Cleveland will hold a counter-protest at Huntington Bank Field, running 1995 clips of people booing, pulling the chairs out of Municipal and burning Art Model in effigy, soundtrack by Nirvana and Trent Reznor

Shot: "The last [18F] report urged the courts to 'start small.'" Chaser: "In mid-2022, the administrative office awarded a five-year, $298 million contract to General Dynamics Information Technology." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

Nobody asked for Americans to need tax preparers or filers at all.

Direct File is now open source. Finally. A short, personal post about why: chrisgiven.com/2025/05/dire... Massive kudos to the Direct File team for pulling this off and showing their commitment to transparency and earning trust.

We have some news to share with you. 🥄 Today we took legal action to challenge our termination, filing an appeal with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. We did this because we believe the elimination of 18F violated safeguards that exist to protect a nonpartisan civil service.

Outstanding thread for Canada's Election Day

RIP Richie Havens, who died 12 years ago today. Boy, this cover hits differently now youtu.be/JltNLkh03ME?...

A guy in our neighborhood has been posting a dad joke in their front yard every day since the pandemic started, and he chose today to get violent

A quick story about big "bloated" systems that people love to hate. When I was at Microsoft a million years ago, I had a friend on the MS Word team who told me this one. (I got the details second-hand; MSFT friends, please correct me.)

18F had already saved the US government over a billion dollars in cost avoidance by the time I left in early 2017. No doubt it and TTS have saved much more since then -- all for the cost of a couple hundred civil servants' comp and benefits annually.

@alt18f.bsky.social saved taxpayers billions, modernized digital services, and made government work better. 💡Now, DOGE has shut it down—eliminating projects that served voters, refugees, military personnel, and more. Read about 18F’s impact ⬇️ 🔗 www.wethebuilders.org/posts/what-i... #altgov #18f

18F story behind my favorite government website: www.ustaxcourt.gov/dawson.html

I'm told some DC AUSAs got those pizza-threats too. Absolutely beyond the pale.

(1/3) It needs repeating: in 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons to Russia in return for the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.


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/

What happens when you force mission-driven, impact-craving public servants out of their job, their career? I have no idea. I don’t think they all pack it in and go work for Fortune 500s. Somebody who could harness their energy and experience would reap big benefits.

18F alum here. While I appreciate the well-deserved attention the 18F team is getting, let's address a fundamental misunderstanding of why 18F was so effective in working with other govt agencies to improve their digital services and why starting a consulting company is not a substitute. 1/

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

This is a good instinct @mcuban.bsky.social + so glad you're tuned into this. I don't think DOGE will ever turn back to 18F. But there are huge opportunities to invest now in a post-DOGE future of government services that's not just more efficient but more secure and transparent to the public.

former colleagues from 18F have asked me to share this open letter widely - please pass on 🙏 🇺🇸 💻💪 18f.org

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.

Mourning 18F’s elimination as a former employee but even more so as a former 18F agency customer. Unlike DOGE, 18F did the hard work of cultural transformation and sharing their methods with other Feds as they helped improve services. They weren’t just techies, they were teachers.

working at 18F was a highlight of my career: smart, passionate, dedicated people doing work to lessen friction and make people’s lives a little easier.

18f were a bunch of badasses who actually *did* make government more efficient in a way that actually worked. And they did it while also being good people who cared deeply for the work, for each other, and for the people that used it.

This is tragic. Anyone who was familiar with 18F knows those were some of the real heroes of government, who helped make government tech/digital services better for the public. They were doing real work that DOGE pretends to do, but is too ignorant to know how to do.

18F did things like making online government forms (like filing your taxes or submitting VA claims) easier to fill out, create text message notification systems for govt agencies, and streamlining internal data sharing. They were literally making govt more efficient & user-friendly. This sucks.

Rubio terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts. Here’s a list of just some of the lifesaving awards that were terminated. Nearly all were Congressionally mandated. They’ve saved millions of lives. 🧵

Our government is on a tear of terminating service and UX designers and researchers, accessibility specialists, and other customer experience expertise, while retaining (some) software engineers. It's penny wise and pound foolish. 1/

Nobody: Absolutely nobody: Me: Do you all want to know why I think "replace bureaucracy with AI" is like turbocharging all the worst aspect of bureaucracy with few of the gains?

Emily Tavoulareas helped found the US Digital Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She says the US DOGE team understands tech isn’t just about websites and apps—it’s the foundation of everything the government does. And now, they hold the reins. But to what end?

This week an AI decided our house is for sale (reader, it is not). A local realtor's assistant, the wielder of said AI, emailed our neighbor to tell them it's on the market and ask if they want to buy it. 🤦‍♂️

When I get off of this mountain, you know where I wanna go Straight down the Mississippi River to

The reports of 18F's death have, so far at least, been greatly exaggerated

beep boop dangerzone.rocks

A good consequence of working in the open, i.e., having all your source code/content in a publicly viewable place, is that the whole world can see when things are changed, and ask why.

You can watch the Trump administration play DEI whac-a-mole with employee policies and public websites on GitHub, which is automatically cataloguing all of the changes the 18F agency is frantically making to its internal and external webpages: www.404media.co/github-is-sh...

So many wildly underappreciated public servants exiting today. ❤️ 🇺🇸 🙏 to every one of you.

Behind the laughter was heart. And behind the heart was laughter. RIP Bob Uecker. joeblogs.joeposnanski.com/p/farewell-m...

You can tell the AI hype cycle is over, because now we're seeing the truly transformative applications of AI to solve otherwise intractable problems. spicerr.com

Cavs fans are absolute crows. There are still signs at the city limits with Olynyk's face and a red line through it

"God did a good thing when he made your dad" is such a great encapsulation of President Carter's life. And a line of eulogy to aspire to earn.

Guys, C-SPAN is momentarily in a state of lawless anarchy.

Here's the biggest reason that custom software for government costs hundreds of millions of dollars: government simply doesn't know better. Government employees have spent decades looking into a funhouse mirror, and have lost sight of normalcy. "Sure, $100M is an OK price for a computer program!"

Work in the open. It makes [government] things better.

The @switchedonpop.bsky.social holiday songs episode never disappoints. Five sleigh bells switchedonpop.com/episodes/bes...

Want to learn more about our new "50 Digital Public Goods in Government Use" scan and dataset? There's a webinar for that. Dec 16, 1pm ET, join me and the Beeck Center #GovTech team as we talk about why we did this, what we learned, and what's in the data for you. www.eventbrite.com/e/digital-pu...