DOGE team helps move position of IRS web page 'log in' button in a little over an hour, instead of the expected 103 days [they cut red tape]

X.com ^ | 04/09/2025 | DOGE

[ransomnote]

Department of Government Efficiency
@DOGE
On the http://IRS.gov website, the "log in" button was not in the top right on the navbar like it is on most websites. It was weirdly placed in the middle of the page below the fold.

An IRS engineer explained that the *soonest* this change could get deployed is July 21st... 103 days from now.

This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes. See before/after pictures below.

There are great people at the IRS, who are simply being strangled by bureaucracy.

 

Apr 9, 2025

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3M Views

[xp38]

Ah yes. This reminds me of the story of Musk decommissioning Twitter’s redundant servers.

[V_TWIN]

“An IRS engineer explained that the *soonest* this change could get deployed is July 21st... 103 days from now”
-

Where I used to work we called that “malicious compliance”.
-

That IRS “engineer” knew how he was just soaking the system......if he’s not any smarter than that he doesn’t deserve the position and should be removed.

[wiseprince]

Now that’s funny

[econjack]

Same old problem: There is no reason for the gov’t to do anything in a cost-effective manner. Indeed, they have every incentive to do the opposite. Your path up the social ladder in DC is a linear function of the number of employees you control. A friend of mine in the 1960’s was finishing grad school and got a job with a new agency in DC. A few months after starting, his boss came in and announced that everyone should let their “Inbox” pile up... no explanation. About 4 days later there was a “surprise” inspection by the GAO to see if the agency really did need more workers. Seeing the stacked-up Inboxes, the agency got more employees. That agency had about 20 employees when he started. It now has 16,000+. It’s the EPA.

[Abathar]

Judge orders the button returned in 3... 2... 1...

[circlecity]

What kind of “red tape” causes it to take 4 months to move the position of a log in button on a web site?

[Red Badger]

below the fold?

It’s printed on a newspaper?.........Man they are behind the Times!.......and the Post.........and the Chronicle.........

[asinclair]

As a decades-long software guy, I can say that cutting through the red tape takes way far longer than actually making user-interface changes in corporations.

At one company I worked for, the 14-person software team was required to submit paperwork for Engineering Change Orders proposals. These were reviewed once a month by a Review Board consisting of enginners from hardware, software, drafting, technical writing, and fiscal managers. Only "approved" change orders could be implemented, except for changes that fixed a documented ticket from Field Service.

These proposals had to detail the tasks that were required to implement the change and document them to customers.

Malicious compliance: I and a couple of my cubicle buddies became good friends with the Field Service people. During informal meet-ups in the cafeteria, they would describe their pet peeves to us software guys. As a group, we would craft trouble tickets for the FS guys to submit. During the ticket submission process (which was considerably more streamlined than the ECO process) we software guys would scaffold the changes and test them. When we got the ticket paperwork, we'd push the software change through.

Now, why the tangle? Our customers would pay literally millions of dollars for the banking equipment systems. Management didn't want to lose control. (But they did!)

The cost savings to the company was measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, plus improved customer word-of-mouth advertising. An increase in the number of service contracts that sales people sold.

(That was almost 40 years ago. The company is now history.)

[ken in texas]

And if you asked the “engineer” why it would take 103 days, he would probably say something like - “Well, the guy I replaced would have taken about 182 days. I’m much faster than him”. /s

[montag813]

They just broke a ton of AI agents and automation routines.

[numberonepal]

In ANY Enterprise level organization this would be a very quick fix for a non show stopper. They didn’t just move the login link, they also rejiggered the middle container. Dev time was prolly like 20 mins, unit tests 20, QA 20, and 11 minutes to deploy the pipeline live. This was a front end only change. They are using Drupal for CMS and this is a static page, meaning no data is being pulled in by APIs. That makes it a lot easier. But this is escalation to the highest levels.

[cuz1961]

DOGE

the cyber ceebees

“the difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer”

[GOPJ]

Pull out a knife and cut the cable?

[GOPJ]

An IRS engineer explained that the *soonest* this change could get deployed is July 21st... 103 days from now.This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes.

Thank YOU DOGE...

[silent_jonny]

[PGR88]

There are great people at the IRS, who are simply being strangled by bureaucracy.

It's a ridiculous statement. Yes, there were great people in the Stasi, or Enron, or Saddam Hussiens army.

But political, financial and bureaucratic corruption is pervasive in all large human organizations - particularly governments agencies that are not subject to social or market forces.

If Musk, Trump or anyone else thinks they can train a Fed.gov elephant to dance, they are badly mistaken.

[numberonepal]

The 4 months was probably cited because the team that develops the IRS homepage has a backlog of work. That work is prioritized by a Product Owner or Project Manager. Requests for changes on a major homepage like irs.gov are likely highly scrutinized through governance processes. NOTHING happens immediately in the software development life cycle (SDLC). Something new coming in goes to the bottom of the backlog by default unless otherwise escalated. This effort may very well have been sitting in the backlog awaiting grooming/refinement and capacity evaluations for the work to begin. This change was escalated to the absolute highest levels and was prioritized at the top of the backlog immediately, probably skipping the governance procedures. Believe there was more than 71 minutes spent from the request to pushing this change to the live servers. That 71 minutes was from when the developer got the direction to do it. This is what we call “swarming” in software development. Everyone involved focused on this one thing to get it live.

[rlmorel]

These are the same types of IT douchebags who, when asked for a Department of Interior Survey, planned to spend millions on the survey, when it would have cost in a normal world less than $10,000 dollars using a tool like SurveyMonkey.

As an aside, page after page on a web search (I stopped at ten pages deep) were composed of "fact checks" and denials that this was a valid find.

Of course, when you read some of them (and I soiled my browser to do so) you see things like this (from CBS):

"That appeared to be a reference to a March 19 post on X, where the DOGE account wrote that the Federal Consulting Group, an arm of the Department of the Interior, "brokered a $75M contract to design website customer satisfaction surveys , and then attempted to award $830M to conduct similar surveys." The post added that the contract was canceled before it was signed, and that the Federal Consulting Group would be dissolved that week. "

Ahhh. So, they were only going to award a $75 million contract to do a survey that cost $10,000 to do with SurveyMonkey.

Oh, that is much better. I am so relieved.

And that $830 million to conduct "similar" surveys was "cancelled" before it was signed.

Gee. I feel even better, even without knowing why it was not signed. Could it just be that people were actually looking at this? What if they hadn't been looking?

Would this have been signed? I have zero doubt it would have been.

How many of these bastardly things DO get signed and ARE getting signed that we just don't know about in this massive, bloated government?

[numberonepal]

This page is built in a Content Management System called Drupal. There was no AI involved in the change most likely.