these people are working their butts off and the disrespect that's implicit in how they treated

those people. My colleagues, my fellow Americans, just pisses me off. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have a very special episode for you.

My guests are from a group called

We the Builders, and they're Kate Green and Milo, who are former U.S. Digital Service engineers.

Now, you probably heard that when Donald Trump took office, he basically took over the U.S.

Digital Service and renamed it the U.S. Doge Service for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

That has obviously had a lot of consequences for that agency, but also the people who work there.

These are people who are used to, you know, developing software and developing solutions for

government and, you know, for the public that it serves to make sure that public services can be

more easily accessible by the people who need them. But when Elon Musk and his people took over,

they had a very different idea of what this agency should be doing, who it should be serving,

and the way it should be oriented toward government. And so I was really happy when Kate and Milo

reached out and said that they wanted to speak to me for the show, because not only did it give

me an opportunity to learn more about what actually happened in that transition from the US

Digital Service to Doge, but also what kind of orientation a department like that takes in trying to

develop software in the public sector that is, you know, oriented towards serving the public.

Is that going to be the same as software development and technological development in the private

sector? Or how is it going to look different? And obviously, I expected it to be different,

but the way that Kate and Milo described what their jobs looked like and how they had to think

through the various implications of the software that they were developing and the solutions

that they were trying to deploy really made me stop and think why these

...