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.’
