Waldo Jaquith18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was demolished by Musk’s team shortly after midnight. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 billion.
18F is *precisely* what Musk and team claim should exist within government. But when his team found it, they destroyed it, because it is evidence that government works well (can’t have that!), and because like Zelensky, 18F didn’t bend the knee.
Trump and Musk are eliminating any part of government that works well, because that undermines their thesis that government doesn’t work.
GSA (which houses 18F) turns a profit as an agency. Naturally it has to be destroyed. 18F’s healthy revenue stream also means it must go.
To anybody in leadership at the state or municipal level: 18F’s destruction makes this *the perfect time* to hire experienced technologists, which you all need very badly. Most 18Fers would love to stay in public service. They are spread throughout the country.
Go go go!
For any devs wondering what 18F does (did), here’s its GitHub org page, with 1,210 repos. A few were mine! All the work they did for all their agency partners was open source. Public money should produce public software, for public inspection.
Those days are over, starting today.
18F
18F
18F did two things, both for agencies that hired them to help with projects: it built software and it taught agencies how to hire & oversee vendors to build software. The former raised the bar by showing agencies what “good” looks like, the latter allowed those practices to expand sustainably.
The work that I led at 18F I naturally feel was really important (I hope all 18Fers felt the same way about their work): codifying the procurement principals that we’d all identified there over the years. I thought this would have a tiny audience. Instead it became a foundational text.
Introduction | 18F De-risking ...
Introduction | 18F De-risking ...
The work I do today at @usdigitalresponse.org is simply what I did at 18F (software procurement, budgeting, and oversight), except I’m a team of one, dependent on grant funding.
I have sent many an agency to 18F when they need large-scale support. But no more—I have nowhere to send them now.
I wish we could hire a bunch of 18Fers at U.S. Digital Response, but we’re a small organization, reliant on grants for funding. Heck, my position is only 3/4-time. Instead we’ll work with our state and local partners to create positions appropriation for these folks, and help to make those matches.
18F faced a lot of threats over the years. In the beginning it was mostly from within, frankly. It’s the way of digital services that they break a bunch of rules to get started. Then the threats were external. But I never thought a threat was being too effective for Republican myth-making.
I see folks asking about forking all the 18F GitHub repos so there are copies. Don’t worry, that was done at scale by multiple organizations, weeks ago, anticipating this.