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I smell a hit piece from a mile away. 18F has done a lot of good but in trying to change how government IT does business but they've also made powerful enemies who view them as a threat to their power base..

Find something that can be spun negatively and sell the story to a friendly journalist. That it what appears to have been done here. Next get the head of a budget committee to question 18F spending. It is all done behind the scenes and sadly 18F's strongest supporters are all leaving government.

The story is reporting on a report from GSA's Inspector General. It's straight reporting. Not a hit piece.

The author comments that he doesn't like their new logo.

The greater point is that 727 hours of staff time were spent on it.

Is that a lot of time for a logo redesign? I've spent more time brushing my teeth than that.

If you're younger than 29.88 years old: no, you haven't.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(727+hours+%2F+(4+minu...

This is assuming you've brushed your teeth for two minutes, twice a day, since the day you came out of the womb.

I'm not. I do know how to do multiplication.

I didn't mean to insult you, just thought it'd be fun to do the math for anyone else who was scrolling by and didn't care to.

If I offended you, I'm sorry.

Not offended :)

That is a great point in favor of it being a hit piece, because that's wrong - rndmize pointed out below [0] that it's a misinterpretation of the report.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12862065

727 hours/10 hours a day = 72.7 days.

roughly 22 working days per month.

72.7/22 = 3.3 months

As far as logo design goes, this is actually pretty fast. Most companies I've dealt with stuff like this usually takes much, much longer depending on how picky the founders are.

I paid $5 for a logo on Fiverr that took the artist about 3 days (general turnaround time, not active work time). To this day, I feel really bad about taking advantage of an artist like that.

Divide 3.3 months across multiple people (say 5), and you get less than 3 weeks.

Also worth mentioning is the $X million dollars spent on redesigning Merrill Lynch's logo. The only redesign that occurred was a different angle view of the lion.

I too smell a hit piece. But I kept reading to figure out why.

What got me thinking this was the statement about generating 22 million when there is a goal of 32 million. And that was after a year of zero revenue.

I was impressed with that too.

This happened in the UK with the GDS (which 18F is modelled closely on), they got savaged in the press by vested interests, it was pretty blatant tbh.

Now I don't think GDS walk on water, but their work really is much better than how things normally get done in the civil service.

The press focussed on, "This bureaucrat paid market rate for in-demand skills! Disgusting!" Rather than, "In house experts save tax payer being ripped off again!"

Exactly, they aren't perfect (nothing is) but the work they've done by government standards is incredible and by commercial standards very good.

They also worked really hard to get government departments to buy-in to modernising with some success.

Current government is gutting them though.

That is so depressing. I lived in London from 2011 through 2014, previously having no clue about GDS or anything else in the UK for that matter. Being a ruby developer, it kind of blew me away when I met so many GDS developers and saw what they were doing. They were operating like a top-tier commercial agency much moreso than anything that resembles government in my mind (and I'm half-brazilian, so US government to me is far from the worst in terms of inefficiency and boondoggles). Next thing you know they stop letting the non-white people in, and before you know it Berlin leapfrogs London as the primary tech destination in Europe.

But if you have an effective in house team you can't give the work to your dodgy mates/ benefactors...

The UK has very civilised corruption.

$32m is not nothing, it would pay for a big chunk of a lot of programs. The federal government could actually pay the amount of educational money promised in the original legislation to the tribal colleges for many years. It would pay our tribal college's general fund for well over a decade.

$32mil is 10 cents a person for a year to fund. It's worth it.

Saying "it's an acceptable cost because the $32 million loss is balanced by gains in other areas" is potentially winning argument.

Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like.

We should focus on the value bought by that money, not on waving it away as "nothing".

> Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like.

You have changed the scale by 2 orders of magnitude to make it something.

$100 is a 5th of someone people's yearly salary, so how dare you waste it on entertainment every month?

Compare:

    $100 is nothing so it doesn't matter what I spend it on.

to

    I spend $100 on entertainment every month because I like watching TV.

To clarify, the $32 million spent by 18F sounds like fantastic value for money, and we should emphasise that value.

I left out that I meant 2 orders of magnitude in government. Comparing federal spending to what would be waste in a town or county is an example of giving into propaganda steered stupidity as an acceptable norm.

I don't disagree that this is a terrific value. I disagree with it coming up for discussion like this in absolute terms when nothing the federal government does that is blatantly absurd could ever discussed in absolute terms without seemingly like an unworldly statistic at any local level besides, maybe, in NYC.

There are 34,000 $32 million dollar units in federal discretionary spending. I'm willing to bet that if someone randomly samples another one it will be worse than this one.

That 32 million may be enough for a town to redo it its main library if it received it through complex graft using a rider (and then some kind of magic to get it to the town level) is a bizarre distraction from anything meaningful at the federal level.

I refer you to Tip O'Neill's observation that "All politics is local".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_politics_is_local

I believe the Government should spend the money, but I also believe that you can't wave away any concerns about it by claiming it's not worth worrying about.

Well, I like the "see also" in that entry.. Do you think they will buy a school or a prison with their graft? Will the 99 other senators who want $32m each be so good as your own?

If you want to reduce federal spending and federal tax so that the local system can tax then that's great. If you question the federal government spending $1 out of $34000 on a reasonable global service, then please tell me why my wife would be reasonable in questioning my $1 a year new year's burger, but my converting from a standard $40 a month ATDT service to a $3400 a year program to turn our kids into psychopathic murderers who are sometimes willing to protect us is an unquestionable rational expense.

If you don't pay even $100 in taxes, the government will seize your assets with a levy or - if you continue to resist - send goons to threaten you at gunpoint to turn the money over. Snapchat gets a free pass, because they don't force their investors to pay using a police force. The IRS maintains its own SWAT team dedicated to enforcement of the tax code.

I'm not saying the FBI shouldn't get a TV in the breakroom, but there's no level of money that shouldn't have a good justification.

18F seems easy to justify.

False. This is complete nonsense.

If you owe $100 in taxes, the government will ask you nicely to pay it.

Then, when you refuse to pay it, they will mark it up with a bit of interest, and ask you nicely to pay it.

Then, when you refuse to pay it, they'll deduct it out of your next year's tax return, and call it even.

Then, if you didn't have a tax return, they'll put a mark on your social security account, and will pay themselves out of your social security cheque.

Then, if you didn't have a tax return, or social security, they'll put a lien on your house, so if you refuse to pay it, they will get paid when you sell your house.

Then, if you still haven't paid your taxes, and don't have a tax return, or social security, or a house, they will complain to a credit agency, and ding your credit rating.

Then, if you still haven't paid your taxes, don't have a tax return, or social security, or a house, or care about your credit, and you are not going to suffer economic hardship because of it, they may take money out of your bank account, or your car, or your property, sell it, and give the remainder to you.

Then, if all those means are exhausted, and you have been particularly belligerent about this process, and owe a lot of taxes, you might be looking at jail time. (At this point, have you considered just paying your debts? Or, perhaps, declaring bankruptcy?)

They will give you many, many, many chance to pay what you owe. The steps that they will take to collect are both reasonable, and proportionate.

Please don't spread nonsense about armed goons at gunpoint stealing 'your' money. That would be civil forfeiture, courtesy of your local police department, not the IRS.

The context is someone arguing that you shouldn't worry about the federal government wasting $32 million, because it's chump change for them. My point is the polite requests they make are ultimately backed up by these SWAT teams, and that you shouldn't take taxation lightly as a result. Obviously very few cases require them to deploy a SWAT team, since most people would rationally choose to pay the $100.

I'm not saying taxation is bad or that they'll jump on you at the first sign of disobedience, just that the commenter's callous attitude towards spending tax money is bad. It's a very entitled mindset that no government official should have.

Actually, what you wrote there has some false parts. They send a certified letter and will put a lien on you bank account for the amount if you don't respond fast enough[1]. They add interest immediately, there is no grace period. You can arrange monthly payments (they are required to let you do this the first time). They will deduct the money you owe from the next year's return.

1) Fast enough can get a little weird. Had to loan a friend money because of a mistake and he didn't even get the letter before the lien happened. Saw him pull up his bank account on a Monday morning after his card was rejected at breakfast. He came in the next day with the certified letter and listened to him call the IRS about the problem with his return. They did get new computers a couple years ago, and it was not a good thing since it seemed they might have sent the first letter to a prior address. They were sorry, but too bad.

Let's define "nothing" in US federal spending as the amount below the standard deviation of the US military budget over the last five year period.

Hmmm. Perhaps that's a bit of large number, isn't it?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Inflatio...

If one wastes a lot of money does not mean wasting a small amount of money is justified.

>In a perfect market, they would be able to sell their services at the same price as the value of those services.

Uh nope. A perfect market means the price is equal to their costs, not the value provided. A monopoly is when you can extract the value provided as rent.

Sorry, I meant in this case, since they are a monopoly. Good clarification!

I don't think they are a monopoly. Other agencies can pay outside firms as an alternative to using 18F, can't they?

I'm not exactly sure how it works so please educate me.

I also separately heard that 18F wasn't supposed to bid against outside firms for government contracts. That doesn't really make sense, then, if they're supposed to earn revenue. If they're expected to earn revenue then they should be able to bid for government contracts.

At least Australia's version of 18F (called DTA) has an enforced monopoly

    The Australian Government has established a moratorium that stops Commonwealth
    (federal) agencies from investing in new, or duplicating, service delivery
    capability. The moratorium is an important tool to help government limit the
    fragmenting of users’ experience across the Australian Government.

Zero economic profit is greater than costs.

Yep. Revenue really isn't a useful metric for an organization like this. They may save the entire government money even if they are recording losses on their own balance sheet. The opportunity cost of using private contractors vs. doing the work in-house through 18F is what should be emphasized.

The vets.gov website built by 18F has had "work in progress" and "coming soon" labels on it since inception.

I dont care what hourly rate the VA negotiated under the auspices of "savings". If 18F doesnt deliver, then the investment is worthless.

The USDS is working on vets.gov, not 18F. Apparently this effort involves taking hundreds of microsites that all look and behave differently and combining them into one unified effort. It's not surprising that this would take a long time, and my understanding is that this is one of USDS's top priorities.

I think it's easy to underestimate how hard it is to ship something on the scale of vets.gov from the outside.

Source: had early talks with the VA to join this project. I didn't, but came away with a lot of respect for the team working on it.

Right. I am a veteran that uses government portals for certain services, and you are absolutely right. There are so many moving parts behind the "single" portal the government wants veterans to use for access to services and information. I have been using those services for many years and haven't even seen them all, let alone used them all.

18F is/was most definitely contributing to vets.gov.

https://www.vets.gov/playbook/platform/

I'll give vets.gov credit for mobilizing content with responsive design.

But as expected, "uber-portal" strategies that re-purpose content from other sites quickly suffer from entropy and information rot. The portal just becomes a cut-n-paste curation exercise.

Ultimately, the issue is whether 18F is more effective than other means and accurate accounting is important to that end.

Let's say that the VA gets bids to create a new system for something. 18F says they can do it for $900k and ContractorX says they can do it for $1M. 18F gets the contract and produces a system that cost the VA $900k. Let's say the system cost taxpayers an additional $1M that isn't billed to the VA. That means that taxpayers are out $1.9M rather than $1M going with ContractorX. The issue can be that 18F isn't accurately pricing their services and hiding the actual cost to the taxpayer.

That isn't to say that I like contractors. I don't. But the point of 18F should be to prove that the government can create its own digital services at a lower cost than contractors. If they're "cheaper" in that they're charging agencies less, but then just taking money from a slush fund to cover the fact that they're not efficient, that's not a good thing.

Also, price being "value created - effort to get paid" isn't a good metric. You need to look at alternatives. If a system saves $1M, but you could pay one source $100k for it and another source $900k, you want to go with the $100k source. If we had to pay the value created for things, we'd stop a lot of economic activity. In fact, why would the VA want to do anything at all given that they're going to be charged the full value of any savings? 18F shouldn't be credited with $1M in savings if they spent $900k to achieve it when a contractor could have done it for $100k.

The value of 18F is if they can produce digital services better than other methods. Other methods are generally paying some non-governmental company for the services or hiring direct employees for the agency. In order to determine if 18F is a good model, they need to charge agencies enough to cover their costs. Otherwise, it's ridiculous. Someone in Health and Human Services would say, "we could hire people to do this project directly, but then we'd be paying 100% of their cost, but with 18F they'll charge us a fraction of the employees cost. In fact, we'll tell them to hire the dozen people we were going to hire and we'll only pay X% of the salary rather than 100%".

Plus, if agencies don't have to pay the full cost, they'll do projects that don't make sense. Let's say that a project for the VA creates $1M in savings. 18F says they'll do it for $900k. The VA green-lights it to save $100k. Great, right? $100k for spending on other things. But 18F actually spends $2M on the project. The VA gets another $100k in their budget, but the government is actually down $1.1M. When people see situations like this, they want to take advantage of it since they're able to basically spend other people's budgets. "If you use 18F, a bunch of the money for your project doesn't come from your budget," is the kind of thing higher-ups dream of.

I think 18F will get better at this. Figuring out how much one needs to charge is hard since it's hard to know exactly how much effort a project will take. I'm guessing that 18F is looking to generate good-will with agencies rather than going back to them with cost over-runs. Still, 18F needs to prove that it's a more effective way than alternatives and it can't do that by just under-charging and subsidizing whatever projects they get given. If 18F just offered free services, then every agency would want infinite 18F work (since it isn't coming out of their budget). Then which projects should be worked on? The ones 18F finds interesting? 18F wasn't created to be the arbiter of what the government should do. As such, they need to price accurately based on their costs. They will get better at this. They will likely have to start passing along cost over-runs to agencies. But if they get great, motivated people, they could provide digital services at a lower cost - it just has to actually be a lower cost.

Even if you hate contractors, a lot of agencies have tens of thousands of employees. Health and Human Services has ~80,000 employees. The VA has ~313,000 employees. Why shouldn't they just hire an engineering team? Why should they outsource a project to 18F? Agencies that large certainly have enough engineering projects to keep an internal team busy. They're not some restaurant that outsources their website because they don't have enough work to keep a dev busy. Well, maybe 18F can gain efficiencies through hiring better people at higher pay who can create better code and re-use stuff across agencies. Or maybe the overhead of outsourcing outweighs those efficiencies. That's something important to figure out and it's an answer that we can get closer to if 18F accurately charges agencies.

"Let's say that the VA gets bids to create a new system for something. 18F says they can do it for $900k and ContractorX says they can do it for $1M. 18F gets the contract and produces a system that cost the VA $900k. Let's say the system cost taxpayers an additional $1M that isn't billed to the VA. That means that taxpayers are out $1.9M rather than $1M going with ContractorX."

If the government is paying itself $900k from one department to another, how are they out $1.9m?

Those $900k are not staying within "the government", they are being spent in salaries, machines, services or whatever. Total government spending would be $1.9mn in that case, $1mn with the contractor option.

The biggest issue with this is when contractor x bids $1m to get in the door and then says oh yeah, we need an extra $5m to do it properly since we had more meetings and scope has changed.

None of that is able to be specced up front because people are involved that have "connections" and "back rubbing"...

It's not to say that the extra scope and cost of $5m is worthless, just simply bidding for work and coming in the cheapest is not an accurate view of the work once the project is finished. This is where 18F should be creating value because they are on the Gov't side as were.

> The VA has ~313,000 employees. Why shouldn't they just hire an engineering team? Why should they outsource a project to 18F?

They're working on that! Marina Martin, the CTO of the VA, has been building out the VA Digital Services team with some awesome people. Vets.gov is growing fast, and is open source, and should hopefully help a lot of veterans.

I work with a lot of those people, and they're doing really good work.

tax dollars, down the drain, was the logo worth that much to change? they need to be more nimble and thrifty

18F is another money grab. A bunch of SV people said to themselves, here is an easy few years to make money and if nothing comes of it we can say "Ah well start up culture...lol". I never had high hopes of this, it's sad that it was touted as a startup. 99% of start ups fail over the course of 5 years....

If it's a money grab, it's a badly designed one. I interviewed with 18F and would have had to take a pay cut even on a cash basis. (Government salaries are strictly limited by law.) They certainly don't give stock, and (gasp) you have to buy your own meals. So financially it's not a good deal at all.

And they're _still_ not breaking even.

no risk and guaranteed but limited salary...not great incentivization.

They're looking for people with a different motivation than maximizing personal profit. The people I talked to there were motivated by public service, solving big problems, and getting shit done.

If the hours are likewise limited, that can be a valuable benefit for some people.