Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
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.
GSA Eliminates 18F
411–420 of 495 posts
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 current iteration of USAID was created by an act of Congress. Unless the President's office has been given the power to create and pass legislature at some point in the past five weeks, only Congress can unmake it.
So was the CFPB, which is also being shut down.
So was the Department of Education.
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
My main recollection of 18F and the USDS is that they expanded the number of identity logins on VA.gov from one to three during their tenure. During one of these transitions, I lost access to my account and had to go through a full re-validation process. When the VA added ID.me last year as 4th identity provider, and mandated its use by March 4th 2025, it felt like an admission that private-sector providers outperfor…
Login.gov is the default idp for the Social Security Administration, supports 200+ federal agencies for identity, and IRS was in the works to onboard Login.gov (to replace ID.me). They handle over 10 million monthly active users and 40 million monthly sign-ins across nearly 50 agencies and states. I would be interested in knowing why it could not serve as the sole idp for VA.gov, as there must be a reason, regardless…
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#415Earlier 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. "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.
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
“The cruelty is the point”
Incorrect. Their goal is to dissolve these agencies, to reduce regulation that burden certain industries.
I'm going with deceptive.
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most developed countries on earth have an income tax. Do you think they're all part of the same elite deception scam?
The point of my comment was that, in the US, the government has to create an elaborate body of law to trick people into thinking the law says something which it does not say. If we did not have limitations on the taxing power of congress, they could just write a simple law that says "There is hereby imposed on all labor of every person working in the 50 states a tax equal to..." The fact that there is no such sentenc…
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Because I've seen Propublica cherry pick quotes before and taken them entirely out of context? The media has been lying to us for decades and no, I don't take them at their word, especially when they share a clip that removes all context.
Are you expecting a creationist style trimmed quote where he said something like “Only a sociopath would say something like…” before the portion in that clip? It’s clear from the length and his cadence that this wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a tight clip. https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M If so, I would note that it’s curious that he’s declined to comment rather than clearing his record and the Trump campaign similarly r…
> https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M
This clip starts at the same point.
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> And now neither of them exist (the vast majority of what once was USDS is gone, and what remains has been converted into "DOGE"). Do any of the old USDS staff survive? I don't know. USDS acting administrator, Amy Gleason, used to work for USDS under the Trump and Biden admins, so it sounds like there is still room for "old USDS" staff in "new USDS" – if they are happy to be there, and if the new administration is h…
40 were laid off and 21 resigned (and Musk claimed that they would have been fired for being Democrats, regardless). That's approximately 60% of the total.
https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government...
As for "government agency", I was using your language:
> If a government agency has a culture [etc]... the agency becomes a target
Again, your claim here is that it's typical and predictable that new administrations conduct ideological purges on the civil service. So far, you haven't actually been able to name a single example of a Democratic administration doing that, and instead you're saying that maybe 18F was bad anyway, etc. Would you consider just admitting that your claim is false rather than resorting to this "by definition, strictly speaking, the premise of your question implies" ink cloud?
Re: GSA Eliminates 18F
#420Everyone 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 the…