I posted this on the bluesky and people found it useful there:
You should know that a big part of 18F's work was to make sure multi-million to multi-*hundreds*-of-millions dollar contracts at fed *and* state level didn't go to shitty enterprise IT consultancies that *repeatedly* delivered tech that didn't work, was late, or didn't even do what it needed to
I brought 18F in on its first engagement with a state. They helped us turn around a giant half-billion-dollar procurement in a waterfall RFP into something that was broken up into smaller chunks in < 4 weeks.
They stood up user research. They helped assess vendors on what they could *actually* do.
18F helps states check whether consultancies and bidders can do what they say they do -- because many governments lack the experience + capability to check those claims anymore.
When people say they were the tip of the spear, they really were.
You can't imagine how difficult it is to persuade a government to fundamentally change how it develops/acquires/manages technology at any scale without the reassurance that the federal government will support it.
States needed 18F to even have the thought that feds would have their back.
There is no way you could've had an executive order on user experience without 18F and USDS. It would've been hollow bullshit.
18F was an actual realization that if you want gov to do stuff differently then you need to actually bring that capability in-house rather than contract it out.
Dan Hon