the title threw me off. I thought it was going to be about someone saying they would not change their a/s/l on chat.
Here I was thinking it was an awfully cold office temperature.
18 F is -8°C
Why I’m staying at 18F
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#32> Politicians may (and will) disagree passionately on what government should do. But they all say that for whatever the government does, we should do it well. I'm not sure how far that can hold. That works if you believe that the government, regardless of which politicians are in power, is doing good work in good faith. I might think that (for instance) universal healthcare is more important than airport security and…
I think there's a world of difference in how the statement was intended and your examples. Personally I read it more as "If this is going to happen anyway we should make it as efficient and pleasant as possible to those impacted"
Yeah, getting deported would suck but there are things in the process that could make the experience a lot less dehumanizing and cruel. Things as simple as making sure the person understands the proper pathway to legally immigrating. And even more important would be making sure that the proper pathway is properly documented and easily understandable.
I do agree with you that technology (and some tech people) don't seem to care if the change they are enabling is positive or not.
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#33> Politicians may (and will) disagree passionately on what government should do. But they all say that for whatever the government does, we should do it well. I'm not sure how far that can hold. That works if you believe that the government, regardless of which politicians are in power, is doing good work in good faith. I might think that (for instance) universal healthcare is more important than airport security and…
I think it can hold pretty far. The government does a lot of stuff that is quite uncontroversial. We mainly think of the controversial things, but if you take a look at the sweep of it, there's little that most people would object to a "let's do it well" standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_agencies_in_th...
And mostly the definition of "do it well" is something that people can agree on. E.g., people have strong feelings on immigration, but pretty much everybody can agree that all the processes related to coming and going should be clear, transparent, fair, and not wasteful, even if they disagree about the right amount of inflow or deportation.
So sure, there are corner cases where somebody might say, "I can't work on that." And if they do, more power to them. But I've visted 18F a few times and every single project I talked with people about was something in the, "duh, let's do that better" category.
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly line offices do, although in my experience HQ is in the process of transitioning away from the mindset that IT means MS Word installs and security management. I've been watching a transition from line office hosted CMS to an HQ hosted CMS and it has been informative how off the mark their assessment of what the agency actually does has been.
What is the distinction between a "line office" and HQ?
HQ is a building with highly paid bureaucrats sitting in Washington, DC or its suburbs. A line office would be say a branch of US Immigration and Customs that you deal with at your local airport.
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure. *I'm an 18F employee.
Except that in theory you are losing money right now? https://fcw.com/articles/2016/10/24/18f-oig-financial.aspx https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/02/... "Instead of securing enough cost reimbursements from its federal clients, 18F is losing millions."
OP here. "In theory" - most of the stories don't realize we're funded by a fund with billions in revenue, and was net positive in 2016. https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/152462#ASF
Congress designed the revolving fund with the purpose of spending any funds in excess of costs to help the rest of government be more efficient and effective, as those funds don't naturally return to the US Treasury as they would in other parts of government.
In terms of 18F's performance in both regards, the capital start up funding we've received from the fund has been extremely well spent IMHO, but of course I'm totally biased. I'd look at what we've produced with that $ and let the work speak for itself, especially given how much govt would normally spend on this much information technology: https://github.com/18f
That also only captures things which have an impact in software - we're still working on the best way to represent the fiscal or performance impact of our consulting work.
All that said, of course we can always be more efficient ourselves, and I think the next few years of fiscal reports will show that.
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure. *I'm an 18F employee.
I assume USDS could be stripped away though, as its under the Executive Office of the President. EDIT: Not that that's good; its just the environment we're working in now. Hide your staff, hide your code.
OP here. I totally grok your feeling on that, but we've adopted the opposite strategy from Day 1. Extreme transparency to the degree we're allowed, so the public can see the value of the work and defend it if necessary. At the moment, I'm still cautiously optimistic.
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do agencies have discretionary budgets that they can spend on whatever they want? My understanding was that every penny was somehow accounted for and approved by Congress, even if it's buried in fine print.
Shot in the dark, but I would think that budgets are approved by congress, but there needs to be records for every single penny spent for audit purposes.
OP here. Yep - the record keeping is out of this world. Due to the spending clauses of the Constitution, even a penny spent in excess of budget or even without all the proper authorities in place can result in a Constitutional violation, and you need to write a fulsome report to your agency head, Congress, the White House, auditors, etc. I've seen it done for what are effectively rounding errors for the US Govt (a few hundred dollars in the wrong spending 'bucket').
Echoing comments above, the laws/regs are strong, the problem continues to be implementation. Govt fiscal IT systems are some of our worst / most tricky legacy systems to modernize.
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do agencies have discretionary budgets that they can spend on whatever they want? My understanding was that every penny was somehow accounted for and approved by Congress, even if it's buried in fine print.
Accounting for how the government spends money is actually a very difficult problem, but 18F is also working on that. We're helping the Treasury Department implement the DATA Act, which will give the public and government a much better way to track how federal money is spent. https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/06/09/data-act-data-act-explainer/ But yes, agencies have some discretion in how they spend their budgets. Agencies ar…
Alright, let's keep it 100. R's in the congress recently ended rules and passed others in order to obfuscate the debt that will be incurred once they abolish obamacare. Also, as said by someone else, R presidents haven't passed balanced budgets. Despite their rhetoric, do you really think the R's care where federal money is spent? In fact, what you are doing has the possibility to expose them to the American people; what you just described is a threat to them.
This is not a dig at the R's, but all of you have to realize the R's do not care about functioning gov't or reducing spending, they just want to pass tax cuts, cut regulations and direct social spending to certain industries. You must realize that 18F's existence is diametrically opposed to that and despite the Medium post, your existence is in danger.
I realize you probably can't comment on this, but there is no way I can imagine all of you don't realize it. A man can only take so much fluffy talk when the truth is right in front of his eyes.
PS When I say all of you, I am directing it at 18F employees.
EDIT: And yes, in light of that, if you are staying put, you are indeed brave and your devotion to your cause is noble.
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that in theory you are losing money right now? https://fcw.com/articles/2016/10/24/18f-oig-financial.aspx https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/02/... "Instead of securing enough cost reimbursements from its federal clients, 18F is losing millions."
OP here. "In theory" - most of the stories don't realize we're funded by a fund with billions in revenue, and was net positive in 2016. https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/152462#ASF Congress designed the revolving fund with the purpose of spending any funds in excess of costs to help the rest of government be more efficient and effective, as those funds don't naturally return to the US Treasury as they would in other…
So... does this mean you are (effectively) funded by Congress?
Re: Why I’m staying at 18F
#40> Politicians may (and will) disagree passionately on what government should do. But they all say that for whatever the government does, we should do it well. I'm not sure how far that can hold. That works if you believe that the government, regardless of which politicians are in power, is doing good work in good faith. I might think that (for instance) universal healthcare is more important than airport security and…
OP here. I think about this every day.
Ultimately, it comes down to how you construct the root origin of the problem facing government right now. For me personally (hence why this post is on Medium and not on a *.gov) is the lack of both faith and trust (two very different things) in public structures of all kinds, not just the federal government.
We've lost that faith and trust for very good reasons, to be sure. We may forgive, but not forget those indiscretions to put it mildly, and they go back to the founding of the republic.
The problem as I see it though is that faith and trust have fallen into such disrepair, it's become a self-replicating negative cycle. So few people believe govt can do anything well (in terms inclusive of ethics/effectiveness/efficiency) which leads to apathy, which leads to skilled people leaving govt or not joining, which leads to further degradation, which leads to a further undermining both in perception and in actual funding or authorities from Congress, and on and on it goes.
That cycle is not just observed at the federal level of course. Even more pernicious to me is the apathy it creates at the state/city (or even community) level, even if one person or one small group's potential for positive impact is exceedingly more likely at the level!
I certainly still have my ethical red lines, and I recite them to myself on a near daily basis so I don't normalize the "might" of the feds with "right". But I still see the one of the core origins that got us to this point being the cycle above, so trying to break the cycle is still my #1 priority for now.