18F Has Been Eliminated | Hacker News Reader

18F Has Been Eliminated

40 pointsronbenton27 comments

According to a current employee’s post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ronbronson_18f-has-indeed-been-eliminated-tonight-activity-7301520770147434496-INNE

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18F was doing valuable work trying to actually make the government work a little better for people. The current administration doesn’t want that.

It’s crazy. USDS and now 18F. These were the organizations doing the real efficiency work. Both axed. Why???

If your goal is efficiency, it makes no sense.

If your goal was something like contracting government functions to businesses owned by you or your friends, and your pretext for doing it was that government was incompetent and couldn’t work, this would make sense as a move to remove both competition and people who can disprove your “smartest guy in the room” shtick.

They’re pushing so much claiming that the DOGE people are geniuses who can fix everything, but then detail after detail confirms that they’re not actually that good but they are very interested in politicizing what are ostensibly non-partisan activities.

For the same reason you fire the inspectors general and the JAGs, shut down corruption investigations at the DoJ. They're systematically eliminating the people whose job is to make sure laws and rules are followed. Useful services are cut, while money is redirected to favored contractors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F:

“18F is a digital services agency within the Technology Transformation Services department of the General Services Administration (GSA) of the United States Government. 18F helps other government agencies build, buy, and share technology products. The team consists of designers, software engineers, strategists, and product managers who collaborate with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve public service through technology.”

Clickable URL from this post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ronbronson_18f-has-indeed-bee...

One lede that gets buried when talking about 18F : they operate in a “cost recovery” model. Their funding comes from agencies that pay them for help.

There is no money saved eliminating 18F.

We’ll have a list like that when the obscuring smoke clears. The FDA division clearing medical devices, for instance, used no taxpayer money.

The median case will be that spending stays even because of legal bills. I predict net Congressional spending will increase because DOGE itself will require a massive bailout.

Also everything left will become more expensive: anyone bidding on a government contract needs to allocate more overhead money to account for refusal to pay as well as additional legal and accounting expenses, and trying to hire anyone for federal jobs costs more for less-qualified applicants when they can expect to be treated like this.

When they talk about the government being too inefficient, it’s a promise rather than analysis.

Anil Dash - Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture

https://www.anildash.com//2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-captur...

This makes a lot of sense. I remember Elon saying “don’t worry, spacex will fix the air traffic control system.” Which is, in a word, crazy. But probably lucrative if he somehow gets a contract for it.

18F's internal artifacts & documentation will be passed to private contractors who come in after a while to do the same work at triple the price, including Elon's cut.

This is bad. Last I heard, 18F was maintaining the US Web Design System and Login.gov

Additional context and news coverage: https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/03/gsa-eliminates-18f/40...

Not from our memories.

Sir, please hold still while we insert you Neuralink.

Your name is "Not Sure".

conflicted - people who have admired Elon in the past, how are you feeling about him now?

Drug addiction can affect your behaviour and degrade your brain.

and what do you think of him?

To be fair, also so can being obscenely rich and not having anyone around telling you "no". Put them together with utopianist weirdos and the results are predictable.

Is there still a way to access the design system they created and shared?

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