I don't know @smithsam.bsky.social's purpose, but I think there is value in reflecting on what civil servants in GDS (or anywhere else in government) would do or should do if instructed to do DOGE-like activities for DOGE-like reasons.
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Ultimately, civil servants are individual moral affects and can't duck those questions (though they certainly can duck admitting that and acting on it).
Now that I'm fully on board with. Of course, it's only a conversation people outside of the civil service can have openly, as we are right now. As Sam suggested, civil servants would have to fall in line, or quit. So is there any safeguards we could be building externally? I don't know :)
I managed to write this while I was still a civil servant, so I don't think the conversation is completely constrained - but that's not to say that it's easy or that the need for it is widely recognised.
Having a written constitution and an agreed process to change it can very easily become its worst feature. The existence of Trump is arguably a consequence of a constitution where that is very broken.
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What it lacks is an agreed process to change it which makes things rly difficult when bad actors arrive :-(