Reclaiming design for better public services...And what if DOGE had actually been focused on efficiency?

Government has spent the last two decades evolving from e-government to digital government — shifting from simply putting paper forms online to designing end-to-end services that help people get things done. But for most residents, those services still feel like translated bureaucracy, not truly user-centered delivery. That’s because we’ve been chasing the wrong idea of efficiency — prioritizing cost-cutting over outcomes — and ignoring design as the key to course-correcting. Design isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s the public sector infrastructure we need to understand what works, for whom, and under what conditions.