Skilled technologists are being forced out of government

18F and USDS are gutted by DOGE

For those who don’t know much about government, the idea of Elon Musk as a serious tech guy who could shake up how the public sector work was appealing. Even people who do know a lot about government were hopeful.

Such hopes now look naive. Musk is not just ignorant about what government does, he chooses to celebrate and make decisions based on that ignorance, defaulting to accusations of fraud to explain things he does not want to understand. He is not interested in fixing government, but in destroying key parts of government, and that takes no great skill.

This is not just a point about competing political philosophies, but about state capacity, and specifically tech skills in government. Musk is not just destroying core government functions, he is also destroying the actual tech capacity of government. Because there are, in fact, skilled technologists who work in government. They are not enough of them, and they lacked power to make big changes. They worked mostly in the US Digital Service and 18F, both created in 2014 after the failure of healthcare.gov. And now they are mostly gone.

All 18F employees were fired as part of the ongoing Reductions in Force. The US Digital Service no longer exists. It is now the US DOGE Service. It also has seen about 40 people laid off, and 21 employees resigned last week, leaving around 40 experienced employees left.

Here is a thumbnail sketch of the two units: USDS offered support and guidance to agencies, but could not dictate a governmentwide approach on most issues. In times of crisis, or when a President prioritized a policy outcome dependent on digital innovations, it could play a more prominent role, serving as a de facto firefighter for digital governance. The General Services Administration set up its own digital consultancy team, 18F in 2014. This team’s mission is to work with agencies to “[transform] the way the federal government builds and buys digital services.” 18F was a cost recoverable office, meaning that they charge partner agencies for their work rather than being funded directly through a congressional appropriation. Both organizations use similar managerial technologies, which includes agile, iterative design, a user-centric approach, a reliance on data-driven decision making, directly managing relationships with vendors, favoring open-source solutions, the prioritization of platform models, and a flatter organizational culture.

USDS and 18F represented a hopeful trend for American government: embedding serious tech skills inside the bureaucracy, rather than relying on private vendors. They care about public services, and represented the most visible public sector manifestation of “civic tech” in government.

DOGE, by contrast, appears to be a temporary wrecking crew paving the way for aligned Silicon Valley vendors to fill the gap. Removing 18F will make that easier. Dan Tangherlini, the former GSA Administrator who oversaw 18F posted that:

18F was popular among the agencies; annoying to the contracting community; and frightening to the contractors and consultants who could charge unsuspecting agencies whatever they could get away with. Small, but mighty, 18F was the OG DOGE, but with a mission to create actual efficiency, and more importantly, effectiveness. These were smart, technical, caring, dedicated, and patriotic public servants. Their dismissal with a late-night email demonstrates that this administration either doesn’t know how to effectively enhance government efficiency, or really doesn’t care. We built it from scratch before. We will just have to do it again.

If the founding of 18F and USDS felt like the beginning of one era for technology in government, the current moment feels like the end of that era.

DOGE represents a new era. There are sharp contrasts in philosophy and role.

• While USDS and 18F focused on improving services for the public, DOGE focuses on cutting services.

• USDS and 18F staff took a cross-government approach, but did not ride roughshod over agency staff, or create extraordinary security risks as DOGE has.

• USDS and 18F were never accused of trying to centralize all government data, or ignoring court orders.

DOGE is a step backwards for government tech talent

Musk’s team saw USDS as an an existing shell they could occupy that seemed nominally aligned with goal of modernizing government. A former USDS official, Amy Gleason, had worked for one of the DOGE team, Brad Smith in the private sector, and returned to USDS on the understanding she was helping the Trump transition team.

Gleason became the official DOGE administrator last week, though of course no-one believes this to be the reality. She also tried to get the USDS to hire some of the staff who had already signed on to work for DOGE. None made the cut. They did not advertise their connection with Musk, and so their rejections were not clouded by political bias. Their applications failed because they were not qualified.

On LinkedIn, Vivian Graubard, who was a founding member of US Digital Service posted the following which offers an insight into the skills mismatch between DOGE and USDS:

Elon Musk is pitching a vision of talented tech people coming into government. This is a lie. The talented tech people were *already* there..at USDS, at 18F, at our agencies — before he and DOGE leadership conspired to gut the system….When we founded USDS, the early talent team — in partnership with engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and other technical people— created a minimum qualifications process that tested technical competencies. Over the years, these have been iterated upon to ensure that everyone coming into USDS (now DOGE) had the technical skills necessary to handle sensitive data. Think: YOUR tax data, YOUR health data, OUR veteran’s data, YOUR social security data.

The process involved: resume review, two technical competencies reviews (tq1 and tq2) and a testing for EQ, too (brain matters 🧠 , so does ♥️ ). Here’s what I’ve learned so far (from trusted sources). When they tried to bring on some of the DOGE engineers through the front door:
- Luke Farritor failed RESUME review (didn’t even make it past the most basic part)
- Jordan Wick failed TQ1 *and* TQ2
- “Ally B” wasn’t even put through the official process and was pushed through the process without any formal technical competencies testing.

So when we’re talking about DOGE engineers walking in and getting access to highly sensitive systems without proper clearances or vetting — we’re not just talking national security risks, we’re also talking technical security risks. They couldn’t even make it past the *minimum* qualifications part. These are the “best and brightest” that DOGE is replacing smart, and also TESTED, public servants with.

These are the people overseeing what the government does with *your* data, your children’s data, all of it. These are the people gutting our agencies, cutting off payments for critical programs, and using the data they are accessing to harm human beings. If you supported Trump, if you love DOGE, you should know that your personal risk of data leaks only increases as the number of unqualified people accessing it increases.

We’ve seen videos and tweets of engineers explaining that, based on how he talks about technical systems, it’s clear that Elon Musk doesn’t actually understand how computers work. People hear that and say, “well, he’s not actually building the things! The engineers he’s hiring are!”…but the thing is, they apparently don’t get how any of this works, either. 🤷🏻‍♀️ 💻 🔥

Luke Farritor’s application consistent of a single sentence: “Super passionate about serving my country in the U.S.D.S.!” Farritor is now one of the DOGE officials who is ensuring that the government is not following court orders (and Marco Rubio’s public promises) by releasing life-saving USAID funds. Alexandra Beynon was head of engineering at a company that sells ketamine, Musk’s drug of choice. Jordan Wick had worked at Waymo, and progressed further in the process than the other two, but still did not make the cut. Online, he had posted his praise of Javier Milei’s downsizing of the Argentinian government.

The point is that Musk isn’t bringing in incredible 10X coders to replace bureaucrats. The best evidence we have is that they would not have been hired into a tech role under normal circumstances. The people who could not make it at USDS were hired at DOGE staff because of their personal and professional connections to Musk, and their ideological commitment for downsizing government. This was a poor fit with the existing employees at 18F and the US Digital Service, who believed that technology could be used to make government work better, not to cut its core tasks.

Within the civic tech community who work with government, Mike Masnick’s comments sum it up.

Ethan Marcotte, who resigned from 18F explained how DOGE represented the antithesis for why he joined government:

But what’s happening right now is not about “government efficiency,” nor is it about “cost-cutting.” I would gently urge you to look at the net worth of the people who are telling you otherwise. After all, there is no financial analysis; no review of possible downsides, no weighing of potential negative impacts. There is no discussion of what could happen if our math is wrong? Or even more importantly, no consideration of who might be harmed?

One government tech employee I communicated with said the following:

We are grieving. We are angry. We have busted our asses for years to make interacting with the government easier for the public, by improving both digital platforms and also the processes behind those platforms. Those changes are hard, and they do take more time than anyone would like - but they are absolutely necessary. I’m not sure the public realizes how much of government services are there just because they’re the right thing to do. But this administration is focused on burning down anything that’s not required by law, which will take things down to shutdown levels. And we all know how much the public likes a government shutdown.

I want to echo one particular point in the above comments. It takes a lot of skill to be a technologist working in government. This includes not just policy and legal knowledge to understand risks that are different from the private sector, but also people skills since the work involves a lot of collaboration and trust-building. Of course, you don’t need such skills is your goal is to take control of systems, lock out and ignore existing employees, which is what DOGE is doing.

The Trump administration does not care about the loss of this talent. Katie Miller, the DOGE spokesperson, posted this about the resignation of USDS officials.

Miller does not explain how fully remote workers posted “trans flags” (or rainbow flags for the rest of us). But she herself is representative of DOGE. She has no tech skills, which is fine for a PR person. Her husband, Stephen Miller, has been described as the “Prime Minister” aiding Musk. Musk had previously given Miller’s political groups $50 million dollars. These are the people running tech in government now. (One more fun fact about Katie Miller: According to Wikipedia, she destroyed “hundreds of copies of the school's newspaper, after it endorsed an opposing student government candidate.”)

Mikey Dickerson, the first USDS administrator said:

Without USDS, the government has no access to current tech industry skills and practices. It will lose the ability to respond to unanticipated needs.

I don’t know about you, but I would prefer that the tech arm in government still includes a few people who know something about tech in government, and actually wants government services to work, rather than people who care more about rainbow flags than government capacity.

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Below are excerpts from letters from 18F and USDS employees:

Letter from 18F employees who were fired

For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.

When former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd took the position of TTS director and met with TTS including 18F on February 3, 2025, he acknowledged that the group is the “gold standard” of civic technologists and that “you guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists.” He repeatedly emphasized the importance of the work, and the value of the talent that the teams bring to government.

Despite that skill and knowledge, at midnight ET on March 1, the entirety of 18F received notice that our positions had been eliminated.

The letter said that 18F "has been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical”. "This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the Administration and GSA," Shedd said in an email shortly after we were given notice.

This was a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.

All of that work has now abruptly come to a halt. Since the entire staff was also placed on administrative leave, we have been locked out of our computers, and have no chance to assist in an orderly transition in our work. We don’t even have access to our personal employment data. We’re supposed to return our equipment, but can’t use our email to find out how or where.

Dismantling 18F follows the gutting of the original US Digital Service. These cuts are just the most recent in a series of a sledgehammer approach to the critical US teams supporting IT infrastructure.

Before today’s RIF, DOGE members and GSA political appointees demanded and took access to IT systems that hold sensitive information. They ignored security precautions. Some who pushed back on this questionable behavior resigned rather than grant access. Others were met with reprisals like being booted from work communication channels.

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Letter from US Digital Service employees who resigned

As civil servants, we remained committed throughout the Presidential Transition to delivering better government services through technology and stood ready to partner with incoming officials. Each of us left senior private sector technology positions to pursue nonpartisan public service. We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations. However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments at the United States DOGE Service.

On January 21st, we completed 15-minute interviews with individuals wearing White House visitor badges. Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability. This process created significant security risks.

On February 14th, one-third of our USDS colleagues were indiscriminately terminated by an anonymous email. These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, healthcare, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services. Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans’ data less safe.

On February 16th, DOGE representatives began integrating us into their efforts. DOGE’s actions—firing technical experts, mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems—contradict their stated mission of “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”. These actions are not compatible with the mission we joined the United States Digital Service to carry out: to deliver better services to the American people through technology and design.

We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.