Mary Bridges is a historian of the 20th-century United States and the Ernest May Fellow in Research and Policy at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her book, Dollars and Dominion: U.S. Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, is a finalist for the 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
It’s tempting in this era of “move-fast-and-break-things” governance to fixate on the latest federal agency to be raided, department dissolved, or contract severed. The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has launched rapid-fire interventions across federal agencies and dominated headlines: USAID practically dissolved, threats of dismantling the Department of Education, millions of federal employees pressed to resign. But focusing on this cascade of disruptions obscures a more important, long-term transformation: how DOGE is systematically reshaping the infrastructure of U.S. governance.
It’s easy to lose perspective as every day brings “unprecedented” overhaul and new findings of Elon Musk exceptionalism. To get a bigger-picture grasp of DOGE’s impacts, it’s worth looking to the original power broker of U.S. infrastructure, Robert Moses, the late urban planner and public official. Mr. Moses died in 1981 but remains one of the most powerful figures in New York history for the urban transformation he directed. He built parkways, bridges, beaches, and parks – and amassed unchecked political influence in the process. The parallels are striking not just in the scale of his ambition, but in his origin story: Mr. Moses began not as an infrastructure power broker, but as a crusader for government efficiency.
Mr. Moses’s first government position in the 1910s was as a Progressive Era reformer tasked with overhauling New York’s civil service and cleaning up government bureaucracies mired in inefficiency and corruption. Those experiences – combined with his work drafting legislation in Albany – made Mr. Moses a master of both the letter of the law and the sausage-making of government administration. He would later use that knowledge to build an infrastructure empire that has outlasted nearly a century of changing political leadership. His power redrew the map of New York, subverted democratic governance, and hard-wired patterns of racial discrimination and fossil-fuel dependence that persist today.
Today’s infrastructure power operates through different and subtler mechanisms, but with even vaster reach. Instead of Mr. Moses’s highly visible bridges and highways, DOGE is gaining access to – and in some cases, influence over – the invisible digital systems that enable modern governance. Through executive order, its small team of largely unconfirmed appointees has obtained unprecedented access to examine federal agencies’ operations. While traditional political appointees might shape policies of particular agencies or topics, DOGE’s interventions seem to upend the underlying architecture of government itself.
Comparisons to Mr. Moses’s methods are instructive. Mr. Moses mastered his era’s legal and bureaucratic machinery before reshaping New York’s built environment. DOGE’s young, tech-savvy staffers are also mapping the circuitry of federal operations, but how they will wield that foundational knowledge – of US Treasury data systems, for example, and human-resources records – remains opaque. They bring Silicon Valley’s reverence for disruption, but the consequences may be far more pervasive and long-lasting than a few months of bureaucratic shakeups. When Mr. Moses built a highway, its physical presence divided neighbourhoods, changed commuting patterns, and shaped the life of the city for generations. Meanwhile, DOGE is gutting agencies of institutional knowledge without ensuring fair, transparent, or even functional alternatives.
Consider their proposed deployment of artificial intelligence. Algorithms designed for fraud detection can also encode biases, erode privacy and automate decisions that fundamentally reshape how citizens interact with government. Just as Mr. Moses’s bridges and roadways created barriers that shaped New York’s development, these digital infrastructure changes could cut new channels that determine how people receive government services and create barriers that thwart democratic oversight.
Mr. Moses’s unique, unelected power stemmed from his quasi-private, quasi-public status in between government and investors. He maintained control of the Triborough Bridge Authority, for example, in part by designing contracts with bondholders that assured his continuing leadership. For decades, Mr. Moses could not be ousted by any particular New York mayor or governor (nor even by making an enemy of powerful U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt). Today’s infrastructure networks blur the lines between public and private oversight in complex ways. Consider government contracting with Mr. Musk-controlled companies such as SpaceX and Starlink: Mr. Musk has positioned himself to both determine the hardwiring of government and profit from the companies that perform the rewiring.
Traditional infrastructure building like bridge construction and highway paving displaces residents and creates observable patterns of discrimination. This visibility can help the public track and, later, mobilize in protest. But how do citizens evaluate – let alone challenge – algorithmic systems embedded deep within government operations? How do we resist private-sector metrics that optimize processes at the expense of democratic purpose? The hidden nature of these networks makes oversight more essential – and more difficult.
When these systems are implemented without transparency or public debate, in a slash-and-burn style, their effects can become embedded in the infrastructure long before their implications are understood. Mr. Moses’s webs of concrete and steel far outlived his political influence and continues to shape New York even today, long after public opinion turned against his repressive methods. The systems being built and overhauled today may lack the physical presence of a bridge or highway, but their ability to reconfigure government operations and citizen access could prove even more profound and far-reaching.
In an era when government systems are being rapidly rewired, the vital question isn’t just who holds power today, but what kind of democracy they’re building for tomorrow.