There's been a lot of stupid things over the last few weeks, but this one is close to the top. 18F did really important, good work. But they also stood for equality and diversity, they were proud of their inclusive culture, and outspoken about the importance of representing the entire country.

The new administration put a 28-year old tech-bro in charge of the parent service named Thomas Shedd from Tesla who started demanding root access to systems, firing probationary employees, and generally making the place worse (to say nothing of the partner projects that were abandoned with no notice). All in a few weeks. Somebody needs to be taken out to Chesterton's fence and whipped a few times. They have no idea about the value of what they just threw away.

Stupid, pointless destruction. No part of this is efficient. 18F and the USDS were effective tools for modernization.

Elon literally said they would be 'deleted' for being 'far left,' specifically for working on direct file.

Yet, people still seem baffled by what's going on and refuse to accept the maliciousness behind his and Trump's actions. He came out against a public technology service!

It's like Bill Gates being confused about USAID being dismantled and being willfully ignorant that the people dismantling it believe he's part of some sort of global health conspiracy along with Soros.

It's easy to see why they're successful. Their 'opposition' does nothing but roll over.

There are things that I at least understand, but who is opposed to direct tax filing and … why?

Intuit and their lobbyists, because.. you guessed it! Money.

Rich people, because... you guessed it! Money.

(Direct File doesn't directly affect them, but the push towards automated tax collection strikes at the heart of their games.)

the push towards automated tax collection strikes at the heart of their games

I don't think that's even it. The goal is to make taxes seem scary and complicated to the public, to build a consensus that taxes should be eliminated or simplified - which inevitably plays out in ways which will largely, if not entirely, benefit the wealthy. And in this light, the reason the wealthy are opposed to Direct File is obvious: having it available reduces the pain that people (and particularly the working class) will feel from having to file taxes, making it harder to drum up popular support for "reform".

So not right wingers? I don’t know many right wingers that enjoy filing tax returns.

He is not interested in efficient. He is interested in destroying anything that regulates or taxes him.

It's an Obama legacy. You ingratiate yourself to the felon by destroying what he hates.

Got to make room for the trillion dollar tax cuts. Trickle down economics, right?

Can’t wait for the pitchforks to rise up against the billionaires that created this mess.

This isn't caused by some nebulous alliance of "billionaires," this is caused by one particular billionaire, Elon Musk, and his friends.

These days I'm getting skeptical of these anti-billionaire quips. Sounds like a great segue to "all politicians are the same because they're in the billionaire's pocket," and now look at what that led us into.

This isn't caused by some nebulous alliance of "billionaires," this is caused by one particular billionaire, Elon Musk, and his friends.

I am waiting for all the "good billionaires" to step up and do something about it.

what function do billionaires fulfill that 1000 millionaires couldn't do better?

That's neither here nor there. Trump and Musk are dismantling the American government piece by piece, and I'm not terribly interested in discussing whether billionaires were the problem all along. That feels like a totally unnecessary diversion.

By all means, after America kicks out Trump, feel free to discuss billionaires and the tyranny of capitalism and everything. Just not now.

why? it's hard to quantify the impact but musk personally spent hundreds of millions to get this outcome

if he weren't a billionaire we might not be in this situation at all

Isn't this the agency that gradually allowed Americans to file their taxes without paying some commercial third party for the privilege? Like the rest of the world?

We Europeans used to be able to gleefully report that we could file our taxes in minutes (which, in fact, it being 1 March, I did today), but you almost had it fixed.

Look, I know we Dutch aren't perfect. After all, that twat Rutte (our teflon coated former prime minister, currently secretary general of NATO) just told Zelenskyy, essentially, to apologize to the big kid bullying him, so there's that. Sorry about that (didn't vote for him though). But still, could you guys, like, stop your government from being run by ironically fascist muppets?

Seems like it was mostly already dead. Cursory search shows its headcount went down from 250 in 2018 to 91 in 2024 (before Trump; all remote).

Pro tip to 18F workers: get rehired as consultants for 2x the wages.

TIL that in America, if you work on a free tax filing system you are considered by some to be part of the "far left".

Heaven forbid if the US catches up with the U.K. in the 1990s.

Hell any country except the USA. I've lived in both the USA and Australia. In Australia it's been digital for a long time. As in you go to file and the equivalent of all your W2 information is pre-filed by the employer, retirement and investment systems. You're just running through a government provided site to check off any special exemptions and you're done. It's a huge efficiency win. Think of the hours you spent dealing with Turbotax and the like, re-importing information from other systems manually when your employer and bank already added filed that information under your name into the tax system on their side.

I hear outright wrong arguments for why the USA has not moved to a modern filing system. The US tax system is NOT more complex than other countries. It's pretty middle of the road in complexity. Yes other countries are made up of states too. Yes there's a ton of exemptions in other countries.

It's yet another example of people taking an absurd "government is always less efficient than private" viewpoint that isn't even founded in any academic sense. It's a line broadcast by very rich people that want to siphon off profit and it's hard to do that when it's tax payer funded.

I read somewhere that the convolution of tax returns system is intentional as the right thinks that the federal government should collect as little tax as possible. Making people suffer to file their taxes aims to reduce the federals from levying more taxes without popular opposition.

Providing a free, digital service to collect taxes would then be considered a real threat.

But you don't understand. If the government helps you file your taxes, they'll use the service to collect your personal data, so the communists could use it against you at some point in the future.

(this is the right wing argument, so to speak)

The IRS already files its own version of your taxes. They use their version to check against what you the individual files.

The IRS has some pretty strict rules about who can access those files and how they can be shared with other agencies. In many ways these rules are unique to the IRS. Precisely because of the issues noted here.

Is it? I think the more common right-wing argument is that you shouldn't have taxes / the IRS is just evil / the whole government apparatus needs to be burned to the ground.

(I do not agree with it, it's just what I interpret the arguments to be)

Here's the tweet that prompted Elon's 'deleted' tweet:

18F, the far left government wide computer office that was recently taken over by allies of @elonmusk, is also the same agency that built Elizabeth Warren's "Direct File" tax program.

Direct File puts the government in charge of preparing peoples tax returns for them.

https://nitter.poast.org/alx/status/1886415751528972515?

Clearly, they think there is something malicious in having the federal government manage this service despite the fact that the result gets submitted....to the federal government anyway

First of all, it's the US Governments, and thus the citizens, Direct File tax program. Unless Elizabeth Warren personally wrote the code I don't think her brand deserves to be on it.

Second, are we pretending it was a good system?

"Direct File is now open and available in 25 participating states." Wow. Half the country! That's _almost_ useful.

"You can't use Direct File if you had other types of income, such as gig economy, rental or business income." Again another baffling miss. Perhaps Senator Warren is willing to explain this personally?

"You can't use Direct File if you itemize deductions." What is even the point? Who would have wasted their time creating this boondoggle?

This is all lipservice. People who want to claim credit for a half working implementation. It's 2025. This is utterly embarrassing to the nation and I can't rightly determine what goes through the minds of Senators. They are so detached from the common American experience.

Hijacking this somewhat, but shouldn't the engine be open-source so both Sean Hannity and Richard Stallman can see the code and protect their data from prying government eyes? Or maybe it's already open-source? There should be something like opentaxsolver that has a government stamp of approval.

In the US privatization is conservative, so anything that reduces private profiteering on mandatory activities is by definition “far left”.

a couple pages that describe the agency and their projects, for those who were not familiar. the agency was created in 2014.

https://18f.gsa.gov/our-work/

https://www.govtech.com/civic/what-is-18f.html

Key Projects:

Beta.FEC.gov: Revamped the Federal Election Commission's website for easier record access.

MyUSCIS: Simplified the immigration process for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

USCIS ICAM Development: Developed a login and identity verification system for USCIS users.

eRegulations Platform: Made regulations more accessible and understandable.

College Scorecard: Provided clear data on college costs, graduation rates, debt, and post-college earnings.

Cloud.gov: Offers a platform for government teams to develop and manage web applications efficiently.

U.S. Web Design Standards: Created open-source UI components for consistent federal website experiences16.

yeah this agency is kinda what I imagined DOGE was created to be. alas now I am just confused

it's because DOGE is full of sycophants and 18F wasn't, that's the whole thing

You have to get rid of the technically literate internal competition if you want an oversight free monopoly.

Extinguish, extend, embrace

The purpose of a system is what it does. DOGE was created to facilitate kleptocracy.

Just another obvious sign of the drive to privatizing everything.

I find it pretty amazing that conservatives would be against Direct File since the government is forcing people to pay taxes shouldn't the way to pay those taxes not be another tax?

Amazing how the idea of being able to file tax returns online, without paying for a commercial service to do it, is considered far-left extremism in the US.

You’d think that simplifying tax returns and reducing costs in the taxation system would be something the right could get behind?

The right in America does not believe in a federal government. Anything that helps a federal government exist is to be destroyed.

It absolutely believes in a federal government.

It just does not believe in a federal government that it is not in control of.

who, exactly, is in control of independent agencies if Congress never corrects their power and the Executive isn't in charge?

For example: the perennial fight over "net neutrality" was because Congress absconded their duty to write regulation and handed it off to the Executive to figure out in a vague way that allowed for flip flopping policies with the force of law every time the administration changed.

You know what would stop the Executive power grab currently happening? If Congress would do their damn jobs. The Republicans in Congress are more to blame for this mess than the White House. This is supposed to be their power that they are just sitting and watching get taken away.

But the Democrats aren't guiltless either. People who care about this sort of thing have been complaining for decades, right through Democrat majorities and administrations. They had plenty of chances. The whole beltway fucking sucks and we are so cooked.

The Republicans in Congress are more to blame for this mess than the White House.

The fact that Congress is ineffective in no way absolves the executive branch of irresponsible or illegal behavior. The president took an oath.

Genuine question: what here is illegal?

The executive cannot just unilaterally shut down departments created by acts of congress.

That's what makes it illegal.

18F was not created via act of Congress, as far as I have been able to tell. Do you see a source that shows otherwise?

The purple fringes of the congressional GOP would be crucified by their constituents if they were doing this shit, which is why it is sitting back and letting the executive do everything that the party always wanted, but couldn't, while they keep their hands free.

The legislature could stop this, yes. But it won't, because he is carrying out the program the GOP always wished it could have done, but couldn't. Once this all goes to shit, they will of course, blame him, while keeping their own hands clean.

And given just how fucking fast a dedicated executive can destroy anything it doesn't like, there's literally nothing the Dems could have done to prevent this. It doesn't matter what laws they passed when they had control of government, when the current executive simply doesn't follow the law.

And the only people who could compel it to follow the law don't want it to.

The only cure to this is never voting red, under any circumstances, for any position, in any race. It's been fully compromised, and is unsalvageable.

And given just how fucking fast a dedicated executive can destroy anything it doesn't like, there's literally nothing the Dems could have done to prevent this. It doesn't matter what laws they passed when they had control of government, when the current executive simply doesn't follow the law.

Oh yes there is. It's just more radical than they were prepared to admit was necessary. It's things like ramming through thousands of new federal judgeships, packing the Supreme Court, passing anti-gerrymandering laws with jail-time penalities for state officials that violate them, and ultimately packing the union (https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/pack-the-union-a-...). The things that needed to be done were not "make things so no president can do this when he gets elected", it's "fix the system so these kinds of people cannot ever be elected".

Yes, I suppose they can be blamed for not doing something like that when they get a 49.8% mandate. It would also alienate half their voter base, because it actually believes in the systems and due process.

(We can also blame them for not imprisoning, quicky and fairly trying, and executing Trump for sedition and treason when they could.)

The thing is that numbers like 49.8% are meaningless because the current system simply does not result in government that is representative of people's interests. There are large numbers of people who don't vote because they feel their vote doesn't matter, and they're right.

People suggest things like that as if the underlying problem is that Republicans often get into office with 46% of the vote and if they had to get 51% every time everything would be perfect, under the assumption that then they would never win.

What do think would really happen in that case? They'd change their platform slightly in a way that allows them to get 5% more of the vote and then still get in half the time. They're one of the parties in a two party system and it's a two party system because it uses first past the post instead of e.g. STAR voting. And the reason court packing doesn't work is obviously that as soon as either party actually did that, it would become the norm and happen every time the party in power switched, and nobody wants the courts to become fully partisan and the number federal judges to double every 4-8 years.

If you actually want to stop them from fucking everything up, figure out why they're doing the things they're doing. "They're evil and corrupt and have entirely impure motives" doesn't explain why ~half of voters voted for them.

Instead you have to look at the actual reasons and do something about them. Why do they want to expand oil production? Because people want cheap energy. If you don't want to expand oil production then you need to cause energy prices to go down in some other way, e.g. by not actively opposing the construction of nuclear reactors so their costs don't balloon as a result of lawsuits and a capricious regulatory environment, or provide more tax incentives for renewable energy so the transition happens faster and people stop caring about the price of gas sooner. Use diplomacy to e.g. encourage Germany not to shut down their nuclear reactors and raise global energy prices by switching back to fossil fuels.

Republicans keep getting elected by saying they're going to do something about burdensome regulations. Maybe consider whether there's something there? Look into what it's like to operate a small business. If you're making $9000/year selling stuff on Etsy and you invest in a postage meter, should you now have to know what MACRS is? If you don't, is it because it's somehow illegal to own one? How does property tax work on unsold business inventory stored in an out of state third party warehouse? If you have a question about any of this, why isn't there anyone in the government who can give you an official answer? Does the law create a good way for you to accept digital payments without getting locked into an overpriced payment gateway that can capriciously disrupt your business by dropping your account at any time? If you get an electric vehicle for your business, can you take the tax credit if you have enough income to be eligible for it personally even though the business didn't make a net profit this year? Why is the tax credit aimed at making it easier to afford one limited to people who make enough money that they already can? What can happen if you get some of these things wrong?

People keep voting for Republicans because interacting with the government is slow, frustrating, complicated and dangerous. The best way to take that away from them is to solve those problems yourself instead of insisting that they don't exist.

The issues you mention are more or less valid, but I think you overestimate the extent to which those explain why Republicans get elected. Moreover, the problem isn't so much "Republicans get elected" as "bad stuff happens". That stuff happens in large part because Republicans get elected after talking about doing the things that you mention, and then instead passing tax breaks and "deregulation" that largely favors the wealthy. But they also get elected in large part because of the highly unequal and unrepresentative system that they perpetuate, including a media system built on feeding people falsehoods utterly disconnected reality (which is another reason ~half of voters voted for them).

It's true that to some extent both parties participate in propping up that system, but Republicans clearly do so far more. There are a lot of problems with the Democratic party as well, which is precisely why radical change is needed rather than just "pass some garden variety Democrat measures".

I agree that there are important changes to be made that Democrats are lamentably unwilling to engage with, but I'm not talking about a world where Republicans need 51%. For most of the Republicans of national prominence, we should consider ourselves as a failure as a nation if they can even get 5%.

The right wants everything related to taxes to be as difficult and painful as possible, in the hopes it will encourage the government to lower them.

I have heard of this argument many times but it doesn't make sense to me. Most often, the ways to lower taxes come from things like finding new deductions and credits that you didn't know apply to you. This is what the difficult part is. Otherwise, taxes are simple if you just have some W-2 and 1099-INT or 1099-DIV, and claim the standard deduction.

Indeed if taxes are too difficult or painful, a reasonable person would demand that the government simplify taxes, and that's not the same as reducing taxes. But then again maybe they are banking on the masses conflating simplifying taxes and reducing taxes.

Taxes aren’t hard but people have been encouraged to talk about it like it’s a colonoscopy by Roto-rooter. Someone can have all W-2 income and only take the standard deduction, but thanks to that messaging they’ll act like filing your own taxes is incredibly dangerous with a high chance of ruining you for life (I know someone whose parent worked for the IRS as an auditor and they noted that many people ended up neutral or even getting a refund because an audit for someone who wasn’t trying to cheat would usually find deductions that they hadn’t claimed).

That’s not accidental: the rich have been funding anti-tax messaging since the introduction of the income tax, and it’s heavily promoted by the media voices they fund. The tax preparation industry is similarly biased since it’s with so profitable for the median voter to think that they need to pay hundreds of dollars every year to fill out a couple of forms.

The reason I think taxes are hard isn't because of messaging. I might be an idiot, but it's because of an experience I had years ago where I was trying to follow the rules and pay taxes on some contracting income. I screwed something up. I ended up corresponding with the IRS dozens of times. Somehow I had recorded some income that never happened. I think I spent more time writing letters than I spent on the contract project. To this day I'm scared of contacting.

They want everything to be privatized so they can rake in that sweet, sweet lobbyist money.

There's zero reason why taxes, for the majority of citizens, isn't just a postcard you get in the mail and confirm against your own earnings records. It should not cost me hours of my own life and/or dollars of my own money to file my taxes. I don't mind paying them (if they're used for something actually constructive like public infrastructure) but gosh they sure make it hard.

Both parts are true. The goal as a whole:

  * Eliminate all taxes
  * Eliminate all regulations
  * Use the government for financial gain (by the "right people")
  * Use the government to oppress all "others" (those who are not white christian men)
  * Crown a king and ensure that crown stays within their select group

no, the right wants you to keep paying Turbotax.

This is commonly repeated but incorrect. The Nyquist pledge is a far more powerful force keeping tax filing complex than Intuit lobbying. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a stated practice of Americans for Tax Reform, the anti-tax conservative group.

"Musk ally is moving to close office behind free tax filing program at IRS" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222216

18F is not the group behind Direct File, and it's very annoying that this narrative keeps getting spread. DF was created by a team of people from USDS, 18F and the IRS. It's housed within the IRS.

USDS was gutted and turned into DOGE, 18F is shuttered, and IRS is having mass layoffs.

They claim that if the government could calculate taxes for you, then it would be too easy for the left to add new taxes that you wouldn't notice.

The real kicker of course is that if you don't file your taxes, they actually do calculate your taxes for you, and send you a bill. It just includes the non-payment penalty and doesn't include donations.

Is non-payment cheaper than donations?

No.

Taxes are in hindsight so you've already made whatever donations you did by the time you paid taxes.

Donations either lower your tax bill or have no effect on it. So, by not filling taxes (_and getting caught_) you're just increasing your tax bill.

Unless of course you're owed a refund, in which case they'll hold your money and pay you interest on it (at least for a few years.)

...but then tax you on the interest they paid you if you claim it.

My understanding was they don't pay interest on tax refunds, but you pay interest on unpaid tax liabilities.

Do you have a source handy? My Google-fu is failing and only bringing up interest on unpaid taxes.

They claim that if the government could calculate taxes for you, then it would be too easy... to add new taxes that you wouldn't notice.

As a non-American whose country break out the VAT into a separate line item, with the explicit intent to inform consumers how much tax they are paying, and who has shopped in countries where they roll it all into one, I can say that this 'claim' is absolutely what happens in practice.

Are you saying the only way that citizens are informed of the current tax rates is through price tags?

Why on earth would I say that?

That's what your comment implies. That taxes are being hidden because they aren't on the price tag.

Then the right thing to do would be to remove tax deduction at source from payroll. People will notice how much they are paying in taxes when they have to write a check every month to the government and start asking questions.

For most people, taxes are more than the next 3 biggest expenses.

Are you sure the question wouldn’t be “why don’t they just take it out at payroll like they did before $RIGHT_WINGER did this, that would be more efficient and save everyone time like every other country in the world?”

You’re saying I can pay the IRS to figure out my taxes for me?

There’s no way the IRS can track and calculate many large, important features of the tax code.

EITC eligibility, for example, depends on the aggregate employment and spending patterns of your household. The IRS does not (and shouldn’t) track when you moved in with your boyfriend.

The home mortgage interest deduction depends on your primary residence; if you have more than one, that means tracking how much time you spend at each.

This is true. They would have to send you a simple form to ask you for those things. Or change the way those things are reported. But fun fact, ~80% of tax returns could be calculated by the IRS with no input from the taxpayer, based on the actual returns that they get now. In other words, 80% of returns don't have any information they don't already know. That's mainly because most taxpayers have a single W2 income and just take the standard deduction.

Although you're wrong about the mortgage interest deduction, that is reported by the bank per address, and you have the list your primary address with your state tax authority, which the IRS gets a copy of.

“A simple form to ask you for those things” is what we have today. Or is the IRS failing to simplify these forms to the utmost degree?

I think you’re seriously underestimating the amount of data the IRS would have to proactively collect. “We get your tax obligation right 80% of the time!” isn’t an acceptable SLA. Kids are born, houses (and electric cars!) are bought and sold, community college classes are enrolled in, …

Re: Primary residence: Uhh, OK, so I report to my state tax authority who reports to the Feds. I thought the point of this thread was that somebody else would do all this for me, but for the evils of Grover Norquist and Intuit?

That is not what we have today. For starters, that form starts with "tell us what is on your W2". They already know that. They don't need it.

There is a reason TurboTax is popular -- because it's a better interface for asking those questions.

But look at other countries. They don't ask you to fill out a form. They send you a bill and ask if they missed anything. For 80% of taxpayers, they would send the bill and the taxpayer would say, "yep, that's right". And your taxes would be done.

The rest could keep doing it the old way.

Kids are born, houses (and electric cars!) are bought and sold, community college classes are enrolled in

All things they already know about! Because when you claim those things on your taxes, they cross check that to try and catch you in a lie.

The IRS is not keeping a database of real estate transactions and birth records. Let alone modest charitable contributions or fluid household composition.

When the IRS audits you, they don’t come with their own evidence beyond the basic income reporting that yes, they could pre-fill into forms. It’s up to you to produce documentation that justifies your filing.

Our tax code is complicated. It relies on voluntary (but potentially audited) reporting and compliance. If you want to argue for a simpler tax code, great, but at the end of the day, either the IRS needs to collect a lot more data or we’re stuck with self-reporting.

Again, for 80% of filers, none of this matters. They have their one W2 and take the standard deduction. The only thing the IRS needs to know is what's on the W2 and their marriage status, which they absolutely do have because if you get the marriage status wrong they send you a letter (and it's a matter of public record anyway).

So for 80% of people, they would never have to fill out a tax form at all. They could just get the tax bill and have it auto-pay (or more likely auto-refund).

And for the next 10% of people, who only take a small set of deductions that you can take on top of the standard deduction, you don't need even a two page form, you just need a wizard that asks a few questions like TurboTax.

And then for the rest they can opt to fill out the regular forms if they don't agree with how the IRS calculated their bill. This is how it works in pretty much every other civilized country (and a lot of uncivilized ones too).

Heavy lobbying by Intuit/TurboTax for years.[1]

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=TurboTax&type=site#gsc....

It's not TurboTax, it's Grover Norquist. Republicans are already ideologically against easy tax filing because they're against taxes, they don't need corporate backing for that.

Using OpenSecrets in particular is misleading because it shows you donations fron "employees of corporations" to political campaigns and then people pretend it's donations from "corporations", which is obviously not the same thing. (and not allowed either)

I mean, it's both. Intuit gives money to representatives that ideologically dislike taxes, and therefore WANT it to be a horrible experience so that you'll go along with getting rid of it (which Intuit knows will never actually happen).

I don't think that far-left was primarily only written because of the tax returns. I followed some links in the article and came to this twitter thread which might explain where that notion comes from: https://x.com/lukerosiak/status/1885523747425399247

(Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and don't want to take any political stance with this)

This is exactly right. Direct File got thrown into the discussion, but it was not the reason that 18F was getting labelled as far-left.

I don't see any evidence that 18F was any more "far-left" than tech workers on average.

The tweet the GP linked – https://x.com/lukerosiak/status/1885523747425399247 – mentioned they wrote a Slack bot to lecture people about using inclusive language.

I don't think that is average for US tech workers. I don't believe the vast majority of US tech firms have such a thing.

I wouldn't call that "far left" myself – although "far left" as used by American conservatives is a pejorative colloquialism whose meaning has shifted from its traditional definition (Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc). Not slang I'd use myself but I can understand it.

P.S. If you don't trust a tweet from a right-leaning journalist, here's a page from their own GitHub repo about their bot: https://github.com/18F/charlie/blob/main/InclusionBot.md

So now trying to avoid offensive language in the government is the reason to fire a whole department?

What is going to happen in four years? Is every administration forms to fire each others federal workers?

If a government agency has a culture which appears to lean strongly in one political direction, it is unsurprising that when the opposite political persuasion gets into power, the agency becomes a target.

Traditionally how civil servants handle this, is to be aware of the political sensitivities of both sides, and try to avoid language which overly triggers either. But people seem to be forgetting that tradition, or even intentionally discarding it

Which government agencies have been targeted by Democrats for being too conservative?

This is like tiny stuff. What fundamentally matters is the main projects they're working on and if they're doing a good job with that or not.

Maybe a new administration want to to change the culture at GSA/18F. Fine, they can do that.

Nuking an entire department and chucking out a significant chunk of work they've done because of a Slack chatbot and a few minor documents/policies is just mental. It's vindictive score-setting and an ideological purge.

Far-left is having some affinity groups at work, hiring people who happen to be queer, and being inclusive to people with disabilities?

The right is deranged with intolerance. All the talk about "free speech" and they can't stand that someone might not think or act like them.

The "anti-woke" crusaders are honestly more unbearable than any social justice warrior type I've met because they will not shut up about it and it colors their whole life.

It's just another flavor of identity politics with in and out groups.

Simplify the tax code, don't add even more complex bureaucracy in a misguided attempt to make the awful tax code understandable.

Citizens need to understand the tax code themselves, they shouldn't need an entire government division to write software that is the only way to understand it.

That's a great idea. Let's do that.

And until that happens, helping people file their taxes for free is a benefit to everyone (except tax prep companies).

What on earth is the GSA

Here's the big picture: Only around 3% of total spending is federal payroll. Dismantling of essential services like free tax filing saves very little money.

Total annual spending is around $6.75 trillion, of which only around $210 Billion is spent on federal payroll (not including military and postal workers).

All these cuts are intended to pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires.

Bad result for America, as at least the two that I've been familiar with have both been dramatically better website implementations than much of the federal government.

GSA, Digital Analytics Program: https://analytics.usa.gov/

Huge amounts of data about how government websites are used including: locations (cities, countries), languages, referral sources, media sources, devices, browsers, OS, website destination, and top file accesses.

Treasury, Government Spending Explorer: https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Really thorough breakdown of government spending from 2017 onward, with per month, per quarter, and year spending totals by budget function and agency. Divable categories so you can look at the $1,400,000,000,000 in National Defense spending, and actually find out a little about where it all goes to each year.

Edit: Here's their Github and 1200 repositories: https://github.com/orgs/18F/repositories

If I had enough money to hire them, I'd snap their employees up quickly.

The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible (beside the part that enforces corruption [for your side]), so people want it to get smaller and smaller (except for the corrupt parts that benefit exclusively them), so that it costs less, so that they pay less taxes, so that they have even more money (that they don't need).

They definitely do not care if this "makes things worse". Often, it's intended.

The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible

...So it's easier to justify to the people when they tear it down completely and then "rescue" the country by replacing it with a true corpocracy.

Given Musk has inserted industry CEOs into agencies where they definitely have conflicts of interests, the other goal is to privatize the scraps.

The most important task now is for every civil servant and citizen to maintain a paper trail on what they can.

So that when this gets litigated, everyone who broke the law is convicted.

Bro, it isn't 1975, it's 2025. The president has immunity like some South American dictator. His agents will be pardoned as long as they stay in favor.

The civil servant should collect his pay as long as possible and do as little as possible.

The president can't be criminally tried for "official acts" and this Court likely would use a very broad definition of those.

But no one following his orders has any immunity. They should keep that in mind.

It’s not about paying taxes. The super rich don’t really pay taxes, and they don’t care whether the middle class pays taxes.

It’s about regulation. The only thing that can counteract the super rich are government regulators.

The super rich don’t really pay taxes,

No.

They often pay FAR less than an average person as a percentage, often times paying nothing for a year.

In total amounts - most of them are still paying millions in taxes per year - most of them end up paying tens if not hundreds of millions in taxes over their lifetimes.

Thank you for agreeing with me. I think everyone else on HN understands how percentages work.

The motivation behind DOGE didn't make sense to me until I also realized the money saved on government employees could be used to justify reducing taxes on corporations or the very wealthy.

And the rhetoric that the reason the working class have lower quality of life now than 20 years ago being due to immigrants and the poor ... is a way to focus attention elsewhere instead of increasing taxes on the rich.

I’m not sure why the downvotes are here - tax breaks and rebates are likely going to be part of Republican spending outlines going forward, damn the deficit.

All that wonderful transparency and analytics, yet failed to uncover this here multimillion dollar Uniparty/DeepState money laundering scheme (one of many!): https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1889172190282821690. Uncovered by just one deaf, nonverbal, female hacker working part time (until she was doxxed, she's full time now).

Ah yes, our favorite partisan actors, who can’t be bothered to mention how much her benefactor spent just this year doing same thing.

Also, that chart is just magical, did she inflate the numbers by repeatedly adding same money being shuffled around (represented by those arrows between entities)?

You can't "doxx" someone working as a government advisor. The public has an absolute right to know.

This is hilariously bad analysis. She doesn’t even get the names right, let alone anything else of substance.

This is perfectly emblematic of our national decline: a person with little interest in doing the work to understand things, spoon feeding their mistakes over social media to an audience with little interest in doing the work to know whether the things they read are real.

Their web dev guides - especially for a11y - are high quality, and were taken offline this morning. I stood up a copy (slightly modified) at https://guides.18f.kmr.me/

Hopefully the GitHub repos stick around; I forked and cloned a few and suggest folks browse through them and grab anything that looks interesting in case they disappear.

Anyone interested in helping organize a boycott of filing federal taxes until a direct-file system, that serves everyone, is instituted? I’d like to join, but don’t have the influence to start one on my own.

I think a tax strike could be incredibly effective, but also have really bad failure scenarios.

I always thought that 18F would be the inspiration behind DOGE. Instead it seems to have become the opposite

May I offer a proposal here?

A great many people would've told you beforehand what DOGE was going to be and do (although I think most of us are a bit shocked about the speed and violence of the thing). I expect you heard some of it ahead of time, too. It may be worth updating your priors on the intents, beliefs, and capabilities of the people involved in this to match this new experience, and to apply those new priors as you hear new proposals and ideas from those same groups in the future.

Just did this. My spouse told me I was being far too optimistic about this new mis-Administration and the vector toward an Ayn-Randish kleptocracy. No more. I’m in now with people I would have considered conspiracy theorists two months ago.

May I ask, have you discovered the wonderful world of mass protests and torching local policy headquarters or you are still waiting for another epiphany?

I can't wait to send thoughs and prayers about whatever America's Tiananmen Square would be called. I would even write a twit full of empathy and a nice picture.

The result of trickle down economics and neoliberalism to its core.

Elimination of these “non-critical” agencies are nothing but a drop in the bucket compared to military spending and amounts tax cuts for billionaire parasites.

A good article from (2015) about the formation of 18F is “Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup”, https://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks.

I can’t access an archived version at the moment but if someone finds a link, it is an insightful read.

It is even nicer to get paid for consulting work (or does anyone believe Musk's drones are doing it for free) when it allows you to eliminate competition from lower paid staff. Tax dollars working on establishing new high watermarks for conflicts of interest.

Sad that 18F is gone and that USDS is effectively gone. I’d long had in the back of my mind that I’d take take a short sabbatical at some point and work for one of these organizations - looks like that’s not happening.

Worry not, if we get to vote again, I expect a hard swing back to the other side after these events. Lots of rebuilding to do from the ashes. Steady as she goes as we sail through the storm.

We’re not going to get to vote again. There is no future, America’s dreaming.

We sure as shit are or there will be civil conflict. Period.

They’ll try to do elections Putin-style where the votes magically all end up being in favor of the incumbent and the opposition party becomes increasingly criminalized.

Elections are run by states, not the federal government. “They” will not be able to control them in this way.

Man it's American exceptionalism all the way till the end. Do you see all the other countries that have gone through the exact same transformation without and such civil unrest? What exactly makes the US different from them? Name absolutely anything.

All this bluster and wishful thinking is exactly why we're here today.

"you should admit your situation there would be more dignity in it"

~120 firearms for every 100 citizens?

https://www.ncja.org/crimeandjusticenews/nearly-half-the-wor...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/26/world/us-gun-culture-world-co...

Nearly Half The World's Civilian Guns Are In The U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihrGNGesfI

What do you mean? There are several special elections happening April 1. New Jersey and Virginia have governor elections this November. Mid-terms in every state next November. These elections, like all elections, are run by states, not the federal government. Which ones do you think are not going to happen?

Apathy and nihilism are unproductive, even if current outcomes are bad. Without hope, there is no motivation for change. Act. Do. Vote. Volunteer.

Already did that. Studied climate change, volunteered and served as an officer in the local Democratic Party for years. Did lots of precinct walking, wrote postcards, helped fundraisers, organized protests. Things have only ever gotten worse, and we’re barreling towards +6°C by 2100.

Honestly if people actually voted for Trump after the last time, how could they ever be convinced to change? Maybe we deserve what we get.

This thing was always underutilized even by the last 2 administrations. For all of the purported DOGE savings, these folks actually legitimately saved money from agencies, which is why big contractor shops were so opposed. They didn't take Congressional appropriations and charged agencies for work, but couldn't just go to agencies and pitch business, they had to be reached out to.

Can't imagine how much better the thing had been if it'd been allowed to fully blossom, but given all the stuff they deal with it, it wasn't perfect but it was a really good experiment.

We need to help our 18F friends find work and get back on their feet. Open up your teams, your HR hiring processes, and let’s help these folks.

Who would downvote this?

Someone who thinks it's off topic or doesn't contribute I guess.

Which is odd — all the YC startups likely have another talented pool of eager engineers to likely hire. Or they probably think they’ll just be replacing engineers with angentic ones (sic).

I didn't downvote you but hovered over the button. Your comment came across as empty virtue signalling. I'm not friends with anyone in 18F and while I'd be keen to read a blog post of your describing how you staffed two entire departments from their layoffs, I don't make hiring processes easier for people because they were fired for political purposes. Everyone gets treated equally well regardless where they come from. I also don't take kindly to people telling me what to do with my money.

No offence intended, no intention of arguing, and you seem like a lovely person, but you did ask and I'm feeling grumpy.

Is there any meaningful reason that states couldn’t start their own equivalent 18F at the state level?

I live in Massachusetts and I know a bunch of socially conscious techies who’d love to help out in this manner.

I have no idea if there is need for 18F at the state level, but I could see something like this working OK in MA, CA, and maybe NY.

Many states do have something like 18F. Massachusetts has Mass Digital[1], Washington has WaTech[2], Maryland has announced[3] the formation of one.

[1] https://www.mass.gov/orgs/massachusetts-digital-service [2] https://watech.wa.gov/services [3] https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/governor-moor...

New York Times wrote [1] a pretty extensive expose on how the government takeover has happened. Basically Musk started infiltrating the government with his agents a couple of years ago so by the time inauguration happened he had access to all the passwords. I am not sure which laws were broken but if they were I hope the administration that comes in 2029 will not overlook these people's contribution.

[1] https://archive.ph/oJRrI

It's somewhat interesting that the NYT acts all outraged while the refused to report on the orange guy's numerous conflicts of interest/crimes/dubious connections, and all out penchant for fascism before the election...

Can’t shill outrage without something to be outraged about

How do you figure? I saw plenty of coverage. What did they miss?

The NYT had 3 straight weeks of breathless Biden is too old front-page headlines based on speculation and tenuous connections. Trumps equivalent actions/incoherence which could be interpreted in as an age-related decline were being continually "sanewashed". Further, all concerns about an old president suddenly vanished when Biden dropped out, even though Trump will be older than Biden was by the end of Trump's term.

Biden was too old. And the problem with his age was not the number, it was that he was visibly very, very old. 10 years ago, Biden was fit, spry, and sharp. He rode his bicycle with ease, and was quick-witted with journalists. In the last year+, Biden became frail and tottering, and his words slurred at times almost to incomprehension (I once rewound a clip 10 times to figure out what he said, and never untangled the phonemes).

Trump is no spring chicken, but he hasn't yet turned that corner into rapid physical decline. It will happen in the next couple of years, but he's not there yet.

It did not matter how old or sick each one is it mattered how each one is perceived. After the first debate a lot of Democratic voters felt like Biden was doing very poor and he was, numbers show it.

But really Democrats keep providing one unpopular boomer candidate after another, so when it is NYT or anybody upset - I am not surprised.

EDIT: actually I meant to reply to the person you are replying to, heh.

IIRC these organizations were originally formed in reaction to how badly contractors screwed up the original healthcare.gov rollout? So if the idea is to replace them with a private sector contract who gets it? Palantir?

Is it possible that the 18F website is no longer available? It doesn't seem to work anymore: https://18f.gsa.gov

Lots of people are hyperventilating about DirectFile, but:

1. IRS itself created DirectFile. 18F merely provided some unquantifiable "support"

2. DirectFile is not shut down.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but you are correct. It's essential that as many people as possible know about and use Direct File this year, to provide evidence that it ought to be continued.

+1. I agree. The government should not shut down a way to collect revenues.

Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M

18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.

“The cruelty is the point”

Incorrect. Their goal is to dissolve these agencies, to reduce regulation that burden certain industries.

But 18f? They've been one of the most visible streamliners of government bureaucracy we've seen.

They want to make government bureaucracy less streamline, so they can point out how inefficient it is and therefore should be abolished (ignoring the fact that they sabotaged it).

They are either deceptive or incredibly incompentent. There is no burden to any industry in giving the American taxpayer a free and authoritative easy way to file. Similarly, firing so many FDIC inspectors saves nothing, they are paid by the banks not the government.

I'm going with deceptive.

And I though professor Snyder was dramatic about decapitation strike. Trump will for be remembered as Gorbachov of US

Wouldn't he be Lenin, the guy who turned the country into a cynical police state? Rather than Gorbachev, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize and started to end totalitarianism in Russia and the Soviet empire?

This is a very one-sided take, you should ask people on the street of any Russian city what they think of Gorbachev and his policies. I agree with GP with one exception: Gorbachev probably thought he was doing good things for his nation and the actual consequences were unintentional. Probably less so in this case, but I have no desire to tell Americans how to operate their country, so pay no attention to me.

This is a very one-sided take, you should ask people on the street of any Russian city

LOL. I'll get right on that, after I ask the North Koreans for their opinion.

Snyder has a great talk at a conference where he talks about how the liberalization of Russia was a move towards the west, but they did it without a fundamental ingredient -- Rule of Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law).

So Russia was effectively cargo culting the idea of capitalism and democracy. They did things that looked right, but because they didn't understand a core principle, Rule of Law, they did not get democracy or capitalism. Instead opportunists attained all of the once governmentally owned assets, and then used their levels of wealth gained to consolidate their own power, leaving Russia in the current mafia state/oligarchy it is in.

I wish I could find it for you, but it's kind of painful to search for videos based on semantic information.

Snyder's US centric video on rule of law, was not only prescient, but it builds some of the scaffolding needed to understand just how bad everything is right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6fpu_9S31c

They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do. They are just demonizing the scapegoat du jour.

Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on.

The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.

They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do.

"Bureaucrat" is always a pejorative for a professional person who works in a bureaucracy. It doesn't mean anything.

"bureaucrat" is a pejorative

"bureaucrat" doesn't mean anything

These two sentences appear to be contradictory.

It does not mean anything, it has the only purpose of demeaning one's work.

Many of Gary's videos on the economy shed light on what's happening in the US right now. A lot of sleight of hand to convince the general population that the villains are immigrants, government employees, anyone on welfare, etc. I found this one to be most poignant on the topic.

https://youtu.be/wPoXOwiEfrQ?si=K58Pa-JQhdIvQzrw

The civil servants should have stayed in their lane: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...

I grew up in the DC area 30 years ago. Civil servants declaring “Resistance” to the agenda of the duly elected president would have been unthinkable then. That destroys the premise of a civil service that is a machine that processes paperwork and doesn’t think for itself.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3331 The agenda of the president does not matter

This is just insane. Totally destructive. Checks and balances are gone.