We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M

18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.

Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on.

The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.

"Bureaucrat" is always a pejorative for a professional person who works in a bureaucracy. It doesn't mean anything.

It certainly means something in context, seeing as virtually everyone in the civil service has been painted with this same brush regardless of whether the term's use is correct or not.

> "bureaucrat" doesn't mean anything

These two sentences appear to be contradictory.

Language is everything. Are they a government workers or are they a bureaucrats? Deep state operatives or public servants? All of these words could describe someone who works for 18F.

18F workers are public servants, some of the best in the government, but by calling them bureaucrats, it makes their work seem inefficient and their removal seem logical.

Accepting the word chosen for the conversation determines what actions are acceptable. Protestors or rioters? Freedom fighter or terrorist? Peacekeeper or occupying force? Security or surveillance? Whistleblower or leaker? Regulation or Red Tape? Tax or Theft? Patriot or nationalist? Socialism, Marxism, or communism?

Peace (justice) or peace (submission)? Woke (generational injustice) or woke (any leftist idea I don’t like)?

It's precisely because these words have exact meanings, that they are so insidious. Many end up becoming shibboleths, dividing us vs them.

There are companies, PR firms, private intelligence, and think tanks that A/B test words and ideas in order to create the right metaphorical context to get people to submit to a certain framing.

A good read on the general topic of control via metaphorical framing:

https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...

https://youtu.be/wPoXOwiEfrQ?si=K58Pa-JQhdIvQzrw

A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while Vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré.

The based to cringe pipeline, if you will

I grew up in the DC area 30 years ago. Civil servants declaring “Resistance” to the agenda of the duly elected president would have been unthinkable then. That destroys the premise of a civil service that is a machine that processes paperwork and doesn’t think for itself.

Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.

Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?

Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.

If you want, you can attempt to clarify why you're asking the person you're replying to if they know what checks and balances are. We can all ready social study books and read wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers_under_the...) and it seems unlikely the response to your question is going to differ much from the philosophy and practice described there.

Not sure where you got the "widespread misinformation about checks and balances in the executive branch", the C&B are across branches, nobody implied otherwise.

I'm going with deceptive.

If there's a free and authoritative easy way to file taxes, then there's no reason for people to pay for unnecessary third party services who earn ALL their money by imposing themselves between the taxpayer and IRS. They will fight like bastards to preserve their privileged position.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation.

Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest.

(I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)

oil > nuclear > some miraculous thing

Russia currently is run by an ex-KGB dude. The KGB opposed Gorbachev's reforms. Putin is actively trying to rehabilitate the Stalin personality cult and revive a longing for Soviet era colonialism to legitimize his war of expansion.

The Russian people are amazing, but there's only so far you can go if you don't have a free press, if expressing certain facts about history is illegal and if people are murdered for being too open about their opinions.

I don't doubt there are people who are still unhappy that Russia lost its status from the imperial days, just as there are British people frustrated that they're no longer an important empire. But that was happening anyway and it was only a matter of time.

It's not really surprising that the average opinion in an authoritarian country aligns with the position actively promoted by the government of that country. Just like it's not surprising that the party wins by a landslide in a one party state.

LOL. I'll get right on that, after I ask the North Koreans for their opinion.

But as you describe it that's fairly plausible to me. Russia under communism had no rule of law and was basically a mafia state. So it's not surprising that remnants of those institutions, the paranoia, the corruption, opportunism, etc carried over through the transition.

My point wasn't that Gorbachev was some sort of miracle worker, just that he helped end totalitarianism and is recognized for his efforts. And Trump will definitely not be remembered as that kind of figure. Putin is trying to bring back the state religion, and Trump is trying to do something similar in the US so if we're going to compare him to someone in Russia historically, it will be someone who tried to tear things down and impose a dictatorship for the supposed "betterment" of the people.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-voug...

The media has been lying to us for decades and no, I don't take them at their word, especially when they share a clip that removes all context.

https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M

If so, I would note that it’s curious that he’s declined to comment rather than clearing his record and the Trump campaign similarly reacted by pretending they wouldn’t have him setting policy again rather than by saying that’s not what he meant.

Wait until you see Twitter Files or whatever Elon is going to drop from DOGE.

GSA, Digital Analytics Program: https://analytics.usa.gov/

Huge amounts of data about how government websites are used including: locations (cities, countries), languages, referral sources, media sources, devices, browsers, OS, website destination, and top file accesses.

Treasury, Government Spending Explorer: https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Really thorough breakdown of government spending from 2017 onward, with per month, per quarter, and year spending totals by budget function and agency. Divable categories so you can look at the $1,400,000,000,000 in National Defense spending, and actually find out a little about where it all goes to each year.

Edit: Here's their Github and 1200 repositories: https://github.com/orgs/18F/repositories

If I had enough money to hire them, I'd snap their employees up quickly.

They definitely do not care if this "makes things worse". Often, it's intended.

And the rhetoric that the reason the working class have lower quality of life now than 20 years ago being due to immigrants and the poor ... is a way to focus attention elsewhere instead of increasing taxes on the rich.

It’s about regulation. The only thing that can counteract the super rich are government regulators.

So that when this gets litigated, everyone who broke the law is convicted.

The civil servant should collect his pay as long as possible and do as little as possible.

But no one following his orders has any immunity. They should keep that in mind.

As long as they commit their crimes in DC, they enjoy the ability to be fully pardoned. Outside of DC, you have to have a prosecutor with cohones.

Someone has always disagreed with something the government is doing. It has always been the end of democracy as we know it.

And yet, the future then and present now were formed by people who acted.

Not quite "oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture." Yet quite a few of the others.

- stratified social classes; impoverished working class [1]; ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites; economy of state capitalism operated for the exclusive profit of the ruling class; collusion between the state and favored monopolies; profit is private property, while debts are the responsibility of the public treasury.

Maybe it's cynicism like noted in other commments, yet the linked chart from the NYT would say "it wasn't always this way" and its not my imagination that the situation has changed over the last 40 years.

[1] NYT, "Our Broken Economy", https://archive.is/ZFnAT

...So it's easier to justify to the people when they tear it down completely and then "rescue" the country by replacing it with a true corpocracy.

And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.

Hopefully the GitHub repos stick around; I forked and cloned a few and suggest folks browse through them and grab anything that looks interesting in case they disappear.

This is perfectly emblematic of our national decline: a person with little interest in doing the work to understand things, spoon feeding their mistakes over social media to an audience with little interest in doing the work to know whether the things they read are real.

Also, that chart is just magical, did she inflate the numbers by repeatedly adding same money being shuffled around (represented by those arrows between entities)?

You’d think that simplifying tax returns and reducing costs in the taxation system would be something the right could get behind?

The real kicker of course is that if you don't file your taxes, they actually do calculate your taxes for you, and send you a bill. It just includes the non-payment penalty and doesn't include donations.

The fact that they are capable of doing that implies how much time we all have to waste doing our taxes.

For most people, taxes are more than the next 3 biggest expenses.

If you want people to visually see where their money goes and when taxes are increased, you do a better job breaking down where it goes when described on a paycheque. Think "$0.82 for military spending; $0.05 for road maintenance" instead of "Federal tax: $317.02"

If you want the people to misunderstand and hate the government, then you make the people do math every month with numbers that change throughout the year and have financial penalties for getting wrong.

EITC eligibility, for example, depends on the aggregate employment and spending patterns of your household. The IRS does not (and shouldn’t) track when you moved in with your boyfriend.

The home mortgage interest deduction depends on your primary residence; if you have more than one, that means tracking how much time you spend at each.

Although you're wrong about the mortgage interest deduction, that is reported by the bank per address, and you have the list your primary address with your state tax authority, which the IRS gets a copy of.

I think you’re seriously underestimating the amount of data the IRS would have to proactively collect. “We get your tax obligation right 80% of the time!” isn’t an acceptable SLA. Kids are born, houses (and electric cars!) are bought and sold, community college classes are enrolled in, …

Re: Primary residence: Uhh, OK, so I report to my state tax authority who reports to the Feds. I thought the point of this thread was that somebody else would do all this for me, but for the evils of Grover Norquist and Intuit?

There is a reason TurboTax is popular -- because it's a better interface for asking those questions.

But look at other countries. They don't ask you to fill out a form. They send you a bill and ask if they missed anything. For 80% of taxpayers, they would send the bill and the taxpayer would say, "yep, that's right". And your taxes would be done.

The rest could keep doing it the old way.

> Kids are born, houses (and electric cars!) are bought and sold, community college classes are enrolled in

All things they already know about! Because when you claim those things on your taxes, they cross check that to try and catch you in a lie.

When the IRS audits you, they don’t come with their own evidence beyond the basic income reporting that yes, they could pre-fill into forms. It’s up to you to produce documentation that justifies your filing.

Our tax code is complicated. It relies on voluntary (but potentially audited) reporting and compliance. If you want to argue for a simpler tax code, great, but at the end of the day, either the IRS needs to collect a lot more data or we’re stuck with self-reporting.

So for 80% of people, they would never have to fill out a tax form at all. They could just get the tax bill and have it auto-pay (or more likely auto-refund).

And for the next 10% of people, who only take a small set of deductions that you can take on top of the standard deduction, you don't need even a two page form, you just need a wizard that asks a few questions like TurboTax.

And then for the rest they can opt to fill out the regular forms if they don't agree with how the IRS calculated their bill. This is how it works in pretty much every other civilized country (and a lot of uncivilized ones too).

Taxes are in hindsight so you've already made whatever donations you did by the time you paid taxes.

Donations either lower your tax bill or have no effect on it. So, by not filling taxes (_and getting caught_) you're just increasing your tax bill.

...but then tax you on the interest they paid you if you claim it.

Do you have a source handy? My Google-fu is failing and only bringing up interest on unpaid taxes.

As a non-American whose country break out the VAT into a separate line item, with the explicit intent to inform consumers how much tax they are paying, and who has shopped in countries where they roll it all into one, I can say that this 'claim' is absolutely what happens in practice.

Pretty much everyone does, of course, know that the VAT rate is 20%, but still you always get people complaining that we’re being ripped off when something which costs $1000 ends up being sold here at £950.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=TurboTax&type=site#gsc....

Using OpenSecrets in particular is misleading because it shows you donations fron "employees of corporations" to political campaigns and then people pretend it's donations from "corporations", which is obviously not the same thing. (and not allowed either)

No they don't. Corporations can't give money to representatives. That's exactly why I just said OpenSecrets is misleading.

There's zero reason why taxes, for the majority of citizens, isn't just a postcard you get in the mail and confirm against your own earnings records. It should not cost me hours of my own life and/or dollars of my own money to file my taxes. I don't mind paying them (if they're used for something actually constructive like public infrastructure) but gosh they sure make it hard.

  * Eliminate all taxes
  * Eliminate all regulations
  * Use the government for financial gain (by the "right people")
  * Use the government to oppress all "others" (those who are not white christian men)
  * Crown a king and ensure that crown stays within their select group

Everything they say is double speak, you have to look at what they say and what they do.

Indeed if taxes are too difficult or painful, a reasonable person would demand that the government simplify taxes, and that's not the same as reducing taxes. But then again maybe they are banking on the masses conflating simplifying taxes and reducing taxes.

That’s not accidental: the rich have been funding anti-tax messaging since the introduction of the income tax, and it’s heavily promoted by the media voices they fund. The tax preparation industry is similarly biased since it’s with so profitable for the median voter to think that they need to pay hundreds of dollars every year to fill out a couple of forms.

Sure, if you only have a W-2 then it is pretty simple. The issue is that over time people have a tendency to accrue other tax reportable activities as a function of age. It actively discourages people from making some types of potentially productive investments because of the additional tax complexity.

Enough 401k, mild investments over time with disposable income, or transfers from friends / family / inheritance, that the process becomes quite challenging. You make a couple thousand on a decent year in capital gains or dividend distributions, yet end up with rather confusing paperwork piles to deal with at tax time. Finding out it was necessary to note each buy / sell and the holding time individually for the entire year just seemed crazy in the detail necessary.

Mild awareness of why the actual wealthy hire accountants and firms with specialized teams and software to deal with those issues.

The part that's also not dealt with, at least in terms of those deductions, is that usually they're related to businesses and expenses. The deductions are available, yet often you have to be treating almost your entire life like a business expense every moment. Business cell phone. Business internet. Business supplies. Business ads, website, and marketing. Business travel. Business property depreciation / amortization. Business legal and accounting. Business mileage. Business loan interest. Business meals.

A (personal opinion) funny one is "Hire your own children as workers." You can write-off the payment you make to them which reduces your taxes and the income they earn can be tax-free if you pay them less than the standard deduction.

You're an exception and, yeah, it sucks. For somebody who has W-2 income, maybe a 1099-INT, and takes the standard deduction filing taxes is painless and simple.

I've just accepted the $800 - $1,000 cost per year for preparation of my LLC K-1 and personal taxes as part of the cost of being an exception. It sucks, but I just roll it into my rates.

But also, Intuit spends a lot money lobbying.

Hell, I have a fairly complex return. It takes me <90 minutes with a $40 software package.

For example: the perennial fight over "net neutrality" was because Congress absconded their duty to write regulation and handed it off to the Executive to figure out in a vague way that allowed for flip flopping policies with the force of law every time the administration changed.

You know what would stop the Executive power grab currently happening? If Congress would do their damn jobs. The Republicans in Congress are more to blame for this mess than the White House. This is supposed to be their power that they are just sitting and watching get taken away.

But the Democrats aren't guiltless either. People who care about this sort of thing have been complaining for decades, right through Democrat majorities and administrations. They had plenty of chances. The whole beltway fucking sucks and we are so cooked.

The fact that Congress is ineffective in no way absolves the executive branch of irresponsible or illegal behavior. The president took an oath.

That's what makes it illegal.

31 USC 1535, The Economy Act, authorizes Federal agencies to purchase from each other in the interests of economy. Obvious application is that rather than have the Social Security Administration lease an office or build a building, they sublease or lease a facility owned by the GSA so Federal demand can be aggregated. 1 big lease is cheaper than 12 little ones.

In the case of 18F, having a consultive entity within the GSA maximizes the value of procurements made by GSA and other agencies. When congress appropriates money to say, the Department of Labor to perform a function, DOL may choose to engage 18F to deliver or assist, avoiding additional procurement and taking advantage of investments and capability already built.

Congress in 1949 recognized that basic concepts like shared services, aggregation and mission focus deliver value and promote efficient operations. The current regime's corrupt interest is obvious to anyone with a brain.

The current iteration of USAID was created by an act of Congress. Unless the President's office has been given the power to create and pass legislature at some point in the past five weeks, only Congress can unmake it.

So was the CFPB, which is also being shut down.

So was the Department of Education.

People have been warning for a long time that this concentration of power in the executive is ripe for abuse. And here we are.

The legislature could stop this, yes. But it won't, because he is carrying out the program the GOP always wished it could have done, but couldn't. Once this all goes to shit, they will of course, blame him, while keeping their own hands clean.

And given just how fucking fast a dedicated executive can destroy anything it doesn't like, there's literally nothing the Dems could have done to prevent this. It doesn't matter what laws they passed when they had control of government, when the current executive simply doesn't follow the law.

And the only people who could compel it to follow the law don't want it to.

The only cure to this is never voting red, under any circumstances, for any position, in any race. It's been fully compromised, and is unsalvageable.

Oh yes there is. It's just more radical than they were prepared to admit was necessary. It's things like ramming through thousands of new federal judgeships, packing the Supreme Court, passing anti-gerrymandering laws with jail-time penalities for state officials that violate them, and ultimately packing the union (https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/pack-the-union-a-...). The things that needed to be done were not "make things so no president can do this when he gets elected", it's "fix the system so these kinds of people cannot ever be elected".

(We can also blame them for not imprisoning, quicky and fairly trying, and executing Trump for sedition and treason when they could.)

What do think would really happen in that case? They'd change their platform slightly in a way that allows them to get 5% more of the vote and then still get in half the time. They're one of the parties in a two party system and it's a two party system because it uses first past the post instead of e.g. STAR voting. And the reason court packing doesn't work is obviously that as soon as either party actually did that, it would become the norm and happen every time the party in power switched, and nobody wants the courts to become fully partisan and the number federal judges to double every 4-8 years.

If you actually want to stop them from fucking everything up, figure out why they're doing the things they're doing. "They're evil and corrupt and have entirely impure motives" doesn't explain why ~half of voters voted for them.

Instead you have to look at the actual reasons and do something about them. Why do they want to expand oil production? Because people want cheap energy. If you don't want to expand oil production then you need to cause energy prices to go down in some other way, e.g. by not actively opposing the construction of nuclear reactors so their costs don't balloon as a result of lawsuits and a capricious regulatory environment, or provide more tax incentives for renewable energy so the transition happens faster and people stop caring about the price of gas sooner. Use diplomacy to e.g. encourage Germany not to shut down their nuclear reactors and raise global energy prices by switching back to fossil fuels.

Republicans keep getting elected by saying they're going to do something about burdensome regulations. Maybe consider whether there's something there? Look into what it's like to operate a small business. If you're making $9000/year selling stuff on Etsy and you invest in a postage meter, should you now have to know what MACRS is? If you don't, is it because it's somehow illegal to own one? How does property tax work on unsold business inventory stored in an out of state third party warehouse? If you have a question about any of this, why isn't there anyone in the government who can give you an official answer? Does the law create a good way for you to accept digital payments without getting locked into an overpriced payment gateway that can capriciously disrupt your business by dropping your account at any time? If you get an electric vehicle for your business, can you take the tax credit if you have enough income to be eligible for it personally even though the business didn't make a net profit this year? Why is the tax credit aimed at making it easier to afford one limited to people who make enough money that they already can? What can happen if you get some of these things wrong?

People keep voting for Republicans because interacting with the government is slow, frustrating, complicated and dangerous. The best way to take that away from them is to solve those problems yourself instead of insisting that they don't exist.

It's true that to some extent both parties participate in propping up that system, but Republicans clearly do so far more. There are a lot of problems with the Democratic party as well, which is precisely why radical change is needed rather than just "pass some garden variety Democrat measures".

I agree that there are important changes to be made that Democrats are lamentably unwilling to engage with, but I'm not talking about a world where Republicans need 51%. For most of the Republicans of national prominence, we should consider ourselves as a failure as a nation if they can even get 5%.

But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on. Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.

I think we agree that structural reforms are necessary (like changing voting systems), but I think it's more than just that. There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people. Switching to STAR voting isn't going to fix it. That entire phenomenon has to be actively purged from society in the way that Nazism was purged in post-WWII Germany.

People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.

> Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.

Nah, that's just confusing the problem with the rhetoric.

Republicans hype immigration because the Democrats have an immigration problem:

a) "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". b) Generous social safety net.

You can't have unlimited immigration of the world's poor and then give them all welfare; you have to pick one. But Democrats can't choose, so we end up with this nonsense where immigration which is formally illegal is still happening at scale and they're neither willing to formally legalize it nor enforce the law against it.

Which means Republicans get to beat them over the head with it because the Democrats have no response to it when they're legitimately caught in an inconsistent position. To stop that from happening they need to pick which one of the two incompatible things they want.

Likewise, the US really does have a lot of regulatory overhead, and many of the rules are needlessly complicated, inconsistent, blunt, poorly considered or obviously corrupt. The people who actually have to interact with them -- mostly small businesses -- are intimately familiar with it and find it infuriating. Now, some of the rules are net positive, but even those are often still needlessly complicated or in conflict with other, stupider rules. To fix it you would need large teams of smart people go through all the rules, throw out the bad ones (even if they're corrupt and someone wants them that way), simplify the needless complexity, do a cost/benefit analysis that includes the administrative cost of implementation and have the ability to actually modify them. Which requires fastidious people to do something expensive and boring at large scale. But until that happens -- which it hasn't -- there is still a problem.

And in the meantime the Republicans get to say "regulations bad! less regulations!" and have a bunch of people cheer because they know how much the status quo sucks.

> There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people.

Eh. That's kind of one of the things a cardinal voting system does fix.

You're defining the problem too narrowly. The general issue is, in a two party system, both of the parties are big tent parties. Which means that if your party wants both X and Y and you need a majority to get either, the people who want X can go drum up support from people who want Y so their party gets in and they get X, because by nature the other major party will support both not-X and not-Y, so more support for Y is more support for the party that wants X.

If you have a voting system that supports arbitrarily many parties and your party supports both X and Y but X is stupid or unpopular, you can't win by getting more people to support Y because then some other party would come in and support Y but not X and then win because you've convinced people to want Y but not X and now that's actually one of the options on the ballot.

But that sounds like you're saying the solution is to just fix all problems. That's never going to happen. There will always be problems of some sort, which means there can always be someone claiming to have solutions.

If the democrats grow a pair and shutdown the government by filibustering the budget, Trump will fire (or worse) Elon, scorched earth whatever is left and blame the democrats. They are all about the big lie -- they'll float the idea that Elon was secretly working with the democrats the whole time. If Trump is lucky, there will be an early hurricane or an earthquake in California and the devastation will be Chuck Schumer's fault. Long live the king.

(Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and don't want to take any political stance with this)

I don't think that is average for US tech workers. I don't believe the vast majority of US tech firms have such a thing.

I wouldn't call that "far left" myself – although "far left" as used by American conservatives is a pejorative colloquialism whose meaning has shifted from its traditional definition (Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc). Not slang I'd use myself but I can understand it.

P.S. If you don't trust a tweet from a right-leaning journalist, here's a page from their own GitHub repo about their bot: https://github.com/18F/charlie/blob/main/InclusionBot.md

Some of the terms are genuinely offensive or unprofessional. I'm not sure about some of them, but I'd expect a government agency to show a higher level of sensitivity and professionalism about their language than a private start-up.

I also note that the bot "lectures" people as a private message.

Maybe a new administration want to to change the culture at GSA/18F. Fine, they can do that.

Nuking an entire department and chucking out a significant chunk of work they've done because of a Slack chatbot and a few minor documents/policies is just mental. It's vindictive score-setting and an ideological purge.

It is unclear how much of the actual work they've done is being "chucked out".

18F did work for various federal agencies, and whatever code 18F wrote for its client agencies would still be in possession of those agencies.

What happens to that code going forward – whether it continues to be maintained by other resources, or whether it just gets archived – is going to be an agency-level decision. Probably some will be kept, others will be thrown out – keeping or abolishing 18F is a separate decision from keeping or abolishing the agency-level projects/initiatives 18F was working on. (And even if 18F had survived, probably some of that code would eventually have been thrown out anyway, since government IT projects frequently end up failing and being cancelled, and 18F involvement is no guarantee against that outcome.)

Obviously, if those projects are going to be kept, removing 18F resources is going to cause a delay to the project – but maybe other resources will be found. It also depends on what percentage of the project resources were from 18F. If a project was 18F-heavy, it may take a big hit, if 18F's contribution was smaller, the negative impact might be smaller.

18F was funded out of the Acquisition Services Fund (ASF), managed by the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) within GSA. FAS is legally obligated to spend ASF funds on federal technology modernization projects. Without 18F, FAS will have to find some other mechanism to spend those ASF funds on technology modernization. So, while of course there will be a delay, agencies which were relying on 18F may still end up getting help from GSA TTS for their modernization projects. I wouldn't be surprised if ASF funds were redirected towards DOGE, and DOGE was then tasked with working on those projects.

What is going to happen in four years? Is every administration forms to fire each others federal workers?

Traditionally how civil servants handle this, is to be aware of the political sensitivities of both sides, and try to avoid language which overly triggers either. But people seem to be forgetting that tradition, or even intentionally discarding it

> there was a lot of overlap in the mission statements of 18F and USDS, and it wasn't clear why both existed

And now neither of them exist (the vast majority of what once was USDS is gone, and what remains has been converted into "DOGE").

I don't know what the quotes around "abolishing a government agency" indicate -- those words weren't used previously in this thread.

Do any of the old USDS staff survive? I don't know. USDS acting administrator, Amy Gleason, used to work for USDS under the Trump and Biden admins, so it sounds like there is still room for "old USDS" staff in "new USDS" – if they are happy to be there, and if the new administration is happy to have them.

And I don't think DOGE's remit is completely distinct from that of USDS. Of course, DOGE is a lot broader in scope than USDS, but according to Executive Order 14158 which established it, a big part of its mission is software modernization–same as old USDS was–and DOGE staff appear to include a number of software engineers, which also aligns with that mission.

> I don't know what the quotes around "abolishing a government agency" indicate -- those words weren't used previously in this thread.

You asked the question "Which government agencies have been targeted by Democrats for being too conservative?" – which seems to put 18F in the category of "government agencies" - if it isn't one in some sense, then the question isn't asking for a relevant comparator. And the title of this thread is "GSA Eliminates 18F", and "eliminates" is a synonym of "abolition". So, the premise of your question implies "abolishing a government agency". Which in a sense abolishing 18F is, since it was sort-of-kind-of a government agency – but strictly speaking it isn't, since strictly it wasn't – hence the quotes.

40 were laid off and 21 resigned (and Musk claimed that they would have been fired for being Democrats, regardless). That's approximately 60% of the total.

https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government...

As for "government agency", I was using your language:

> If a government agency has a culture [etc]... the agency becomes a target

Again, your claim here is that it's typical and predictable that new administrations conduct ideological purges on the civil service. So far, you haven't actually been able to name a single example of a Democratic administration doing that, and instead you're saying that maybe 18F was bad anyway, etc. Would you consider just admitting that your claim is false rather than resorting to this "by definition, strictly speaking, the premise of your question implies" ink cloud?

No, I'm not denying this is reaching a level which hasn't been seen before.

But, perceptions of political impartiality of civil servants have been greatly eroded.

Imagine if the situation were reversed, if Democrats had a widespread perception that the federal bureaucracy had a pro-GOP/anti-Democrat bias – can you be so sure they wouldn't do similar things?

The ICE union endorsed Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 -- the only presidential endorsements it has ever made.

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/immigration-customs-e...

The FBI has traditionally leaned Republican (it has never had a Democratic director), as has the US military (especially the Air Force).

Biden did not purge ICE, nor did he replace Trump's FBI director, etc.

The right is deranged with intolerance. All the talk about "free speech" and they can't stand that someone might not think or act like them.

The "anti-woke" crusaders are honestly more unbearable than any social justice warrior type I've met because they will not shut up about it and it colors their whole life.

It's just another flavor of identity politics with in and out groups.

What we need is a center. Just stuff that makes sense. The problem is our "sense" has been under attack we've basically collectively lost it.

Citizens need to understand the tax code themselves, they shouldn't need an entire government division to write software that is the only way to understand it.

And until that happens, helping people file their taxes for free is a benefit to everyone (except tax prep companies).

https://18f.gsa.gov/our-work/

https://www.govtech.com/civic/what-is-18f.html

Key Projects:

Beta.FEC.gov: Revamped the Federal Election Commission's website for easier record access.

MyUSCIS: Simplified the immigration process for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

USCIS ICAM Development: Developed a login and identity verification system for USCIS users.

eRegulations Platform: Made regulations more accessible and understandable.

College Scorecard: Provided clear data on college costs, graduation rates, debt, and post-college earnings.

Cloud.gov: Offers a platform for government teams to develop and manage web applications efficiently.

U.S. Web Design Standards: Created open-source UI components for consistent federal website experiences16.

Paradoxically this is a real witch hunt

It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.

Can't imagine how much better the thing had been if it'd been allowed to fully blossom, but given all the stuff they deal with it, it wasn't perfect but it was a really good experiment.