Absolutely beautiful day in Portland. Spent it in a couple different neighborhoods cheering on the racers in our marathon/half/10k with my 13 month old and friends visiting from out of town. Very peaceful cross-city event with families all coming out to celebrate.

Folks in our community have asked us to comment on “America by Design”—but a site like this largely speaks for itself.

America by Design

A National Design Studio Initiative

americabydesign.gov

Streamlining the government's procurement processes shouldn't come at the expense of safeguards designed to protect the public interest. At 18F, we developed a set of practices to help our partner agencies work effectively with technology vendors—and these practices worked.

Improving government contracting and acquisition

Doing government contracting and acquisition better is not (just) about finding the cheapest way to do things.

18f.org

This is what happens when 18F goes away: beta.weather.gov has been deactivated, “due to the loss of critical federal staff, which leaves this project without the resources to continue its development or for routine monitoring and maintenance.” 18f.org/projects/#:~...

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the psychological scars I have felt from the last six weeks as a federal civil servant will be with me for the rest of my professional career, if not the rest of my life. (Yes, I know that was the goal. It doesn't make it hurt any less.)

We’re receiving word that General Services Administration leadership are firing more people tonight. Our dedicated colleagues should be eating dinner with their families or putting their kids to bed, not having their lives upended. The public will suffer, too. We stand with all of you.


You might know us from the guides we have put together, like the de-risking guide and the UX guide. Governments all around the world have used them to make services more accessible and add more value to the public — all while saving millions of dollars. You can still find them here: 18f.org/guides/

18F Guides

A central resource for all 18F guides and methods

18f.org

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.

This is something I’ve harped on for a while. Govt, especially locals, doesn’t have the right skill set for engaging with these vendors and they keep getting taken to the cleaners on expensive contracts that don’t deliver and nobody understands the tech or the contracting side well enough 1/

Dan Hon@danhon.com · last yr.

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

One way you can tell that DOGE is not doing what they claim they are, modernizing tech or finding waste, is bc Trump and DOGE have ousted 3 entities who ALREADY WERE DOING THAT. @donmoyn.bsky.social describes two here, USDS and 18F. The third are the IGs. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/skilled-te...

Skilled technologists are being forced out of government

18F and USDS are gutted by DOGE

donmoynihan.substack.com

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.

I had a front row seat to watch 18F get started a dozen years ago by some of the smartest and most dedicated public servants I’ve ever met. Their work saved countless lives, and yes, hundreds of millions, probably billions, of dollars. But just as significantly: it made government more responsive.

Waldo Jaquith@waldo.net · last yr.

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.

I’m heartsick thinking about the destruction of 18F. The lights of my own public service turned on when I learned about them in 2014. I’ve worked among them and learned from them, and the American public lost orders of magnitude more than whatever small amount won’t be expended on work left undone.

2/ A key goal of 18F was to provide state of the art end user experience for usg websites. So basically making sure public facing websites that the American people must use are super user friendly and effective. In other words, something really important at many levels.

Confirming what others have discussed or reported, 18F, the elite tech consultancy within TTS/GSA, was formally disbanded overnight. There’s a formal RIF, the legal system in which the government downsizes/layoff people. I’m told it’s 60 days on leave for all involved.

I once saved an agency around $2 million on a modernization project because of a bad contract they had, it took me several phone calls and less than a week. You need alignment and air cover to pull stuff like this off, but the game changing is stuff we weren't even allowed to promote or talk about

Waldo Jaquith@waldo.net · last yr.

18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was just demolished by Musk’s team. 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 million. A thread about 18F:

Last night just after midnight ET, me and my colleagues at 18F were told our office had been "deleted". All 90+ technologists are out of the civil service.

Alright since my time in the civil service was abruptly cut short, I guess it's time to return to my true calling: posting.