Why DOGE Missed the Most Obvious Opportunity in Government

I dread tax season.

Like so many of us, especially Millennials, I have a deep fear of doing it wrong. And with American taxes, it's so easy to get it wrong and so hard and so expensive to get it right. Gathering the inputs, putting the right number on the right line, in the shadow of potentially large, undefined negative consequences - what should be a basic administrative task becomes an annual ordeal.

Building a business in cannabis in an emerging market made all of that worse. It gave me a front row seat to understanding how deeply flawed our system is - not just in terms of loopholes and inequities, but in the operational challenges that face even seasoned professionals. Cannabis businesses operate under a particular tax burden that makes the ordinary complexity of American filing look straightforward by comparison. I watched smart, experienced people get it wrong anyway. Not because they weren't trying. Because the system is genuinely broken.

Our filing system is beyond antiquated, extremely confusing, and has been chronically understaffed for years. Tax compliance imposes a total economic burden upwards of $500b annually on the U.S. economy. And still, estimates suggest that up to 30% of returns are filed with errors, and that's not counting the errors made by professional accountants who are themselves "taking positions" on rules that allow for interpretation. When those mistakes are found, the accountant often retires. The filer is left holding the consequences.

This is not a personal failure. It is a systems design failure. And it is exactly the kind of problem that should have been at the top of DOGE's list.

The Missed Opportunity

When the Department of Government Efficiency descended on Washington with a mandate to modernize and streamline, I was briefly hopeful. It was an exhilarating 30 seconds, let me tell you.

I wasn’t hopeful because I trusted any of the people involved, but because the premise - that government systems are bloated, redundant, and overdue for redesign - is actually correct. Anyone who has navigated tax filing, benefits applications, disability services, or healthcare paperwork knows this firsthand. The friction is real. The inefficiency is real. The human cost is real.

With genuine expertise in database management and UX design, DOGE could have approached tax filing the way a serious product team approaches a broken user experience: map the pain points, reduce unnecessary steps, build in real-time guidance, and design for the people who struggle most with the current system- not the ones with accountants and lawyers.

Instead, they fired people in departments they clearly didn't understand. The State Department office focused on Middle East energy trade. The IRS staff who process returns and answer questions. The institutional knowledge that takes years to build and minutes to destroy.

Destroying is not redesigning. Cutting doesn’t necessarily mean efficiency results, and mistaking chaos for boldness is the oldest Scarecrow mistake in the book - confusing the performance of action with the substance of it.

What AI Actually Does Well

Here's what gets lost in the conversation about artificial intelligence in government: AI is genuinely good at exactly the kinds of problems our public systems are drowning in.

Finding redundancy across databases that don't talk to each other. Mapping the gaps where people fall through the cracks between agencies. Identifying patterns in errors before they compound. Streamlining intake processes that currently require people to re-prove their eligibility to multiple offices, multiple times, in multiple formats.

The IRS could be transformed. Not by firing auditors, but by building systems that catch common errors before they become problems; that guide filers through complex situations in plain language; that make compliance less dependent on whether you can afford a professional to navigate it for you.

Healthcare administration consumes a staggering share of total healthcare costs in the United States. A significant portion of that is not care - it's paperwork, prior authorizations, billing reconciliation, and the friction between systems that were never designed to work together. That is an AI problem. A data architecture problem. A systems design problem.

Benefits navigation; food assistance, disability services, housing support, is another. The people who most need these systems are often the least equipped to navigate their complexity. Every unnecessary form, every redundant office visit, every unexplained denial is a Time and Dignity failure. And many of those failures are solvable with better data design, clearer interfaces, and smarter routing.

This is not futurism. These are known problems with known technical approaches. What has been missing is the political will to prioritize them, and the wisdom to understand that modernization is not the same as elimination.

The Oregon Frame

As friction continues to build between providing for Oregonians and a genuinely broken federal government, it will fall increasingly to state leadership to find solutions, to protect people while working with fewer resources and less reliable federal infrastructure.

That means Oregon needs a Governor who understands what AI can and cannot do in public systems.

It can reduce friction. It can find patterns. It can make services more accessible to the people who need them most. It can help a state do more with less, not by replacing the humans who deliver care and make judgment calls, but by clearing the administrative debris that slows them down.

What it cannot do is replace leadership. It cannot make values decisions. It cannot decide whose dignity matters and whose doesn't. Those are human choices, and they have to be made deliberately, transparently, and with accountability.

Used judiciously, AI is one of the most promising tools available to a state that wants to redesign its systems around the people they serve rather than the institutions running them.

The question is whether we will use it that way, or whether we will keep making the same mistake DOGE made, and confuse disruption with progress.

A Better Question

The question was never whether government needed modernization. It was whether the people doing it understood what modernization actually means.

It means reducing the tax burden on ordinary filers — not protecting the complexity that makes the industry profitable.

It means designing benefit systems that treat people as intelligent adults — not as compliance problems to be managed.

It means using the tools we have to build something more human — not just something faster.

We have the tools. We just need leaders who know what they're for.