A number of people I know—and many, many more friends of my friends in D.C. and around the globe—have been negatively affected by the recent firings and other chaos-making of the current administration. Yesterday, the employees at 18F, a federal agency responsible for improving government efficiency in the digital realm, were summarily dismissed, and it looks like their website at 18f.gsa.gov was taken offline. Its code is still available on GitHub, though. The group quickly created a site in response at 18f.org. The homepage begins with this:
A letter to the American People:
For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.
However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.
18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.
I encourage all to read and share the full statement. These are dedicated people who have been working tirelessly to serve the American people. I’ve followed them and looked at their code for a number of years (~1,000 publicly accessible projects!), and I can tell you that they are excellent at what they do. Why, I wonder, is this administration so eager to get rid of experts? Of course, they are not an isolated case. Many of the most committed, intelligent, talented civil servants in many fields are being fired. It’s short-sighted and cruel and all so heartbreaking. As one of my good friends who lives in D.C. said, “if this were a coal-mining town, everybody would be furious.”