Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy running a "department of government efficiency" that they're choosing to abbreviate as DOGE. A secretary of defense that denies germ theory (interesting to see how that goes with the US bioweapons program). An attorney general who has had credible accusations of child sex trafficking levelled against him. And expected purges of people not loyal to the leadership in the military, the civil service and the media. Yep, no doubt about it: we're seeing the first ever US government to run on SCRUM principles take shape.
For those of you blessedly ignorant of what SCRUM is, it's a form of Agile software development management. I... can't bring myself to document the details of it, but my good friend Nikhil Suresh has kindly documented it here. I will note, however, that I make a distinction in this article between SCRUM-as-documented and SCRUM-as-actually-practiced: the two are very, very different things, and the conflation between the two coupled with a refusal to acknowledge this distinction are an integral part of SCRUM ideology.
SCRUM-as-practiced, to my mind, is a tool of social control; the primary purpose of it is to keep engineers confused, off-balanced and continually reacting to crises, making them pliant and easy to control. While I don't believe it was designed to be this way, it is notable that if you ask the question "what will cause the maximum disruption to a software engineer's peace of mind?" when designing a system of management, in almost every case you get the decision that SCRUM-as-practiced makes. The two-week sprint structure combines with the backlog management system to create a situation of continual crisis, where velocity consistently goes down and the team never meets its targets, stressing the team out and leaving them feeling inadequate. The bizarre names for everything make it almost impossible to know what's going on without acculturating to a truly dogshit set of thought patterns, and the constant, incessant interruptions make it almost impossible to get any real work done, much less actually think about what you're doing.
Now, does this mean that I think Donald Trump has consciously chosen to adopt SCRUM principles in order to run his government? No, not exactly. But I do believe that both the Trump administration taking shape and SCRUM-as-practiced draw from the same basic principles for maintaining control in an environment where the people in charge are devoid of actual authority or legitimacy. And that, I believe, says something interesting.
Rank managerialism
You will note that literally all of Trump's proposed appointments so far are manifestly unqualified for the positions they're doing. I don't think this is an accident or a mistake. Rather, the inability of managers to actually do the work they're overseeing is key to the ideology of SCRUM-as-practiced. Competence, you see, is dangerous. Engineers (in this case extending more widely to "people with skills that you need to do what you're doing") are more often than not key to the success of whatever organisation they're working in, and you usually can't just do without them. But engineers are powerful, and if you're not careful about how they're managed, they might realise that they have that power and do something unpleasant, like take control of your company or go on strike, or even block some of the awful legislation your administration is pushing. You have to keep them tightly controlled by management, even if it leads to highly suboptimal output: so long as the output isn't nil, any amount of inefficiency can be overlooked. And this in turn means that your managers are primarily enforcers, whose first job is to crack down on any signs of independence in your workers: output is, at best, a secondary consideration.
This leads to one very obvious conclusion: you cannot afford to have managers who might even remotely identify with the people whom they're managing. It doesn't necessarily matter that engineers are having their brains turned to sludge, producing slowly and insipidly and getting almost no work done. Managers who understand and care about engineering work might find common ground with the people they're managing and push back against your ideas. Even worse, they might actually understand that what you're asking for is immoral, impossible or insane.
Trump's appointment of complete incompetents to these posts makes an awful lot of sense in this framework. Being out of their depth, they will often simply be unable to understand the complexities of what they're overseeing, meaning that all they'll be able to do will be to enforce diktats from above. This goes beyond simply being a question of enforcing loyalty; an incompetent is far more effective than a competent loyalist for a number of reasons. First off, a competent loyalist will consistently have loyalty to multiple different things; loyalty is always divided, and that means that if you upset a loyalist enough, they may turn against you. And when a competent loyalist does turn against you, they're equipped to make a good job of it. By contrast, an incompetent appointed to a position always has the fear of being found out hanging over their heads, which is a much more effective way to keep them in line. Coupled with the aforementioned difficulty that an incompetent will have with identifying with their subordinates, this is a great way to keep one's appointees in line.
Strategic aims? What strategic aims?
You've heard it before and you'll hear it again: I love Clausewitz. I love talking about strategy, both in the context of war and outside it. And I love looking at the dysfunctions of strategy that bring down states and organisations alike. Which makes this new experiment very interesting to me.
So far what I've described could describe any dysfunctional organisation: there are some elements of it that do align with SCRUM to a degree, but it's certainly not specific. The reason why I say that this is a Scrumlord regime is not simply due to the dysfunction, but because of what SCRUM is for on a horizontal level. We've already discussed the purpose of SCRUM-as-practiced in the context of vertical hierarchies, but it also have a horizontal element: one that mediates relationships between peers and at the upper echelons of the power structure. And that purpose is to obscure a lack of strategic direction.
Fascist regimes have historically had considerable difficulty maintaining a consistent strategic orientation. They are, after all, made up of a whole bunch of different stakeholders, each of whom have been promised different things in order to co-opt them, and in a qualitatively different way to a liberal (in the wide) democratic government that has actual ideological and policy commitments. Everyone in these organisations wants different things, and in this kind of situation, it's downright impossible to organise a consistent strategy. In the extreme case, you see Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler actively feuding over whether to massacre Jews or use them for forced labour in the munitions factory, while the eastern front was actively collapsing and shortly before the D-Day landings. Being able to obscure the facts in this kind of situation is vital for maintaining sanity and morale.
And, in the corporate environment, this is what SCRUM is for. It's a brilliant way to fake action and forward progress in a situation where nobody in a company or organisation knows what they're doing or where they're going. Hence, we have a system of management where we actively avoid long-term thinking or any time horizon longer than two weeks. So long as we don't look at the long term and just push out widgets and features, we can pretend that our organisation is making progress and being effective. We don't have to think about the hard problems that might cripple our organisation down the line, and we certainly don't need to give our engineers any leeway to think or correct course. All we have to do is keep churning out the JSON, and things will be OK.
Now, throwing our gaze over the newly-forming regime, the department of government efficiency is exactly this kind of thing writ large. The organisation won't, I imagine, be particularly effective at pursuing any specific strategy: certainly not with the people in charge of it. Nor will the organisation actually have real impacts in its own right. What I do see happening, however, is them sending out agents to micromanage literally every other department, creating a storm of "productivity" that they'll talk about loudly and at length. Under no circumstances will outcomes be tracked. This is most definitely Scrumlord behaviour. I can only imagine that similar things will happen in other departments. I cannot imagine that RFK is going to do anything in the health department besides burning things down at random. He'll ban vaccines, trans healthcare and abortion, but he's certainly not going to actually formulate a strategy or respond effectively to threats to American health. I dread the next pandemic.
This kind of behaviour is bad enough in tech environments, where it destroys morale, leads to organisations wasting millions of dollars on idling computers and means that we can't build anything remotely useful. I shudder to think what it's going to look like when the exact same mindset is running the most powerful country in the world.
Why talk about this in the context of SCRUM?
As much as this regime is a fascist one, it's also an extension of modern corporate management to the state: all fascist regimes are. 1930s Germany was, in many ways, a reflection of 1930s corporate culture, and an awful lot has been written about how corporatist ideologies are one of the major drivers of fascism (David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules goes into this in way more depth, so I can highly recommend it as a thing to read). And so, just as the Nazi regime reproduced the corporate structures of its time, it's inevitable that our current fascist regime is going to reproduce a lot of the worst aspects of corporate-technical management in the modern day, almost all of which are encapsulated within modern SCRUM.
There are two reasons that make examining this dynamic interesting. The first is that watching this regime take shape reveals many of the underlying ideological biases of the way we manage. There is formally no difference between appointing Matt Gaetz as Attorney-General and appointing a person with absolutely no understanding of software engineering practice as a Scrum master or manager (well, the manager is probably less morally bankrupt, but that's a low bar to cross). That brings the sheer managerialism and contempt for actual technical skill of our ways of managing people into sharp relief: the belief is that the people in charge are, because of innate virtue, more suited to manage technical work than technical people are. The idea that skill is unimportant when it comes to leadership is, I think, a fundamentally fascist idea. Likewise, the fact of the matter is that we do primarily hire for loyalty over competence in most corporate roles, and competence is actually a direct black mark: it's perhaps disguised a bit better in the corporate world than in this regime, but it is a very real thing. This regime is, in a lot of ways, the prototypical version of our usual corporate governance, shorn of any of the fluff we usually surround it with. It's certainly a revealing view, and it'll be interesting to see how it performs.
The second reason is of more immediate interest: if we understand the current regime as being a somewhat unusual outgrowth of Scrumlord ideology, we can predict how and where the regime is likely to fail, and, in fact, make a start on taking it apart. First and foremost, this regime is likely to have real trouble getting anything done. Between the lack of strategic direction, the fact that the regime constantly lies to itself and the fact that the regime has to waste most of its resources on maintaining loyalty, it's highly unlikely that they'll actually be able to do anything well enough to please their supporters. They can, of course, still do an awful lot of damage, but this does give us an opportunity: if you or a community organisation that you're with is capable of actually helping people and delivering on what you promise, however small, you become very well-positioned to pull the regime's soft support away from it. This suggests a strategy of dual power, or of building our own institutions to replace the ones that the regime intends to neglect. Education failing? Set up after-school tutoring, and make sure that people have access to at least basic literacy and numeracy resources. Healthcare going down the shitter? There are limits to what can be done here, but you'd be surprised just how far community clinics can go. People hungry and unclothed? Community kitchens are a great idea. Workplace rights being systematically torn down? May I suggest a union?
Of course, a lot of this is going to be made radioactively illegal. It's worth doing anyway: we're not going to get through this without some casualties, though we definitely need to try and minimise them as much as we can. The goal here is to delegitimise the regime: it's going to be very hard for a lot of soft Trump supporters to maintain the weird ideas they have when trans people are keeping them fed, healthy and making sure their kids are educated while the regime just makes them suffer more. This kind of thing makes the regime look callous to its supporters, and more importantly, weak. It also has the advantage of covering the very real needs that this regime is going to create. And finally, it helps organise us: organising around small, focused-in issues is excellent training for running large organisations and co-ordinating bigger actions (I'll note that a lot of what I'm drawing from here is the model that Solidarnosc used to bring down the Communist regime in Poland: a lot of the same lessons are going to be applicable).
The second major point of fracture is the fact that loyalties in the administration are going to be deeply divided. Everyone in power will be in there for a different reason and with a different agenda. It's thus going to be very important that we make space for defectors. Yes, it's not something that I think any of us like the idea of. They're not people whom we like, and their moral judgement is obviously somewhat suspect. It's still important, unfortunately, to hold our nose and welcome them into the fold: defectors make the regime look even weaker, and they'll often bring some body of support along with them. Every person who defects from the regime thus erodes the power-base that they rely on. And even if you don't see eye-to-eye on most things, there are going to be things you can work together on (I suspect that this tactic is primarily going to be effective with the evangelical crowd: while we may not agree on much, there are some spots where our values overlap, and we can focus in on them).
All in all though, there's something fundamentally depressing about this state of things. We all know that corporate government doesn't work, that SCRUM doesn't work, and that it's a basically corrupt and authoritarian system that slowly drives companies into the ground. While there's some perverse pleasure to be gained from watching this go down, I don't think I can be happy about this. And, as I think I've established, SCRUM and the current regime are fundamentally the same kind of thing.
So, even as we fight the looming fascism in the USA, perhaps we could get rid of the seeds of it in our own workplaces?