DOGE and the deficits of an engineering education

I’m an undergraduate studying engineering. I became an engineer in hopes of building sustainable energy infrastructure for a better future, but over the past few years, I have come to understand the limits of an engineer’s education. One of the most powerful cautionary tales I’ve been reflecting on is the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

As the head of DOGE, Elon Musk very intentionally chose engineers — specifically rather young engineers — to be his grunts and lieutenants. The New York Times profiled 70 DOGE staffers: There are the expected lawyers, advisors and leadership, but the bulk of the staff are young engineers — ranging from Forbes 30 under 30 tech entrepreneurs like Nate Cavanaugh to Edward Coristine, who graduated high school last year. It’s a strategic decision. And as a young engineer, I urge you to reflect on why he did this.

Here’s my theory: As engineers, we’re trained to immediately immerse ourselves in solving whatever problem we’re given — to try to improve and optimize a process before we even have a deep understanding or respect for the system the problem is embedded in. If I’m told to build a computer, I am trained to first ask how fast it needs to operate, not how it will be used. If I’m told to build a highway, I am trained to first ask how many cars need to fit on it, not how many people will be displaced by its path.

We aren’t trained to step back and ask “What are we improving? And what are the impacts of our solutions?” We are primarily — if not solely — trained to view challenges through a limited, technical lens. 

So we dive headfirst into solving the “problem,” but don’t ask whether the problem needs solving. Nor do we ask to understand the complete downstream effects of our solution. Broader, non-technical perspectives are eschewed as “soft sciences” or the liberal arts, useful in select cases, but largely considerations and decisions for others to grapple with. And that ultimately limits our awareness of the unintended impacts our “problem-solving” can have.

Yet having an awareness of and respect for the impact of your actions is the very foundation of being a responsible member of society. The absence of that broader perspective means a lack of awareness of our impact, and with that comes an absence of empathy, humility and understanding.

And that is why I am afraid of DOGE.

The invocation of Nazism is a heavy, overused trope that risks diminishing its true horror. But in observing DOGE, I am reminded of how engineers can easily become a mechanism of fear and hate, of how an indifferent and banal evil arises when technical education is divorced from the broader context.

Albert Speer serves as this stark warning for me. Young and ambitious, he graduated in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin, but lacked any real political fervor. He aligned himself with the Nazi Party in the 1930s largely because their promise to reinvent German culture afforded him lucrative opportunities organizing elaborate parades and designing grand buildings. When war broke out, Hitler chose Speer as the minister of armaments and war production, making him the head coordinator in manufacturing weapons, building labor camps and improving transportation infrastructure, including the trains to Auschwitz.

In a 2015 speech, the late history professor Richard Olson, quoted a 1943 piece in the London Observer that examined Speer:

“[Speer] symbolizes a type which has become increasingly important in all belligerent countries; the pure technician, the classless, bright young man, without background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world, and no other means than his technical and managerial ability. It is the lack of psychological and spiritual balast and the ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational machinery of our age which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays … This is their age; the Hitlers and the Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers, whatever happens to this particular man, will be long with us.”

This quote serves as a constant, stark reminder of what a technical education can mean, and is what we have a responsibility to reckon with as engineers.

Of course Nazism isn't the only example of how engineers can be used as a tool for harm; there are countless examples from history. Software engineers just doing their jobs at social media companies have created addictive algorithms that put kids at risk for a variety of problems, from eating disorders to bullying and sexual harassment. The engineer considered the “father of napalm” thought it would be used solely on military structures and vehicles and once expressed regret to a journalist, saying, "I couldn’t foresee that this stuff was going to be used against babies and Buddhists."

A recent quote from John Rogers, a materials scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, encapsulates this issue perfectly. He invented a silicon circuit with the material properties of human skin, raising all sorts of ethical questions. When a reporter asked him whether his invention might eventually help humans become immortal and whether that would be a good thing, he replied: “That’s a good thing to think about, and people should think about it. But I’m just an engineer, basically.”

Engineers who do not consider and actively grapple with the impact of their work are engineers who function as tools, and there will always be powerful people who are eager to use them as such. This can be for good, certainly.

But more often than not, these types of engineers are used in systems of extraction, exploitation and oppression. No political movement, no organization, no company and no regime can function without the support or, more pertinently, the complicity of its engineers.

As engineers, we cannot hide behind the justification of non-partisanship or impartial self-interest. We cannot hide behind the excuse that if we weren’t doing the work, someone else would. We — perhaps more than anyone — have an obligation to foster systems-level understanding, to be aware of what we are building and for whom we are building it. Of course, no organization is 100% good. And arguments can be made for making change from the inside. But you can't do that if you're sticking your head in the sand for your own self-interest. Willfully ignoring the impact of your work makes you complicit, and complicity is what they want.

And complicity is exactly what Musk is getting. These engineers are not critically thinking about the impact of their actions, but ambitiously flinging themselves at what they were hired to do.

The reason I am afraid of DOGE is not because of their actions; I don’t see a group of evil, conniving masterminds. I am afraid because I see a clear reminder of the worst of history, a clear warning of how technically focused, ambitious people are used when they ignore the complexity of the world. It reminds me of lessons from the past, and it makes me wary of the future.

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