18F 🫡
Over the weekend, 18F was eliminated, and all of its staff placed on administrative leave in anticipation of imminent termination.
I left 18F in November, so I wasn't directly affected by this massacre. But I was at 18F for over 5 years and these were some of my closest colleagues and dear friends, so it's not that I wasn't affected at all. The secondhand trauma is real. The survivor's guilt is real. Honestly, the small twinge of jealousy at the clarity of purpose my former coworkers now have is real, too.
When I left 18F to join the USWDS team, I moved from one dream job to another. But the move was, in part, a strategic bet that I'd be in a safer place depending on the election results. After this weekend, there's a sense in which that bet paid off. But there aren't any safe jobs in the federal government, and there sure as hell aren't any dream jobs. One of Project 2025's architects, and now chief of the Office of Management and Budget expressed a plan to put federal workers in trauma. That effort has been a wild and terrible success.
Why did this happen?
(Even though I'm writing this on a personal device on my personal time, I still work for GSA and am still bound by its social media policy as well as the Hatch Act. As such, I'm going to limit this to only public information and refrain from expressing certain political opinions)
Recently, one of Airbnb's cofounders announced he was working with DOGE to "to improve the user experience within our government." What if I told you there was a group of user researchers, engineers, product managers, and procurement specialists within the federal goverment whose job was to partner with other federal agencies, learn directly from them and the people they serve what problems they face, and come up with solutions tested with real users? Well there isn't. Not anymore, anyway, since they were all just fired. I'm being glib, but my point is that 18F excelled at doing all of the things DOGE purports to want, including dramatically eleiminating waste. See here and here and here for just a few of so, so many examples.
So why did they kill 18F? If you ask me in my totally personal non-official opinion, it wasn't despite 18F's success but because of it. But don't take it from me, take it from 18F's last Executive Director:
The administration got rid of 18F under the cover of night. People who own skyscrapers are afraid of 100 people who make websites. Not because of the latest tech fad, but because we proved the government can be fixed, the government can be made better and the government can work for the people. - Lindsay Young, on BlueSky
I joined 18F almost 6 years ago, during the first Trump administration. It was important to me to ensure that people could have good experiences of government services. At the very least, I wanted to help keep the lights on until it was time to build again. With the American Rescue Plan, Technology Modernization Fund, and other drastic interventions, it was once again time to build, and dammit 18F built. 18F built or helped build: IRS Direct File, get.gov, Federal Audit Clearinghouse, American Climate Corps (RIP), and so, so much else. But that's the rub isn't it? At the end of the day, you either think government can and should make people's lives better, or you don't. If you think government should be in the business of helping the public, you'd keep 18F and throw a bunch of resources at them. If you didn't think that, well....
Now what?
If you want to know what's next for everyone from 18F, stay tuned. I mentioned a bet earlier. Here's another bet: if you piss off nearly 100 of the most capable, driven humans around, I bet you're going to end up regretting it.
What's next for me? I really don't know. For the time being, I still have a job. I don't for how long that will be true. I definitely didn't expect to be looking for a new job anytime soon, so while I'd prefer to be more strategic about my next rolw, I may not have that kind of luxry. We'll see, I guess. I would really like to believe that, if I'm able to hang on, I can still do some good. But the disgraceful treatment of 18F makes it all too clear that doing good is not an option for the timebeing.
In the more immediate future, I'd like to write more about my time at 18F, so if you want to hear more about that, for now the best way to follow that is on BlueSky. (I'm an RSS guy and I'll make a feed for this site, but I'm trying to post things instead of yak shaving). Right now though, I'm going to mourn just a little bit longer and support my 18F comrades however I can.
Originally written on