This deserves more discussion. My brain is a little fried from a long week. But I wanted to let you know that 18F, an in-house government tech consultancy focused on making key public-facing government websites and services more effective and user friendly was finally disbanded last night. It’s housed within TTS (Technology Transformativon Services) which is part of GSA. Just as an example, they’re the team who built the new free IRS tax preparation portal and many other similar things across government.
18F actually didn’t cost the government any money because it was funded by projects with individual government agencies. So they do a job for IRS and IRS “pays” them, which just means they take part of their budget and it goes to 18F for doing the work. The email from TTS Director Thomas Shed (an Elon guy installed in the position) said that the unit was being disbanded under the directive to cut all “non-essential consulting functions” within government. He additionally added that the abolition was “with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the administration and the GSA,” which I take to mean, ‘Trump and Elon wanted all you guys fired.’
The only addition or rather central point here is that 18F was mostly made up of Silicon Valley types who had or could make much more money in the private sector and were into the idea of making great government portals for the American people. That sounds corny. But that’s the essence of it. The additional part is that this and USDS, which is also basically dead now, were in critical ways what many Americans think Musk either is or should be doing: bringing in top private sector people to staff responsive and flexible teams to make things that actually work.
From that quote above it’s very clear they’re not just collateral damage of Musk’s wilding spree but a specific target of it.
Back in early February he proudly said on Twitter that 18F had, thanks to him, been “deleted.”
