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GSA Eliminates 18F

nextgov.com

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Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#391

Post by EasyMark »

hackyhacky wrote: post #123
yongjik wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they won't even say something, let alone do something. The only thing that could hurt Musk is the collapse of Tesla stock. Best thing you can do is not buy a Tesla and suggest to others not to buy on either. As the DOGE team like to say. starve the beast, where Leon is the beast.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#392

Post by EasyMark »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #251
yongjik wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

and hundreds of millions to him is like a months salary, so it cost him almost nothing

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#393

Post by EasyMark »

giardini wrote: post #380

This topic should be shut down. Many people are presenting outlandish ideas here. Especially common is the idea that organizations act (and even think ) the same as individuals.

It's not outlandish because the tail wagging the dog in this case is only a few billionaires, Dump and Husk and a couple of others. So I think we should allow it.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#394

Post by extra88 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #334
ethbr1 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#395

Post by hayst4ck »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #313
Muromec wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#396

Post by disqard »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #288
outside2344 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, Occam's Razor explains it best.

This is the moment a petulant man-child decided to destroy America:

https://youtu.be/k8TwRmX6zs4?si=TZ1nltJJlDNKm9_9

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#397

Post by skissane »

djur wrote: post #306
skissane wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Not strictly speaking a government agency, but what about the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937?

I think there was another possible reason for getting rid of 18F, separate from any concerns about its political culture – there was a lot of overlap in the mission statements of 18F and USDS, and it wasn't clear why both existed. Yes, I do understand that they differed somewhat in their working methods and area of focus, but I don't think anyone can deny that they were both ultimately trying to do the same thing. In fact, at one point 18F was even going to be called USDS, until GSA was forced to pick a different name when they discovered OMB was already using it. Abolishing 18F can be seen as a way of rationalizing federal technology modernization efforts.

18F hasn't been without its share of controversies, including an OIG finding that GSA leadership retaliated against a whistleblower who reported doubts about 18F's legality: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-GS-PURL-gpo134276...

And 18F wasn't formally speaking a government agency – it was just a team within GSA. It hadn't been established by law, just by an internal executive branch policy decision. Hence, abolishing it is just an internal restructure within GSA, it isn't a genuine case of "abolishing a government agency".

I believe laid-off 18F workers are still allowed to apply for open positions in the US government, including DOGE positions. So if they are still keen on contributing to 18F's mission, they may have the opportunity.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#398

Post by danans »

jmathai wrote: post #355
encomiast wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Gary Stevenson is one of the strongest rising voices on what the wealthy have been doing to the working and middle classes over the last decades (under parties of both sides in both the UK and the US), a trend being rapidly accelerated under the current US administration.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#399

Post by Rebelgecko »

froindt wrote: post #195
abeyer wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Within the last few years I got a couple hundred bonus bucks back from the IRS as interest. Might've been a year where they were overhelmed and took significantly longer to cut the check that usual

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#400

Post by djur »

skissane wrote: post #397
djur wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not strictly speaking a government agency, but what about the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937? I think there was another possible reason for getting rid of 18F, separate from any concerns about its political culture – there was a lot of overlap in the mission statements of 18F and USDS, and it wasn't clear why both existed. Yes, I do understand that they differed somewhat in their working methods and area of…

I don't think a failed attempt at court reform (ideologically motivated or no) from almost a century ago is very convincing evidence that this is typical practice on both sides of the aisle.

> there was a lot of overlap in the mission statements of 18F and USDS, and it wasn't clear why both existed

And now neither of them exist (the vast majority of what once was USDS is gone, and what remains has been converted into "DOGE").

I don't know what the quotes around "abolishing a government agency" indicate -- those words weren't used previously in this thread.

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