The fundamental question facing civic tech in 2026: Who should technology serve? One Year In: What We Know the Trump Administration Means for Public Interest Technology - a reflection from @publicgood.tech @civictechallies.bsky.social @wethebuilders.org community.publicgood.tech/c/announceme...

Yeah, Democrats, I’m pretty sure you can run on “We’re going to abolish the agency that’s snatching up and traumatizing GODDAMN 5-YEAR-OLD LITTLE ANGELS!!!l” and win, you weak-kneed chumps. www.startribune.com/preschooler-...

Two DOGE members working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with a group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls" www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

For some reason, very few people these days will stand up and say it, but: the US federal bureaucracy is one of the great wonders of the world, staffed with incredibly diligent people who do their jobs well and care deeply. Trump's destruction of the federal apparaus was a historic crime.

Trump accepting Machado's Nobel Peace Prize is a great insult to the FIFA Peace Prize committee

omg it's just to joy to be in the world, alive at this time, when such moronic things are happening.

looks like donald trump used the military to do a smash and grab for his personal benefit

This is an article WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson wrote 3 weeks ago about her work. Her home was just raided by the FBI. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

If you want to Make America Great, FEED KIDS! #feedkids #schoollunch #kids #food

Lotta people get mad at me when I criticize Democratic messaging but THIS IS HOW DEMOCRATS SHOULD BE TALKING. Like normal people using normal language to communicate normal human emotions about the fucked up situation. THIS.

I know this isn’t new information but I just really gotta emphasize how goddamn difficult it is to successfully sign up for SNAP or Medicaid, even if you’re Good At Paperwork

Brutal

Five years ago.

I mean…they really have no plan for Venezuela. Zero. Just big, bad faux-warrior shit and then drop a shrug emoji in the group chat that Hegseth will accidentally send to his bartender.

if you are talking today about how bad maduro was and were alive, at all, during the run-up to the iraq war you are potentially the dumbest person to ever live

Um What?

@waldo.net your bot doing ok?

We don't have a government. We have a bunch of guys who heard things on social media. We don't have due process. We have entire groups being punished for the alleged actions of a few.

This looks like Sinbad died and got reincarnated as a chair.

5th grade me got a lot wrong about when I grow up. But I was right about Trump.

What a quote.

The guy who put a 19 year old named Big Balls in charge of gutting key government services: “experience matters when lives are at stake”

ICE detain father shopping on Christmas Eve—then steal his family's groceries. Then 3 agents divvy up his paid for food—taking what they want for themselves. "Can I just get the wife's number to call and let her know?" woman asks. "No, guess he should've complied," agent says. Yakima, Washington

Happy Holidays to all! ☃️ As the year draws to a close and with Christmas tomorrow, I want to thank you for your support, and to focus on the values that bind us together beyond party, background, or belief: peace, generosity, gratitude, and hope. chuck4md.com #chuck4md #hope #equity #compassion

Also! Modern management values data over a lack of data and more importantly and dangerously *even when that more data is incorrect or has errors*. Bureaucracy will value more incorrect data over no data at all.

Woman comes to US at age 6. Graduates nursing school. Work permit. No criminal record. Snatched and imprisoned by ICE for 6 months now. About to be forced back to Honduras. A life destroyed and one less nurse. Merry Christmas. www.nola.com/news/educati...

This is some dark shit but…. is there a chance he’s doing this not only to distract from Epstein but also to have a place to send the victims of his ICE goons? And just pretending it’s about the oil (which is also fucked)?

I’d also like to point out that you cannot surround Venezuela with an armada.

This is why you start a project by listening to users and the people who have been doing the work. If you’re too arrogant to listen, you will miss the point and solve the wrong problem. Thanks again Matt!

This tweet from Big Balls says the new “Tech Force” website is their first using the “America Design System.” Here are just a few reasons why that sucks. 🧵

I reiterate: any design thing by Trump (or Big Balls) is just ripping down something that previously worked and replacing it with something less accessible to Americans (and thus illegal under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act)

Yay for Dr Monarez and @drdebhoury.bsky.social. Congrats to them and CA. This is a reminder that many illegally fired CDC staff are still searching for jobs.

"The existing NDS sites therefore behave more like billboards than public infrastructure. ... What makes this shift hardest to justify is that the federal government already had ... [an] office whose job was to actually make government UX work better. From 2014 to 2025, that work lived inside 18F."

After 15 years across local→state→federal, a simple truth keeps coming back: people don’t want innovation. They want things that work. New essay on the blog: Stuff should work. blog.ronbronson.com/stuff-should...

Expanding the Supreme Court should be a core part of an anti-corruption platform for Democrats in 2026 and 2028. And when I say “an anti-corruption platform,” I mean that should be *the* platform. Tie everything back to corruption.

I genuinely cannot believe that this fascist regime has screwed over the military in a thousand ways and the only thing they offered them was "you get to do war crimes" and as soon as they faced any pushback on the war crimes they went "actually it was their idea"

I know this isn't popular to say on here but I'm not universally opposed to LLMs and Stable Diffusion. I work in online safety, and these technologies have helped us develop better classifiers to catch all kinds of badness you don't want on your screen. But they're neither intelligent nor alive.

Again (and realizing this should really be a blog) I'm sympathetic and consider myself part of Dunkleman's project of making democratic governments responsive and functional. But you can't hand wave the accountability stuff. The argument can't be a "unitary exec theory - but for good!"

Last week, ICE arrested and separated a father and son after a routine check-in. Six-year-old Yuanxin had just enrolled in the first grade at an elementary school in Astoria. Now he's in custody, alone. ICE won't say where. This cruelty serves no one. It must end.

I love this line. It's so true it hurts. "Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn. " spectrum.ieee.org/it-managemen...

The idea that “Big Balls” at DOGE would vibe code America to a balanced budget is in the top 3 of silliest ideas to come out of the union of Silicon Valley and politics.

Wasn’t this the guy running the DOGE kids?

NEW: DOGE no longer exists as a "centralized entity," according to the head of the government’s personnel agency --- But the longstanding White House tech team Trump used to house DOGE continues to work on tech projects throughout federal agencies. www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...

Some outlets are reporting that DOGE "doesn't exist" anymore. But the fine print on that overturns the whole story: DOGE is just dropping its tarnished brand, not the chainsaw. 🧵

btw icymi yesterday, I'm fundraising for an excellent little institution that supports civic tech folks - please read, share, & if you have capacity, give a little!

This piece is good, but omits a big source of Musk’s remaining influence in government: namely people given key appointments during the transition who were never officially part of DOGE and who are still in those positions doing DOGE-aligned work—people like my old boss at GSA who came from Tesla.

I got a billion dollar change request from a government contractor.

Seems familiar.

Highly recommend joining up with this group!

From 18F alum @matthenry.fyi: "If [sites like America By Design] are any indication of what was coming down the pike as the future of government websites, it's a bad sign for the people who have to build and maintain those sites, it's a bad sign for USWDS, and it's a bad sign for you as a user ... "