organization in the world. If DOGE is looking for the most difficult problem in IT, this is it.

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