“Many exclaimed how the agency was known for creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer dollars and time—precisely in line with DOGE’s purported mission—but it’s long been clear at this point that DOGE has little real interest in actually locating efficiencies; it’s aim is to hobble the regulatory state, pursue political objectives, and concentrate power.”
— The mass firing of federal tech workers at 18F is one of DOGE’s most extreme political acts yet
In fact, in a telling turn of events, the post in which Musk declared 18F “deleted” was a response to one of his followers crowing about (and evidently misunderstanding) 18F’s role in creating Direct File—a program that let taxpayers circumvent the onerous, for-profit TurboTax’s filing software, and instead file taxes directly to the government online. This would improve taxpayer satisfaction, reduce reliance on an outside corporation, and streamline the process of filing taxes considerably—something that, if DOGE had any real interest in efficiency, would be an obvious boon.
Instead, Musk and DOGE were evidently more interested in firing people for what they looked like, all to get a little adulation from sneering posters on X. The result is unknown and potentially incalculable harm to the nation’s digital infrastructures, and to the people who maintained and sought to improve it.
“Personally holding up okay,” one tech worker effected by the cuts told me. “Difficult to see fed friends and colleagues laid off. Really fearful for what that means for all the services, products, platforms that we spent years building and improving.”
Of course, by now, such incalculable harms are being done to crucial departments across the government—thousands of employees overseeing critical systems, data, architecture, and services, from NOAA, to USGS, to GSA, to the Treasury, to just about everywhere at this point. But it’s worth underlining the particular cruelty at work in the destruction of 18F. Clearly, there are political motives when Musk and DOGE go after USAID, stripping funding and laying off staff because conservatives thought some of its programs sounded silly or woke, and financial ones when it dismantles the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that created hassles for Musk’s billionaire buddies. But the killing of 18F is different. It’s the termination and removal of an entire office operating within the federal government on what appears to be the basis of its politics and its demography. No pretense made about performance deficiencies, or that this is about anything other than malice and punishment.
18F was openly targeted for having many nonwhite and gender-nonconforming LGBTQ+ members by DOGE. The discrimination is sickening but not unsurprising. The loss of their work will be felt by everyone even if folks don’t know where the pain is coming from.
amhrancas 