18F and USDS are gutted by DOGE
Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:
For those who don’t know much about government, the idea of Elon Musk as a serious tech guy who could shake up how the public sector work was appealing. Even people who do know a lot about government were hopeful.
Such hopes now look naive. Musk is not just ignorant about what government does, he chooses to celebrate and make decisions based on that ignorance, defaulting to accusations of fraud to explain things he does not want to understand. He is not interested in fixing government, but in destroying key parts of government, and that takes no great skill. This is not just a point about competing political philosophies, but about state capacity, and specifically tech skills in government. Musk is not just destroying core government functions, he is also destroying the actual tech capacity of government. Because there are, in fact, skilled technologists who work in government. They are not enough of them, and they lacked power to make big changes. They worked mostly in the US Digital Service and 18F, both created in 2014 after the failure of healthcare.gov. And now they are mostly gone. All 18F employees were fired as part of the ongoing Reductions in Force. The US Digital Service no longer exists. It is now the US DOGE Service. It also has seen about 40 people laid off, and 21 employees resigned last week, leaving around 40 experienced employees left.
Here is a thumbnail sketch of the two units: USDS offered support and guidance to agencies, but could not dictate a governmentwide approach on most issues. In times of crisis, or when a President prioritized a policy outcome dependent on digital innovations, it could play a more prominent role, serving as a de facto firefighter for digital governance. The General Services Administration set up its own digital consultancy team, 18F in 2014. This team’s mission is to work with agencies to “[transform] the way the federal government builds and buys digital services.” 18F was a cost recoverable office, meaning that they charge partner agencies for their work rather than being funded directly through a congressional appropriation. Both organizations use similar managerial technologies, which includes agile, iterative design, a user-centric approach, a reliance on data-driven decision making, directly managing relationships with vendors, favoring open-source solutions, the prioritization of platform models, and a flatter organizational culture. USDS and 18F represented a hopeful trend for American government: embedding serious tech skills inside the bureaucracy, rather than relying on private vendors. They care about public services, and represented the most visible public sector manifestation of “civic tech” in government. [...]
DOGE is a step backwards for government tech talent
Musk’s team saw USDS as an an existing shell they could occupy that seemed nominally aligned with goal of modernizing government. A former USDS official, Amy Gleason, had worked for one of the DOGE team, Brad Smith in the private sector, and returned to USDS on the understanding she was helping the Trump transition team. Gleason became the official DOGE administrator last week, though of course no-one believes this to be the reality. She also tried to get the USDS to hire some of the staff who had already signed on to work for DOGE. None made the cut. They did not advertise their connection with Musk, and so their rejections were not clouded by political bias. Their applications failed because they were not qualified. [...] The point is that Musk isn’t bringing in incredible 10X coders to replace bureaucrats. The best evidence we have is that they would not have been hired into a tech role under normal circumstances. The people who could not make it at USDS were hired at DOGE staff because of their personal and professional connections to Musk, and their ideological commitment for downsizing government. This was a poor fit with the existing employees at 18F and the US Digital Service, who believed that technology could be used to make government work better, not to cut its core tasks. [...] The Trump administration does not care about the loss of this talent. Katie Miller, the DOGE spokesperson, posted this about the resignation of USDS officials. Miller does not explain how fully remote workers posted “trans flags” (or rainbow flags for the rest of us). But she herself is representative of DOGE. She has no tech skills, which is fine for a PR person. Her husband, Stephen Miller, has been described as the “Prime Minister” aiding Musk. Musk had previously given Miller’s political groups $50 million dollars. These are the people running tech in government now. (One more fun fact about Katie Miller: According to Wikipedia, she destroyed “hundreds of copies of the school's newspaper, after it endorsed an opposing student government candidate.”)
DOGE’s cuts have harmed skilled technology needed to run government functions.
