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Comment by sunils34 | Hacker News Reader

The entire 18f org was let go. Many of these employees oversaw the building of digital services.

Login.gov is a most critical SSO resource for logging into services such as the IRS for tax payments. It’ll see peak usage next month for taxes. The teams maintaining these have been indiscriminately let go.

More of these online services will start to go down, rapidly.

If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.

(Yesterday the 18F former employee put https://18f.org/ as a transparent warning of what’s to come)

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> If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.

The point is to shutter or kneecap every last government service. When it becomes obvious which services were/are mission critical, they'll be replaced with private solutions -- most of which will conveniently be on offer from X.

In my 30+ years working at about everywhere and on everything the only place I’ve worked, inclusive of federal roles, with intentionally bottom productivity, are private government contractors. Federal employees while fairly kushy in benefits space were often pretty mission driven and believed deeply in what they were doing as they had taken a long term commitment on their role vs more money on the private side. The contractor space is a constant churn of bids and re orgs with the mission being keeping the contract in the next bidding cycle but losing it due to random political whims. It’s the most depressing form of employment I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve worked at multiple FAANG, so that’s really saying something.

>If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit

It is obvious it is not. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Isn’t the leader of the 18f or digital whatever the so called “head” of DOGE aka the face for Elon. Btw, he’s totally not in charge. Wink wink.

I used to get them confused too, but 18f was a separate organization from USDS which got renamed DOGE. https://18f.org/

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