Moving On
I find it a little grating when people talk about their jobs under the rubric of "personal news." No judgment if you feel differently, but in a perfect world, my personal life would not be meaningfully entwined with my job. That said, this post is all about how my job has affected me as a person this year and I will spoil it at the outset by saying the effect has not been good.
But in order to talk about how and why this year has been such an ordeal (beyond what you've probably already read about from other feds or news reporting about them), I want to back up a little and talk about my time in government more expansively.
A capsule history the last 6 years of federal government digital services
I joined government as a Consulting Engineer with 18F in 2019 during the first Trump administration. During that time, the White House's attitude toward digital service teams working to improve the public's experience of government services was one of generally benign indifference. I've heard stories of inflection points at which that attitude could've changed (more likely than not for the worse), but can't speak to those points with any first-hand knowledge. What I can say is that, except for a few high-profile projects, the White House mostly left us alone to do great, impactful work with our agency partners.
And while I definitely don't think Trump deserves special credit for being the one sitting at the Resolute desk when good laws happen to cross it, he is the one who signed the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experiences Act, and the Modernizing Government Technology Act (which created the Technology Modernization Fund) into law. These are still driving big changes in how feds build technology today. (Though it has to be said, as part of the contested budget driving the current shutdown, Trump's Republican colleagues are trying to zero out the TMF.)
Then President Biden was elected. Given the mostly listless back half of that administration, it's easy to forget how much promise there seemed to be at its outset. Remember when people talked about Biden being a new FDR? For those of us doing digital services work inside government, it's hard to overstate how excited we were. Key positions were filled with political appointees who either came from our milieu or clearly shared its vision and goals. And new sources of funding, like the American Rescue Plan, promised to be an engine driving the growth of new programs and platforms throughout government. The Biden OMB's Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience memo put real force behind implementing 21st Century IDEA.
Looking back now, it's hard not to feel like Biden's one term was a historically blown opportunity for creating the kind of lasting change that would've been hard for subsequent administrations to undo. Part of this is obviously due to the fact that, as we've all learned the extremely hard way, there's not much that the executive can't tear down—irrespective of laws or norms—if the putatively coequal branches can't or won't exercise their constitutional powers as checks and balances to stop it. However, while it's correct and important to point to the critical programs (like Direct File) and offices (18F, real USDS) the second Trump administration destroyed, one also mustn't overlook the unforced errors during the Biden era that prevented teams from moving the ball forward as much as they could have. (This isn't the space to litigate any of that but buy me a beer sometime.) Whatever the cause, it's impossible to deny how much has been lost in the first 10 months of the second Trump administration and how insurmountable the challenge of rebuilding any of it feels to many of the people who want desperately to do that.
2025
It seems hopelessly naïve now, but for those of us who were in government for Trump 1, there was at least a faint hope that things might go the same way this time around—that is, that maybe we'd be able to stay mostly under the radar this time too. Of course any such glimmer of optimism was thoroughly squashed after Trump's second election, and the clear signals that he was going to hand the reins of the administrative state over to Elon Musk and Russell Vought.
I was lucky. As part of a consulting project while I was still at 18F, I spent most of 2024 serving in an acting capacity as Engineering Lead for the US Web Design System. Then in October, just before the election, I was offered the chance to move into that role on a full-time basis. I jumped at the chance, not just because I loved the team and the products (though I emphatically did!), but because it seemed like a safer place to be than 18F in the event that the election went the way that it ultimately did. That bet paid off for me in a way that was even grimmer than I would've thought at the time.
Since January, the experience of being a federal worker has been a cavalcade of swords of Damocles, Chekov's guns, and precariously hung shoes waiting to drop. And unfortunately, just about every ominous sign did in fact portend real danger. At every opportunity, the people running the executive branch made it plain that rank-and-file feds were expendable at best and at worst, deserving of open contempt. There were multiple rounds of "fork in the road" emails from mysterious email addresses sent from insecure servers. Reductions in Force (RIFs), legal and otherwise, hollowed out still more capacity, and left those of us who remained in constant fear of sudden illegal termination.
At the beginning of the year, I was leading a small but amazing team of contract engineers working on USWDS. Shortly after the inauguration, that contract was terminated, so the USWDS team was down to four federal employee practice leads. Very soon after that, two of those dear colleagues left of their own accord. That left a team of two feds to steward the design system supporting hundreds of sites across the government web. The two of us were safe for the time being, but obviously we needed to drastically change our roadmap and the way we planned to go about delivering it. All around us, other similar contracts were being cancelled with little-to-no warning.
In the spring, I got notice that I was subject to RIF. Everyone who was in a position to do so reassured me that I wasn't actually at risk of being let go. I'm an engineer and the DOGE and DOGE-aligned tech bros running my corner of government value engineering over other skillsets. Still, it's not fun to have the legal process for termination hanging over your head.
Another of the administration's tactics to cull the federal workforce is the universal requirement to "return" to office. I use scare quotes because most of us were fully remote since before Covid. I've never reported to an office for regular work as a fed. None of the people I work with day to day work anywhere near me, so my going to an office wouldn't do anything to foster collaboration. The initiative is intended to force people out who can't or won't go to an office, and to discipline and surveil the people who remain.
These threats loomed over many feds, but one that threatened USWDS specifically is the executive order creating the so-called National Design Studio. This EO explicitly mentions USWDS, and we were left to wait to see what its actual impact would be on our team and the product. The early signals were extremely mixed. On one hand, the team got informal hints that we should have a wishlist ready to be able to say what we would need in order for USWDS to implement any directives that would come from the NDS and its director. On the other, we could see the NDS's early work, such as America by Design, The NDS's own website, and TrumpRx. None of these has much, if anything to do with USWDS. They also happen to be bad websites.
If these sites are any indication of what was coming down the pike as the future of government websites, it's a bad sign for the people who have to build and maintain those sites, it's a bad sign for USWDS, and it's a bad sign for you as a user and a member of the public. Prior to the shutdown, the USWDS team still hadn't heard anything about what NDS was supposed to mean for us or for the System. However, without delving into specific rumors, there have been indications that NDS's intentions for USWDS or its possible replacement would not be meaningfully better than the JavaScript-heavy, inaccessible, and AI-generated error-ridden sites than that office's early work would suggest.
Then the shutdown came, and the USWDS team was told not to come to work. This came as a bit of a surprise, since our team is not funded through congressional appropriation. The pot of money my last paycheck came from is still there. I've been through several shutdowns now, but this is my first furlough. The only thing that changed is the administration's choice to weaponize furloughs this time. As it happens, I was actually brought back from furlough, but only to work on a ridiculous website that, while it uses USWDS, is otherwise unrelated. I was also directed to spend no more than 5% of my time on USWDS (my actual job) until this other project is done or gets additional resources.
(Side note: if someone were inclined to look into the demographics of these discretionary furloughs as well as who was called back into work vs. who was left furloughed, the interested observer might find it lines up with other major personnel moves the executive has made this year.)
What's next?
It has been a deeply upsetting and at times traumatic year, but I've weathered it as best I could, and managed to stay employed. In the early part of the year when I expected to be RIF'd along with all of my dear friends and colleagues from 18F, I interviewed to the point of near-burnout. I even had an exciting offer to go work on a state digital services team that, after agonizing over the decision for a week, I ended up turning down to try and stick it out with USWDS and GSA.
However, things are a bit different for me today than they were those handful of months ago. Back then, the NDS threat hadn't yet appeared on the horizon. And I believed then I'd be able to avoid having to report to a random, decrepit building for RTO, which I no longer think is possible. And there's just the simple fact that I've been steeping in the accretion of this misery for that many more months, which has taken an ever-increasing toll. Finally, to put it plainly, the horrors that the federal government has been perpetrating in areas that don't have anything to do with me directly have nonetheless become impossible to shrug off and I don't want to have even a whiff of complicity with them.
So, some personal news: for all those reasons, I resigned. As of today, I'm no longer in federal service.
On the happier side of the ledger, all of those things also lined up with a terrific opportunity to keep working in public service and design systems. I'm going to keep the specifics of that role out of this post, since this is all very dark, and I'd like to keep a little distance between all of this and the new role. But suffice it to say, while I'm mourning my own federal service and the dire state of the republic, I'm incredibly grateful to get to keep doing work that's both personally fulfilling and technically interesting.
Before closing this out, I do want to say how grateful I am for the great years I had as a fed: for all the work I had the opportunity to do, and most importantly for all of the wonderful people I had the life-changing good fortune to work alongside. To everyone still there, thank you for your continued service. You deserve so much better.
Originally written on