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.
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.
It certainly means something in context, seeing as virtually everyone in the civil service has been painted with this same brush regardless of whether the term's use is correct or not.
Language is everything. Are they a government workers or are they a bureaucrats? Deep state operatives or public servants? All of these words could describe someone who works for 18F.
18F workers are public servants, some of the best in the government, but by calling them bureaucrats, it makes their work seem inefficient and their removal seem logical.
Accepting the word chosen for the conversation determines what actions are acceptable. Protestors or rioters? Freedom fighter or terrorist? Peacekeeper or occupying force? Security or surveillance? Whistleblower or leaker? Regulation or Red Tape? Tax or Theft? Patriot or nationalist? Socialism, Marxism, or communism?
Peace (justice) or peace (submission)? Woke (generational injustice) or woke (any leftist idea I don’t like)?
It's precisely because these words have exact meanings, that they are so insidious. Many end up becoming shibboleths, dividing us vs them.
There are companies, PR firms, private intelligence, and think tanks that A/B test words and ideas in order to create the right metaphorical context to get people to submit to a certain framing.
A good read on the general topic of control via metaphorical framing:
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.
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.
100%, when I hear it, I hear "small enough to drown in a bathtub" for a new era.
A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while Vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré.
The resistance at Trump’s inauguration has to do with Trump’s immigration and environmental policies. Which undoubtedly are within his lawful executive powers.
Well, Checks come from the Check Republic. A region and culture that has had its own trials and tribulations in the past century, getting over taken and reformed a few times.
Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.
Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?
Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.
Yes, I firmly believe that Trump was elected to punish the current political class in the US for failing to serve the interests of his voter base (largely working class men). The whole election and his sad little mandate is about tearing down the permanent bureaucracy in the executive branch, not about fixing anything or really even changing any systems.
Don’t forget us minorities! Net 20 point swing among both asians and hispanics. Little Bangladesh—note that bangladesh is literally a socialist country—in Queens, NYC swung a net 55 points to the right.
Digressing a bit: is there any correlation between Bangaldeshi-Americans preferences in US politics (Democrats vs GOP) and their preferences in Bangladeshi politics (Awami League vs BNP vs Yunus)? Or are those largely orthogonal dimensions?
I think as between AL and BNP it’s idiosyncratic to the person. Our oldest family friends (BNP) became big Trump supporters during his first term, but that’s just a couple of data points. I think Yunus supporters are almost always Harris supporters, though. Either too young to know how this story will play out, or boomerlib who thinks this time will be different.
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.
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).
Yes, that is the goal, but not quite how they sell it.
The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation.
Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest.
(I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)
You're a zealot or incapable of cognitively understanding what the words mean.
Dissolving agencies is easy. Push the legislation through congress. The republicans hold control of the legislature, have the ability to blackmail their caucus through the oligarchs, and have a supreme court that has dropped all pretense of legitimacy.
The budget bill devastates things like Medicaid, but doesn't dissolve the department of education.
Why would you assume either? Do you have access to brain scanning technology that would let you know what goes on in the minds of these men? If they think that the federal government is all waste, why wouldn't being cruel to them be more important than this idea about efficiency that idiots are absolutely eating up.
The Limits to Growth predicted (in 1972) a collapse of industrialization caused by exponential growth well before 2100. Since then we've only accelerated our rate of growth. I think we have far less than 75 years left before things go very badly.
Far worse. They've crossed the rubicon. We'll have a nasty period of civil unrest and conflict. I'd put 50/50 odds on a military junta within the decade.
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.
IMO you have to take that with a grain of salt. Stalin is increasingly popular in Russia and more popular than Gorbachev. And Stalin is one of the world's most prolific mass murderers.
Russia currently is run by an ex-KGB dude. The KGB opposed Gorbachev's reforms. Putin is actively trying to rehabilitate the Stalin personality cult and revive a longing for Soviet era colonialism to legitimize his war of expansion.
The Russian people are amazing, but there's only so far you can go if you don't have a free press, if expressing certain facts about history is illegal and if people are murdered for being too open about their opinions.
I don't doubt there are people who are still unhappy that Russia lost its status from the imperial days, just as there are British people frustrated that they're no longer an important empire. But that was happening anyway and it was only a matter of time.
It's not really surprising that the average opinion in an authoritarian country aligns with the position actively promoted by the government of that country. Just like it's not surprising that the party wins by a landslide in a one party state.
Okay, here is the thing -- they love Stalin because he made ussr great (again?) and hate Gorbachov for unmaking it. Going by this logic he is in superposition of two depending who you ask.
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
There's not a full clip, probably because it was taken from private speeches. But the article does a good job of putting it into context, and discussing how his private rhetoric is just a scarier, more insulting version of stuff he says in public all the time: https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
What kind of context do you think would excuse that sentiment? Given his extensive public record, would you argue that this is somehow out of character for him? It seems rather consistent based on the rest of his career:
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.
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 reacted by pretending they wouldn’t have him setting policy again rather than by saying that’s not what he meant.
Yes, I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I thought it was a different clip. I am just having trouble coming up with an interpretation which would meaningfully change its impact short of, say, it turning out to be an acting class reading lines for the villain’s role, and in any scenario like that he wouldn’t have hesitated to respond and provide that context.
California here - completely agree that one-sided media clips are a universal occurrence in the modern US media; secondly, completely agree that full speeches, primary sources and thinking for yourself are first-order ingredients in forming real insights and opinions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People kept tossing around the term "banana republic" over on other websites. Wasn't sure what it really meant other than plantations, so I looked it up the other day to see what actually qualified. Kind of surreal how many boxes America seems to check lately.
Not quite "oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture." Yet quite a few of the others.
- stratified social classes; impoverished working class [1]; ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites; economy of state capitalism operated for the exclusive profit of the ruling class; collusion between the state and favored monopolies; profit is private property, while debts are the responsibility of the public treasury.
Maybe it's cynicism like noted in other commments, yet the linked chart from the NYT would say "it wasn't always this way" and its not my imagination that the situation has changed over the last 40 years.
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.
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.
Thanks, term I'd never heard of. Usually think of that in terms of an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy".
And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.
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.
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).
She wasn't working as a government advisor until a few days ago. She was doing this in her spare time, for free. Or rather for negative amounts of money, since she was paying her own AWS fees. Her husband (who is not involved at all) was also doxxed.
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.
Sadly, the last art of that MO is “…knowing that if you do fuck something up critical, that other people will point out your mistakes, so you have no incentive to actually be right in the first place”.
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)?
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?
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.
I don’t remember the exact amount but after I filed my taxes last year I got a refund from the IRS for under 1 dollar because I had mistakenly put a small typo while entering a 1099 and they automatically corrected my return and sent me a few cents of a refund.
The fact that they are capable of doing that implies how much time we all have to waste doing our taxes.
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.
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.
Most people would just set up auto pay and then it would be functionally the same. Out of sight out of mind. I'm pretty sure separating it wouldn't do anything except cause a lot of enforcement issues when people failed to pay.
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?”
If you want efficiency, then sure, remove them automatically and save everyone the time. But Americans, by and large, aren't into efficiency.
If you want people to visually see where their money goes and when taxes are increased, you do a better job breaking down where it goes when described on a paycheque. Think "$0.82 for military spending; $0.05 for road maintenance" instead of "Federal tax: $317.02"
If you want the people to misunderstand and hate the government, then you make the people do math every month with numbers that change throughout the year and have financial penalties for getting wrong.
If the refund is paid in less than 45 days after the tax filing deadline or the day you file your taxes, they will pay you interest. See here: https://www.irs.gov/payments/interest#pay
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
> 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.
In the UK, VAT is incorporated into the price. This does lead to some sort of an awareness issue.
Pretty much everyone does, of course, know that the VAT rate is 20%, but still you always get people complaining that we’re being ripped off when something which costs $1000 ends up being sold here at £950.
Even in countries where price tags must include VAT/GST, the exact tax content is usually broken down as a line item on invoices and receipts. Best of both worlds.
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).
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.
* 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
The first two goals aren't even true, mind you. One of the first things the GOP was looking to do was institute a new tax on workers to pay for a tax cut on businesses and the rich. And they want to cut all regulations for businesses, but keep it illegal for workers to unionize and exert power. The last three points are correct however.
Everything they say is double speak, you have to look at what they say and what they do.
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 minute you save a little money and have a few investments it can start to become complicated quickly. Yet you don't have/make enough money to justify the expense of hiring a professional to properly sort it out. This actually can become a giant headache because it is difficult to be certain that you've done it correctly and not overpaid.
Sure, if you only have a W-2 then it is pretty simple. The issue is that over time people have a tendency to accrue other tax reportable activities as a function of age. It actively discourages people from making some types of potentially productive investments because of the additional tax complexity.
Generally agree for most people. Only caveat is for those with mild amounts of savings (not enough to qualify as wealthy).
Enough 401k, mild investments over time with disposable income, or transfers from friends / family / inheritance, that the process becomes quite challenging. You make a couple thousand on a decent year in capital gains or dividend distributions, yet end up with rather confusing paperwork piles to deal with at tax time. Finding out it was necessary to note each buy / sell and the holding time individually for the entire year just seemed crazy in the detail necessary.
Mild awareness of why the actual wealthy hire accountants and firms with specialized teams and software to deal with those issues.
The part that's also not dealt with, at least in terms of those deductions, is that usually they're related to businesses and expenses. The deductions are available, yet often you have to be treating almost your entire life like a business expense every moment. Business cell phone. Business internet. Business supplies. Business ads, website, and marketing. Business travel. Business property depreciation / amortization. Business legal and accounting. Business mileage. Business loan interest. Business meals.
A (personal opinion) funny one is "Hire your own children as workers." You can write-off the payment you make to them which reduces your taxes and the income they earn can be tax-free if you pay them less than the standard deduction.
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.
> ...where I was trying to follow the rules and pay taxes on some contracting income...
You're an exception and, yeah, it sucks. For somebody who has W-2 income, maybe a 1099-INT, and takes the standard deduction filing taxes is painless and simple.
I've just accepted the $800 - $1,000 cost per year for preparation of my LLC K-1 and personal taxes as part of the cost of being an exception. It sucks, but I just roll it into my rates.
Yeah, I’m not saying that every situation is trivial but the figures I’ve seen have something like 80% of filers using W-2 income so it’s weird when people who don’t have complex property ownership or business arrangements talk like it’s incredibly complicated. Most of us could use Direct File to be just like most other countries in the world, but there’s a now-dominant lobby which tried to block that.
You know how everyone complains "oh I can't do anything this weekend I have to do my taxes"? They want that pain, so that you bitch and moan about the heavy burden of taxation, and then support the party that claims they want to reduce the heavy burden of taxation.
My friend owned a tax preparation place for awhile. Half her clients could file with the short form. Most of the rest had either dependent care deductions or EIC, that's it. <5% used deductions beyond SALT and mortgage interest. It's a gross business. They charge people for being ignorant and dumb with money (via refund loans)
Hell, I have a fairly complex return. It takes me <90 minutes with a $40 software package.
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.
Everyone is responsible for their own behaviour but if the legislature doesn't function nothing else will either. And we know the legislature has progressively become less functional, less bipartisan, less legislation passed every decade.
18F was a business unit of the General Services Administration, which was created via 41 U.S.C. 251, the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949. The act transferred the function of the Federal Works Agency and the Treasury Bureau of Federal Supply to the GSA. The agency is directed and authorized to perform a variety of tasks, from real estate, to acquisition, to information technology and telecommunications.
31 USC 1535, The Economy Act, authorizes Federal agencies to purchase from each other in the interests of economy. Obvious application is that rather than have the Social Security Administration lease an office or build a building, they sublease or lease a facility owned by the GSA so Federal demand can be aggregated. 1 big lease is cheaper than 12 little ones.
In the case of 18F, having a consultive entity within the GSA maximizes the value of procurements made by GSA and other agencies. When congress appropriates money to say, the Department of Labor to perform a function, DOL may choose to engage 18F to deliver or assist, avoiding additional procurement and taking advantage of investments and capability already built.
Congress in 1949 recognized that basic concepts like shared services, aggregation and mission focus deliver value and promote efficient operations. The current regime's corrupt interest is obvious to anyone with a brain.
18F is not the only department that is being shut down.
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.
Both major parties have been giving up the power of Congress for decades. They’re constantly handing more power to the executive, seemingly because it lets them dodge responsibility. People get mad at you when you do stuff, but if you just vest some power in an executive agency then people get mad at the President instead when that agency does the stuff.
People have been warning for a long time that this concentration of power in the executive is ripe for abuse. And here we are.
With the exception of a few days (which don't really count because of a sick Senator Kennedy and spineless moderate conservativeJoe Lieberman), the Democrats haven't had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in many, many decades.
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".
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%.
> That stuff happens in large part because Republicans get elected after talking about doing the things that you mention
Which in turn works because, even if they don't solve those problems, the problems are real and people experience them. So if you would make the problems actually go away, they would lose the ability to run on them.
> But they also get elected in large part because of the highly unequal and unrepresentative system that they perpetuate
This is what I mean by 46% vs. 51%. There are way bigger problems than the electoral college or district lines, which would only change how and where both parties campaign rather than making anything obviously better.
> including a media system built on feeding people falsehoods utterly disconnected reality (which is another reason ~half of voters voted for them).
This was never great but the thing that really seemed to turn it into a tornado full of broken glass is the interaction between Trump and the traditional media.
Major media outlets were used to politicians fearing them, and then Trump didn't, so the media got more aggressive and less cautious. Which was only effective for a minute until people started to realize what they were doing and that set the media's credibility on fire and made things dramatically worse.
Meanwhile the right-leaning media outlets, which were traditionally more partisan but only a little, saw this and their conclusion was basically "oh, so we can just do whatever now?"
> 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".
The most significant thing you could actually do is replace first past the post with one of the cardinal voting systems (STAR, score, approval), because it would allow for more than two parties. Which in turn would upend the the entire partisan apparatus of both sides which has evolved in that environment and would be maladapted to defending itself and therefore vulnerable to positive change. But it's also a subtle enough change and distinct from any of the usual battle lines that all of the villains you'd be disrupting might not recognize the implications until it has already gone through.
> So if you would make the problems actually go away, they would lose the ability to run on them.
But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on. Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
I think we agree that structural reforms are necessary (like changing voting systems), but I think it's more than just that. There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people. Switching to STAR voting isn't going to fix it. That entire phenomenon has to be actively purged from society in the way that Nazism was purged in post-WWII Germany.
> But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on.
People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.
> Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
Nah, that's just confusing the problem with the rhetoric.
Republicans hype immigration because the Democrats have an immigration problem:
a) "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free".
b) Generous social safety net.
You can't have unlimited immigration of the world's poor and then give them all welfare; you have to pick one. But Democrats can't choose, so we end up with this nonsense where immigration which is formally illegal is still happening at scale and they're neither willing to formally legalize it nor enforce the law against it.
Which means Republicans get to beat them over the head with it because the Democrats have no response to it when they're legitimately caught in an inconsistent position. To stop that from happening they need to pick which one of the two incompatible things they want.
Likewise, the US really does have a lot of regulatory overhead, and many of the rules are needlessly complicated, inconsistent, blunt, poorly considered or obviously corrupt. The people who actually have to interact with them -- mostly small businesses -- are intimately familiar with it and find it infuriating. Now, some of the rules are net positive, but even those are often still needlessly complicated or in conflict with other, stupider rules. To fix it you would need large teams of smart people go through all the rules, throw out the bad ones (even if they're corrupt and someone wants them that way), simplify the needless complexity, do a cost/benefit analysis that includes the administrative cost of implementation and have the ability to actually modify them. Which requires fastidious people to do something expensive and boring at large scale. But until that happens -- which it hasn't -- there is still a problem.
And in the meantime the Republicans get to say "regulations bad! less regulations!" and have a bunch of people cheer because they know how much the status quo sucks.
> There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people.
Eh. That's kind of one of the things a cardinal voting system does fix.
You're defining the problem too narrowly. The general issue is, in a two party system, both of the parties are big tent parties. Which means that if your party wants both X and Y and you need a majority to get either, the people who want X can go drum up support from people who want Y so their party gets in and they get X, because by nature the other major party will support both not-X and not-Y, so more support for Y is more support for the party that wants X.
If you have a voting system that supports arbitrarily many parties and your party supports both X and Y but X is stupid or unpopular, you can't win by getting more people to support Y because then some other party would come in and support Y but not X and then win because you've convinced people to want Y but not X and now that's actually one of the options on the ballot.
> People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.
But that sounds like you're saying the solution is to just fix all problems. That's never going to happen. There will always be problems of some sort, which means there can always be someone claiming to have solutions.
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.
An amazing reform that could be achieved is changing to ranked choice voting from the current first-past-the-post. It'll reduce the incentive for politicians to be radical to stand out, and reassures voters that they won't 'waste their vote' if they put an alternative candidate first.
It's way worse than that. The playbook is simple - "it's not us, it's Elon. Trump wants to make america great, Elon went too far. Us innocent legislators didn't see it coming!"
If the democrats grow a pair and shutdown the government by filibustering the budget, Trump will fire (or worse) Elon, scorched earth whatever is left and blame the democrats. They are all about the big lie -- they'll float the idea that Elon was secretly working with the democrats the whole time. If Trump is lucky, there will be an early hurricane or an earthquake in California and the devastation will be Chuck Schumer's fault. Long live the king.
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)
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.
I have worked at a place with a bot like that. It's one of over a dozen bots in that repository and seems to have been created and maintained by 3 people over the years. I believe 18F peaked at 250 employees.
Some of the terms are genuinely offensive or unprofessional. I'm not sure about some of them, but I'd expect a government agency to show a higher level of sensitivity and professionalism about their language than a private start-up.
I also note that the bot "lectures" people as a private message.
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.
> and chucking out a significant chunk of work they've done
It is unclear how much of the actual work they've done is being "chucked out".
18F did work for various federal agencies, and whatever code 18F wrote for its client agencies would still be in possession of those agencies.
What happens to that code going forward – whether it continues to be maintained by other resources, or whether it just gets archived – is going to be an agency-level decision. Probably some will be kept, others will be thrown out – keeping or abolishing 18F is a separate decision from keeping or abolishing the agency-level projects/initiatives 18F was working on. (And even if 18F had survived, probably some of that code would eventually have been thrown out anyway, since government IT projects frequently end up failing and being cancelled, and 18F involvement is no guarantee against that outcome.)
Obviously, if those projects are going to be kept, removing 18F resources is going to cause a delay to the project – but maybe other resources will be found. It also depends on what percentage of the project resources were from 18F. If a project was 18F-heavy, it may take a big hit, if 18F's contribution was smaller, the negative impact might be smaller.
18F was funded out of the Acquisition Services Fund (ASF), managed by the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) within GSA. FAS is legally obligated to spend ASF funds on federal technology modernization projects. Without 18F, FAS will have to find some other mechanism to spend those ASF funds on technology modernization. So, while of course there will be a delay, agencies which were relying on 18F may still end up getting help from GSA TTS for their modernization projects. I wouldn't be surprised if ASF funds were redirected towards DOGE, and DOGE was then tasked with working on those projects.
Building a bot to harangue people about pronoun usage seems like a giant waste of time and resources to me. Those sorts of cultural preferences are a feature of only a very very small portion of the US political culture. Maybe nuking the whole department was a bit strong, I don't know, but if I worked at a place that had tools like that I'd quit, and I think a lot of other people would too. Which suggests that the overall culture of 18F was far from the mainstream of America. It should reflect the middle, no?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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 happy to have them.
And I don't think DOGE's remit is completely distinct from that of USDS. Of course, DOGE is a lot broader in scope than USDS, but according to Executive Order 14158 which established it, a big part of its mission is software modernization–same as old USDS was–and DOGE staff appear to include a number of software engineers, which also aligns with that mission.
> I don't know what the quotes around "abolishing a government agency" indicate -- those words weren't used previously in this thread.
You asked the question "Which government agencies have been targeted by Democrats for being too conservative?" – which seems to put 18F in the category of "government agencies" - if it isn't one in some sense, then the question isn't asking for a relevant comparator. And the title of this thread is "GSA Eliminates 18F", and "eliminates" is a synonym of "abolition". So, the premise of your question implies "abolishing a government agency". Which in a sense abolishing 18F is, since it was sort-of-kind-of a government agency – but strictly speaking it isn't, since strictly it wasn't – hence the quotes.
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.
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?
> Again, your claim here is that it's typical and predictable that new administrations conduct ideological purges on the civil service.
No, I'm not denying this is reaching a level which hasn't been seen before.
But, perceptions of political impartiality of civil servants have been greatly eroded.
Imagine if the situation were reversed, if Democrats had a widespread perception that the federal bureaucracy had a pro-GOP/anti-Democrat bias – can you be so sure they wouldn't do similar things?
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.
>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.
I'm the complete opposite. Swap "anti-woke" with "social justice warrior" and you have my experience across multiple years, both inside and outside of companies.
As far as I can tell all these groups never shut up and it colors their entire life. Far left and far right is just a circle, the join at the same extreme.
What we need is a center. Just stuff that makes sense. The problem is our "sense" has been under attack we've basically collectively lost it.
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.
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.
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.
I know I will be downvoted to hell in this thread for saying this, but the entire income tax scheme is a fraud. The tax code will never be simplified because it was intentionally designed to deceive the average American citizen who has been socialized into thinking that a tax has been imposed on their labor. In reality that has never been the case (power to tax is the power to destroy, pesky human rights).
Ask yourself the following if you have a knee-jerk reaction to disagree with me:
- How many words of income tax law have I read in my entire life?
- How many IRS forms have I signed in the past?
- Do I know the true legal purpose of the IRS forms I signed?
The truth of the upon whom the income tax has actually been imposed is buried in mountains of legalese that the government knows virtually nobody will bother to read or grok. This paired with labelling anyone who knows the truth a tax protester, tax denier, sovereign citizen, or some similar pejorative, allows IRS to get away with the largest financial crime in history. (To be clear there are many incorrect arguments about income tax law.)
Unfortunately this issue is damn near impossible to convey to anyone in a comment on the internet, but hopefully some brave HNers will realize there is more to be seen here and take a hacker-mindset to it. I recommend reading the book 'Income tax: Shattering the myths' if you care to follow the law and learn more.
“As judges, it is our duty to construe legislation as it is written, not as it might be read by a layman, or as it might be understood by someone who has not even read it.” Meese v. Keene, 481 U.S. 465, 484 (1987)
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 sentence in US tax law should be a wake-up call... The reason the income tax parts of the IRC are so complex is to keep them in perfect accordance with the constitutional limits on taxation while deceiving you. Taxes on income are in their nature excises, which are taxes on privileges. Foreign persons do not have the same rights that we Americans do (I don't necessarily agree with this, it is just how the law works).
Eventually this will come to an end. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people have known about what I am saying for a hundred years. Eventually a critical mass of people will be wise to the scam and HR departments will no longer subordinate perjury by pressuring clueless people to improperly sign a Form W-4, declaring themselves to be a foreign person subject to wage withholding (see Treasury Decision 8734)[0].
To be clear for others, the sibling comment is incorrect and I think is an idea coming from the sovereign citizen movement. You have to pay income tax generally.
I do my taxes myself almost every time. And they're more complicated than average.
I'm all for simplification, but it's already pretty simple to understand for almost all Americans.
The only part that sucks for all Americans is actually filing, especially when you have to pay some asshole intermediary just to make it slightly faster.
In our state, they streamlined filing. I still have to understand the same things, but it's 3x faster than before. So I know it's possible.
Laying off the one programming team whose products were actually improving my interface with the government was braindead stupid.
Again, yes, simplify the tax code. But for the love of Christ, streamline filing with DirectFile no matter what you do!!
99% of Americans are not supposed to be filing a tax return. Unless you paid US source income to it's foreign owner, you should not be either. What gave you the idea that you needed to?
The people in charge are intentionally ignorant of things that _already exist in government_, like the OIG, 18F/USDS, etc. And since their actual goal is to slash and burn the government so that it's literally unable to function, thus justifying its total collapse since it no longer has capacity, they have to take out the people who actually look for corruption, look into social security fraud, improve government technology systems, etc who would see through and call this shit out.
It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.
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.
USDS has been co-opted and they don't want competition. I would expect nothing less. 18F and USDS used to have some very smart, dedicated people, and it's sad to see these agencies go this way.
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.
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...
I do wonder just how large a revenue boost a lot of news outlets saw during the first Trump administration, and how much that played into how weirdly favorably they treated him in this campaign.
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.
Please. None of the media is making hay of Trump's IV-bruise, and credulously accepted the White Houses's statement that he was sharking hands too hard the day before. Half his face is droopy, but that's not notable or worthy of speculation when its Trump.
Yeah I’m plenty critical of the NYT myself (esp. in their last month of coverage), but they do ostensibly cover any big news story, including the ones about Trump. Re:fascism, I specifically remember them covering the “I need generals like Hitler had” comment, to pick a memorable example.
While we’re at it, they even endorsed Harris as an institution, writing;
“This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election,”
I question your info hygiene if it's led you to a position where you think it's likely there won't be elections in three years. Obviously there will be elections, and either you know there will be as well and are being needlessly inflammatory or have a wildly uncalibrated view of the world.
You technically have a point, even Russia has elections. But that doesn’t matter because they are just for show.
In US you generally gerrymander to the max or throw all sorts of road blocks to discourage voter participation, but we might also see more physical harassment going forward, both for voters and poll workers.
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.
18F staffers joined the government to make a difference. Most of which likely joined from industry forgoing very lucrative salaries to be the government’s internal tech consulting team. One thing they shipped that the government hadn’t shipped in a long time was the IRS e-file service to the chagrin of the big tax filer companies.
So I assumed in the post that they are capable, mission driven, loyal, hard working (to navigate the government takes dedication) folks that any company and team would benefit from.
AND they were cut not for merit or bad performance but for political reasons by the meme-lord-turned-carnate Elon for dubious reasons.
All of that has me thinking that we as a community should give them a break — in doing so we only would be benefiting ourselves: we’d get new employees and coworkers who are eager to get back to employment who have all those attributes I mentioned above.
Of course the market for jobs is tough as it is. Now with all these federal employees being cut from all parts of the government now likely looking for work in the private sector means competition for roles is only going to get worse. I get that. I feel for all job seekers. You were right to challenge me. Maybe my enthusiasm was unwarranted. It’s just now you know my thinking.
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.
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?
they're talking about federal elections 2 & 4 years. Trump is working to wreck the current independent FBI/NSA/SS and put in toadies loyal to him. They will effectively ignore any malfeasance that red states do at the polls to make sure Trump and republicans win all the races or at least a large enough majority to stay in power indefinitely. So he can call up and say "find me enough votes". It's likely the primary purpose the Project 2025 as first stage and re-enactment of "night of the long knives" in Germany, 1934. Just a bit less bloody and take place over the next year or so.
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.
- how many free media?
- will the queues be longer in some places?
- will Trump have money from all the big companies?
- Will some people have accidents?
Even Russia, Cuba and North Korea celebrate elections
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"
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.
The federal government can do a lot to support state actions to disenfranchise people, especially when the courts go along with it. And then there’s the threat of state legislatures to override the popular vote in national elections on the basis of “fraud”.
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.
There was a guy who posted here in HN about to go work for Doge but he decided to learn physics in Hawaii instead. He sold a company and didn't need to work anymore.
I imagine those are the types attracted to this work to potentially do it for free or cheap
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.
Your phrasing is curious, but let me play this straight: No, never to that point. More in the pacific mode. Current phase: reduce expenditure and financial risk in tech. Consider a move to the west coast, or Canada (again).
Maidan Square situation not inconceivable any more in quite a few countries. Too bad not in Russia though, or as you hint, in the PRC. Our Tiananmen would be the Washington Mall.
And please don’t tweet: send condolences to your Mastodon account or HN. I’ll check this thread every few years.
This isn't a real person you're counseling here. At least it's not a real worldview. Such a person that only now sheepishly is approaching a shift in perspective is an impossibility. There have been ample opportunities prior to this that have been much more horrendous and this person is presenting as if they interpreted all those things in an acceptable light. It's the Zeno's paradox of finally coming around - they pretend like they're getting closer and closer but they never arrive at the actual denunciation. I believe it's a rhetorical device to further cast doubt.
DOGE excuses the laws they’re breaking and the cost increases they’re incurring by claiming that there’s a crisis they have to respond to and that they’re so smart nobody else can do it.
The last thing they need are smarter, more experienced people around who can show that none of those assertions are true and all of the costs being racked up are pure waste.
18F, when it started, was viewed with suspicion by other federal agencies—here were these Silicon Valley know-it-alls, coming in to tell us how to do our jobs. So, basically DOGE.
Except: 18F spent 10 years building trust in the government. As consultants, they met their clients where they were, and acted with empathy and understanding. This is pretty much the opposite of DOGE coming into an agency and seizing control.
18F’s model was geared toward continual improvement over time (“Move slowly and fix things”). It was, I think, a model with a more long term mindset than what is going on with DOGE.
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.
> 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".
Tax fraud is just top of mind because the other day I had to endure a smug rich asshole brag about it over dinner and I wasn't in a position to push back, so I'm venting a bit.
These are related: the rich backers of right-wing media have for decades pushed the idea that taxes are this scary, hard process where one mistake can ruin your life. That is not, and has never been, true (the average person audited by the IRS roughly breaks even because they usually weren’t claiming every possible deduction) but it’s in their interest to promote that belief because it supports lowering the rates they pay and the consequences people suffer for cheating (rich people do this in much larger amounts because most of us don’t have the flexibility to engage in creative accounting or enough inventive to do so).
Intuit wants everyone to think it’s so scary that you need to pay them, and the company is run by rich people who would want to pay less in taxes no matter what industry they’re in.
The combination is how you get people arguing for their boss to get a tax cut even if they personally will pay more, because as long as the IRS is a fabled bogeyman they have been told that’s the price of freedom. It took the better part of the 20th century and billions of dollars in funding to teach the point where enough people believed it, but they were patient.
Same reason there is opposition to municipal ISPs. The theory is the public sector should stay away from anything the private sector could theoretically provide. It assumes the private sector will deliver better goods at lower prices due to market pressures.
> 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.
I really find this kind of seemingly performative "confusion" at what's happening by high profile people (politicians, media, etc) irritating. As if they don't know. It's similar to how they use every euphemism for the word "lie", i.e. "misrepresentation", "mischaracterization", etc, rather than call a lie a lie.
Also they worked as a shared service taking fees from agencies that required their services and did not have any specific appropriation in the federal budget. This was pure spite and not cost saving at all.
Sometimes I think it's a shame that modern democracies lost the original feature of classical Greek city-states -- exile by popular vote. Maybe this is us rediscovering the necessity for it.
Exiling Musk to the Moon or Mars (at his own cost) would be amusing.
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.
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.
There’s at least one, although as a governor he may not count.
> From the Department of Education, Medicaid, the CDC, and more - Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the agencies and programs that protect Americans every single day.
Most millionaires are just older people who’ve earned and invested well throughout their careers. They’re not functionally a replacement for anyone who’s a billionaire because they run large businesses.
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.
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 outperform government-built identity systems.
Internal VA IT resisted years of 18F and USDS-led attempts to refactor the underlying COBOL and MUMPS systems — progress is necessary, but this was not the team to deliver it.
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 of validity of that reason.
Appreciate the ground truth, this is enough for someone to dig further in VA from a journalism perspective.
> IRS was in the works to onboard Login.gov (to replace ID.me)
Has anyone agency completed replacing ID.me with Login.gov?
For that matter do any agencies that support both Login.gov and ID.me have a way for users to switch which one they use?
When the ssa.gov first started asking people who used username/password login to add one of Login.gov or ID.me, I picked ID.me because I already had an ID.me account for use with the IRS and did yet have a Login.gov account.
Since then I've gotten a Login.gov account and would prefer to use that with ssa.gov but there doesn't appear to be any way to set that up. There's nothing I can find in account settings to add another login method to an account.
Current guidance from the SSA login flow is to not use Login.gov if you already have an ID.me account. Identity provider transitions are fraught with peril, and I hesitate to provide guidance that potentially locks you out of the SSA website without any recourse or customer service. Therefore, for the time being, my guidance is to keep using your ID.me idp and login until an official update is provided. I will take a note to provide an update if updated guidance becomes available to me through any channel.
They didn't reliably side with Trump and Putin on all matters. The goal of the Trump administration is the destruction of the US government in order to dismantle it and offer it to billionaire buddies.
Government employees reliably wanted to serve the American people. Their non-partisanship is the entire problem. Please please stop being naive about Trump and thinking they or DOGE is doing anything above the board.
Legality is another victim of politicization because now it's determined less by rules and more by your side's dedication to venue shopping and pushing judicial appointments. You need your own judges just as much as you need your own bureaucrats.
This is happening in other countries as well. It seems like people have found some critical exploits in the old separation of powers social technology.
Federal workers swear an oath to defend the COnsitution against enemies foreign and domestic. When the President is commiting crimes in public and is a blatant tool of Russia, the "good federal workers" must resist as part of their OATH TO THE COUNTRY. It's their oath to resist Trump.
> And none of the “good federal workers” spoke up against that. American voters deserve a civil service that will work as hard on mass deportations under Trump as they did on open borders under Biden.
The US is a constitutional republic, not an Athenian democracy. The whole purpose of constitutions is to act as checks against base majoritarian impulses.
The system of “checks and balances” is between Congress, the President, and the Judiciary. Show me where in the constitution it says employees of the executive branch are constitutional actors that have a role within that system?
You might be thinking of unitary executive theory, which is harebrained right-wing fringe nonsense. Public servants in the US swear an oath to the constitution, not to the president, and have an obligation to disobey clearly unconstitutional orders no matter the personal cost (that's what swearing an oath means).
The January 2017 “Resistance” wasn’t about “clearly unconstitutional orders.” It was about opposing Trump’s lawful policies on immigration and the environment.
Everyone agrees civil servants can disobey “clearly unconstitutional orders.” But civil servants must work equally hard to execute the policies of the president regardless of party, right? Biden’s student loan forgiveness was based on thin but colorable legal interpretations that were ultimately found to be incorrect. Civil servants who worked to implement Biden’s policies must work just as hard to implement Trump’s executive order say effectuating mass deportations, correct?
“Entrenched bureaucracy” == a government not run top-to-bottom by political loyalists, like every administration in the modern era has had to deal with?
We got rid of the spoils system because it fucking sucked.
I'm still amazed by people who consider "politicization" as something done to the Trump administration rather than caused by it. Decades of peaceful transfers of power without wholesale purges, and now that's all changed for some mysterious reason.
I'm not amazed. The only people who consider that politicization was done to Trump administration are Trump supporters and people who have money to gain by ignoring Jan 6 or his constant attacks on anybody that doesn't support him. To be a Republican today is to be a hypocrite in name, action, deed, and as a key part of your core moral system.
I've worked closely with 18F staff. They are/were some of the most dedicated folks I've ever had the pleasure to work beside. Based on my interactions, they were very dedicated to web standards that made the web open and easy for all people to use. Some of the best a11y researchers & advisors who had real empathy and compassion. Anyone who picks these folks up for their org is going to be the real winner here.
It was taken down. In general, 18F’s open source work was in the public domain, though, and I know there have been efforts to archive it recently.
Additionally, it looks like some of 18F’s public guides are still available (e.g. the “Derisking” guide, which is all about how to structure your IT projects to be less likely to fail spectacularly: https://guides.18f.gov/derisking/)
"""18F, a digital services unit inside the General Services Administration, has been completely laid off, according to an email I’ve seen. The email says that 18F was deemed “non-critical” and the decision was made with the “explicit” direction of the administration and GSA leadership."""
18f creates shared and open source government resources for technology efficiency, quality, and streamlining such as login.gov, cloud.gov, design packages, and free IRS tax filing
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?
But what can they do? It’s easy in a bloody dictatorship to just raise and take it in your hands, simply unionizing against oppression forces and ignoring personal grave danger. But they are in the US, it’s completely safe there, so it doesn’t work like that. You speak, get angry and wait for some big corporation or bureaucracy to sort it out for you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43148889
It’s funny to watch (probably) the same people in a tutorial-level situation who thought that if I’m a man/human/etc I should stand by their principles and just go and overthrow the dictator of the place I happen to live in.
> 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.
Its even done automatically here in Austria for you. You just have to use a simple to use webapp if you want a tax refund for stuff like donations or tax-writoffable expanses.
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?
Elon and Trump and MAGA are a cancer. And the other branches of government are unable to apply any remedies because it’s as if the body run by Trump is ingesting radioactive material on the daily.
I wonder if Trump is a KGB asset. The way he’s undoing America from within maybe the premise of the movie the Manchurian candidate was not about China running a candidate but Russia.
It's easy to read into his parroting of putin's talking points as deliberate, but I think it might just be "wannabe mobster" talk. If anything it's probably a little more nuanced than uncle vlad pulling the puppet strings, but they sure do seem awful friendly..
I think it's risky to ascribe any real agency or planning to trump. He's a very simple creature, and he wears his cravings and impulses on his sleeve. I'm much more worried about the thinking people operating in his chaotic wake.
There are many conspiracy theories related to his trip to Moscow in 1987, which I don’t ascribe much to, but the connections are there, if only for some “assistance” to be rendered quid pro quo.
I’m a firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor, and like you ascribe most of his and his followers’ actions to stupidity, but there’s clearly also some maliciousness.
There’s more and more speculation among the political punditry that Trump and company might be seeing Vlad as an ally to counter China at the expense of Europe.
But given what little we know about Putin and his cunning as an ex KGB officer and likely one of the richest men on the planet — I’m
Willing to go into conspiracy land and speculate that he has the ability to puppet master folks and I wouldn’t be surprised that he got his hooks into Trump.
Decades of so-called conservatives' eagerness to rage against whatever other groups of Americans their mainstream media directs them at is the cancer. Krasnov and Muskow are just the metastasization that will finish killing our society.
I don't know where their actual motives fall on the spectrum from being useful idiots stage-managed by social media bots and foreign agent handlers, to deliberately working for personal rewards in a new Chinese world order. But does it really matter?
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.
> they also stood for equality and diversity, they were proud of their inclusive culture, and outspoken about the importance of representing the entire country
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.
18F went around improving tech for other agencies and the government as a whole; shutting them down almost certainly costs money. Just as cutting from the IRS tends to cost money.
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.
If what I'm reading is correct and this was a cost-recoverable function, then it's possible this work will be contracted out to private companies in the future.
Already Trump has said the government will sell federal buildings and rent them instead.
If this continues, it will be very similar to how the kleptocrats took over Russia when the Soviet Union fell...
Unfortunately for 18F's workers, the projects they were working on improved the lives of ordinary Americans (like direct-file). There is no appetite in the current administration for such projects.
The original formula for 18F was to hire elite tech workers coming from highly paid corporate jobs to do term-limited stints in public service at lower wages.
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.
Yes and no. Needs to be big to be effective, I agree.
But, I saw on a documentary of FIFA corruption that one guy making millions in (I think NY) didn’t file taxes for over ten years, maybe twenty. I didn’t know it was possible until then.
Someone actually downvoted my comment above, can you believe? :-D
This feels like another designed distraction -- designed to impact real human lives, as humans are only cannon fodder to Trump and co -- that'll either be clawed back or wallow in legal limbo throughout Trump's presidency. I'd like to think there's an enormous backlash coming in the form of mid terms and maybe other things but it's hard to set realistic expectations these days when it comes to American politics
The author's adoption of Elon Musks's irritating "deleted" lingo is quite a vibe though.
Not.
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?
The current Republican budget proposal incurs roughly five trillion dollars in additional debt and service cuts, all to allow tax cuts which mostly go to the top 10%:
If you went to the average person and asked whether they’d like to have services like Medicaid and SNAP cut so their senior management can pay less in taxes, they’d say no. If you demonize the concept of tax collection, however, then they might go for it because they’re reacting out of fear rather than thinking analytically.
That, but also the current system allows rich peoples' accountants to exercise an enormous amount of creativity when determining what their taxes should be, their imagination constrained only by the vague threat of possible audit from a gutted agency limited to limp-wristed punishments. Automation threatens this kleptocratic "freedom."
(The creativity has to do with asset games of fixed overhead that only amortizes on sizable fortunes. Poor people had better file their taxes correctly. If you work for a wage, you are poor for the purposes of this discussion.)
Meanwhile, the French DINUM (direction of digital inside the French government) and BetaGouv (kind of our 18F) organize their "Rules as code" event in 3 weeks.
Our tax filling is free for decades, but lots of things can be made better.
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.
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 hear outright wrong arguments for why the USA has not moved to a modern filing system.
The argument I always hear from the right about this is that they worry that making taxes more efficient will allow them (and government action in general) to increase. The right is explicitly committed to reducing that, so it's not in their interest.
Same reason I've heard from people on the right about ending withholding. They think that if people had to cut an actual check to the government every year (or quarter) that people would realize how much it's costing them and be more amenable to reducing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't get your strong objection. A 1.0 release that is fit for use by >80% of the addressable market, and gets high marks from those users is a "boondoggle"?
Perhaps you overestimate the fraction of taxpayers that itemize deductions, have gig/rental/business income?
Direct File is following a phased roll-out approach to avoid the "big launch" problem that tends to plague government tech projects. The goal is to serve all citizens, but taxes are very complex, and it will take time to address all scenarios.
Also, as the below commenter mentioned, states need to agree to be part of Direct File.
It's available in only 25 states because the other half decided not to participate. Just another maddening example in the long story of how the American system makes it very hard to Do Good Things for the average citizen.
> the removal of existing power structures within the government that support left-wing causes.
Whoa, I thought DOGE was just trying to root out waste and corruption to save America from its deficit, but now you tell me it's to cement right wing loyalty in the deep state?!
Not sure why that’s a “whoopsie” - I’m intentionally describing both the stated purpose of USDS and what I believe to be the implicit purpose to be of the Trump administration’s actions.
Those are two different things, at two different levels of abstraction. One of them is written in relatively plain language while the other is based off my own perceptions.
I sure don't agree that constitutes extreme activism of any kind, but anyway, my question is for Ancapistani and it's about the personal friends referenced in their message.
I understand the best I have with this handle is pseudoanonymity, but I’m not going to be throwing people I know and respect under the bus in a public forum.
Government changes over time, and the need for workforce changes with it. The number of employees a government needs is a function of what the government does and provides. Anything else would be artificial constraint, or working backwards from assumption.
Depends on what Congress decides the federal government should be doing, which in turn depends on who people elect to Congress.
In general, the number should be sufficient to meet legal obligations with a bit of lag as it goes up or down as agencies and programs come and go or find their scope changing. If the departments cannot meet their legal obligations because they have too few people (consider if tax return processing takes a year), then staffing probably needs to increase. If most people are idle or grossly underutilized, and the work doesn't have a high seasonal variance like tax processing, then the department or agency should be reduced in size. If the work is seasonal and requires low expertise, then hiring can be seasonal too.
This is a non-sequitur. The raw numbers are irrelevant. What are those employees doing?
In abstract, I support a smaller government. In practice, Chesterton’s Fence is an important principle to remember.
For example, the TSA is largely security theater. It would be a real win and legitimate cost savings (unemployment numbers aside) to dismantle the TSA and go back to metal detectors and simpler X-ray machines run by private companies in airports.
On the other hand, getting rid of USAID diminishes America’s stature in the world. Where do you think our power comes from? It’s not solely due to our nuclear arsenal.
These people are destroying the US government’s capabilities and influence for bizarre ideological reasons that are largely grounded in equally bizarre fictional views of the world. It’s going to be _more_ costly, devastatingly so, to US citizens both financially and otherwise in the short and long term.
They could have reduced the size of the government strategically and they could even have done it using this same illegal DOGE technique, but it would have required care and thought, grounded in actual reality.
You support DOGE's mission, but not a fan of this decision? Destroying 18F entirely consistent with DOGE's mission and Trump's goals. Why this decision then and not all their other ones?
I'm just an outsider here but it seems very obvious to me that someone could both 1) support the (stated) mission of saving taxpayers' money and reducing the US national debt, and 2) disagree with a specific cut
I think you could make a reasonable argument that their actions aren't actually effective at implementing their mission. I'm not really in a position to judge that, personally. I was just saying I don't think it requires any great cognitive dissonance for GP to agree with their mission but disagree with a specific cut, as was sort of implied by the reply above.
I generally like my own government but I similarly think they've made some serious blunders at times. I don't think that's a huge contradiction (I'm not American FWIW...)
I guess it's the "Stated" mission that I find impossible to believe is the truth. DOGE clearly is not supposed to be about "saving tax payers money" when they include DEI reviews as well. So even your definition removes the baggage of the racism/transphobia/homophobia/misogyny by focusing only on the money when DOGE has not been focused solely on money in the slightest.
Anyone who trusts the "stated" mission of DOGE is a simple child who hasn't followed project 2025
I support DOGE’s stated mission - the elimination of redundancy and reform with an eye toward efficiency in general.
Eliminating 18F does not fit into either of those categories.
I believe it was eliminated because it was staffed with people who almost exclusively opposed the current administration’s agenda. This as a political decision.
I’m trying to say that when I put myself in the position of Trump and his administration, I understand why 18F was cut, while simultaneously stating that my belief that 18F did good work and we’ll be worse off without them.
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.
Having conflict free in-house counsel is critical for major buy decisions. The last thing the buyer wants is the seller to write the spec and contract unsupervised. Eliminating technical and legal counsel is an enabling move for corruption.
Sure. But I can tell you that it was such messaging that helped elect Trump. You can dismiss me as stupid, and all of the electorate that voted for Trump too. But it's not exactly brilliant to configure your messaging only to be properly understood by people as brilliant as yourself.
If you think the people who support Trump haven't heard this message, then I don't know what to tell you. They have also failed to hear what sounds to them like love-for-country, from the opposite side.
We can argue til the cows come home how true it is or not, but it has played a role in what we're seeing unfold.
Many people who support Trump also think that people like me and my friends are child-abusing Satanists, that there are secret underground military bases containing millions of abducted children, that there's hidden "med-bed" technology that cures all disease that They have suppressed, that JFK Jr. is still alive, etc. The people who have promoted these ideas have been boosted by the President and his allies, invited to the White House, given positions of power in his administration, etc.
I don't know why the genuinely irrational, harmful things these people believe somehow means that I shouldn't be angry about immensely worthwhile and beneficial programs being shut down on the whim of an unelected billionaire.
A challenging hypothesis that made me think deeply. My perspectives as a non-American who follows their lib / left publications and SM...
Founded on stolen land is historically accurate AFAIK.
Slavery was practised in some regions but I don't remember being told that the US was founded on it.
I have been told that some sections are racist and sexist, especially in so-called "red" states. These beliefs seem to be whitewashed by right media using euphemisms like "all lives matter" or "pro-life".
But the nation itself was not painted as sexist or racist. Indeed, it was often described as
mostly welcoming of all races and immigrants.
I don't think it's been called an illegitimate nation and don't see it as such. Rather manipulative and bullying. With bad healthcare and ruthless capitalism. But still a better values-based policeman than the USSR or Russia or China.
I see Trump admin as a higher level success of the racist sexist sections. It is destruction. But by the wrong section of society on the better sections. I see it not as restorative justice but as a path to worse future injustice.
Are those who talked about all this to blame for these consequences? Observing a phenomenon to analyze, criticize, and predict is something we all do. They were just the messengers of a phenomenon that was already in motion.
The phenomenon was irrational brainwashing using euphemisms and disinfo to whitewash unethical ideas, done by the US rightwing media and its corporate backers.
> The phenomenon was irrational brainwashing using euphemisms and disinfo to whitewash unethical ideas, done by the US rightwing media and its corporate backers.
How exactly did a country that elected Obama twice fall to this brainwashing? How exactly did the liberal media fail to counterbalance the brainwashing? Perhaps you could excuse it for the first Trump presidency, but how exactly did all the smart, well-intentioned liberals fail to address the problem and stop it from happening again?
They failed to offer any hope to the people who were seduced by the dark side. Liberals failed. And to keep characterizing this failure as simply a "successful brainwashing by the other side" you completely remove any responsibility from the "good guys". And even worse, you completely remove any opportunity to learn from the situation so that the "good guys" can do something different next time. You've turned the entire left-wing political and media apparatus into hapless innocent victims of an evil empire, who were faultless in the face of an all-powerful right-wing brainwashing regime that had absolute power and was impossible to defeat. That's the most childish of assessments possible.
Remote work doesn't mean it's dead. 91 employees also doesn't mean it's dead. 18F still was a large active team. You are redefining dead to excuse the inexcusable.
This is a good program that should be retained. But theres a nagging thing bothering me about the whole dynamic going on with DOGE critics. You get mad at the waste this represents, the unfairness. Ask your average middle class worker how they feel about the taxes taken out of their paycheck being wasted in the massive amount of waste fraud and abuse we all know happens in government. That is massively unfair. It one thing to lose a job because of a policy change. It’s quite another to have every paycheck docked at threat of state violence to fund the kind of stuff we are hearing about. Budget cuts and shutdowns are normal in business and all too rare in government. The argument that this or that program is good isn’t enough. But we see all these concerns and complaints based on basically that. This ignores the scale and gravity and historical incalcalitrant nature of the problem we actually have to deal with now. It’s not an option anymore. So can we please stop the wailing and gnashing of teeth and absolutely give feedback on what programs are good and why they deserve to be reinstated. I have a feeling they want to wait a year or two to find out what actually mattered.
The average worker doesn’t appreciate all of the different things the government does, and we’ve had decades of polls showing that people wildly misunderstand where money is spent. For example, people think we spend a lot more on foreign aid than we actually do – and also think that we should spend more than we do:
I mention this because there’s another side of this: taxes have been cut massively over the last half century, but a lot of people have not internalized what that means and simply assume that most of the money is going to something they don’t like. Cutting expenditures in any meaningful way means cutting the military, and the big social programs like Medicaid, SNAP, etc. People talk like we’re spending trillions on foreign and buying Reagan’s welfare queens new Cybertrucks but it’s really coming down to whether we want to spend less on the military, deal with our world-leading medical costs, or have rich people pay taxes at the same rates they paid around the turn of the century. The DOGE cuts work out to a few dollars per person total, and that’s before you factor in the significant new costs those cuts have incurred. It’s like looking at your personal budget and saying that the place to cut is your monthly movie date while ignoring rent, food, and car payments.
I think the main criticism of DOGE is that there seems no deliberation at all. They cut whatever Musk and friends don't personally like or what they don't understand after 10 minutes looking at it. Such an effort should be a long careful process, not a hit and run job.
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.
There are better factions within the government doing truly remarkable things. Largely in DoD and integrated well with industry service providers; all of whom have ample gov't experience. If you can flip bureaucracy in DoD, you can flip it in the rest of gov. Beyond that, every agency should how it's own _18F_
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.
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.
>It doesn't mean anything.
It certainly means something in context, seeing as virtually everyone in the civil service has been painted with this same brush regardless of whether the term's use is correct or not.
> "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.
Thanks, that is what I was driving at.
> It doesn't mean anything.
Language is everything. Are they a government workers or are they a bureaucrats? Deep state operatives or public servants? All of these words could describe someone who works for 18F.
18F workers are public servants, some of the best in the government, but by calling them bureaucrats, it makes their work seem inefficient and their removal seem logical.
Accepting the word chosen for the conversation determines what actions are acceptable. Protestors or rioters? Freedom fighter or terrorist? Peacekeeper or occupying force? Security or surveillance? Whistleblower or leaker? Regulation or Red Tape? Tax or Theft? Patriot or nationalist? Socialism, Marxism, or communism?
Peace (justice) or peace (submission)? Woke (generational injustice) or woke (any leftist idea I don’t like)?
It's precisely because these words have exact meanings, that they are so insidious. Many end up becoming shibboleths, dividing us vs them.
There are companies, PR firms, private intelligence, and think tanks that A/B test words and ideas in order to create the right metaphorical context to get people to submit to a certain framing.
A good read on the general topic of control via metaphorical framing:
https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...
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.
100%, when I hear it, I hear "small enough to drown in a bathtub" for a new era.
A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while Vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré.
The based to cringe pipeline, if you will
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https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3331 The agenda of the president does not matter
The resistance at Trump’s inauguration has to do with Trump’s immigration and environmental policies. Which undoubtedly are within his lawful executive powers.
This is just insane. Totally destructive. Checks and balances are gone.
Explain what you think “checks and balances” are, please.
Well, Checks come from the Check Republic. A region and culture that has had its own trials and tribulations in the past century, getting over taken and reformed a few times.
Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.
Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?
Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.
It's not our job to educate fascists, crack a book.
Says the uber-bureaucrat, Musk.
Yes, I firmly believe that Trump was elected to punish the current political class in the US for failing to serve the interests of his voter base (largely working class men). The whole election and his sad little mandate is about tearing down the permanent bureaucracy in the executive branch, not about fixing anything or really even changing any systems.
Don’t forget us minorities! Net 20 point swing among both asians and hispanics. Little Bangladesh—note that bangladesh is literally a socialist country—in Queens, NYC swung a net 55 points to the right.
Digressing a bit: is there any correlation between Bangaldeshi-Americans preferences in US politics (Democrats vs GOP) and their preferences in Bangladeshi politics (Awami League vs BNP vs Yunus)? Or are those largely orthogonal dimensions?
I think as between AL and BNP it’s idiosyncratic to the person. Our oldest family friends (BNP) became big Trump supporters during his first term, but that’s just a couple of data points. I think Yunus supporters are almost always Harris supporters, though. Either too young to know how this story will play out, or boomerlib who thinks this time will be different.
“The cruelty is the point”
Incorrect. Their goal is to dissolve these agencies, to reduce regulation that burden certain industries.
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.
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).
Like they do with USPS. Yes, I agree.
Yes, that is the goal, but not quite how they sell it.
The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation.
Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest.
(I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)
You're a zealot or incapable of cognitively understanding what the words mean.
Dissolving agencies is easy. Push the legislation through congress. The republicans hold control of the legislature, have the ability to blackmail their caucus through the oligarchs, and have a supreme court that has dropped all pretense of legitimacy.
The budget bill devastates things like Medicaid, but doesn't dissolve the department of education.
> You're a zealot or incapable of cognitively understanding what the words mean.
Straight to ad hominem. Excellent.
If you are an advocate for the destruction of my country through your willful ignorance, you’re the problem.
You don’t get to hide behind high minded ideals.
How is that incorrect? They're deliberately being cruel to government employees so they quit and the agencies are de facto dissolved.
The statement was "cruelty is the point."
But cruelty to these employees is just the side benefit, the cherry on top. It's not the main objective driving these decisions.
Why would you assume either? Do you have access to brain scanning technology that would let you know what goes on in the minds of these men? If they think that the federal government is all waste, why wouldn't being cruel to them be more important than this idea about efficiency that idiots are absolutely eating up.
Cruelty and profit or it isn’t capitalism
at some point the oil will run out it is a finite resource let them go crazy in the last 75 years
EVs and all that stuff were nothing more than a toy to play the charged up games the barons / slavers play
The Limits to Growth predicted (in 1972) a collapse of industrialization caused by exponential growth well before 2100. Since then we've only accelerated our rate of growth. I think we have far less than 75 years left before things go very badly.
And I though professor Snyder was dramatic about decapitation strike. Trump will for be remembered as Gorbachov of US
Far worse. They've crossed the rubicon. We'll have a nasty period of civil unrest and conflict. I'd put 50/50 odds on a military junta within the decade.
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.
IMO you have to take that with a grain of salt. Stalin is increasingly popular in Russia and more popular than Gorbachev. And Stalin is one of the world's most prolific mass murderers.
Russia currently is run by an ex-KGB dude. The KGB opposed Gorbachev's reforms. Putin is actively trying to rehabilitate the Stalin personality cult and revive a longing for Soviet era colonialism to legitimize his war of expansion.
The Russian people are amazing, but there's only so far you can go if you don't have a free press, if expressing certain facts about history is illegal and if people are murdered for being too open about their opinions.
I don't doubt there are people who are still unhappy that Russia lost its status from the imperial days, just as there are British people frustrated that they're no longer an important empire. But that was happening anyway and it was only a matter of time.
It's not really surprising that the average opinion in an authoritarian country aligns with the position actively promoted by the government of that country. Just like it's not surprising that the party wins by a landslide in a one party state.
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.
Okay, here is the thing -- they love Stalin because he made ussr great (again?) and hate Gorbachov for unmaking it. Going by this logic he is in superposition of two depending who you ask.
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
Fuck that Vought guy.
Uhhh is there a full clip because 18 seconds of what looks like a speech seems like cherry picking.
There's not a full clip, probably because it was taken from private speeches. But the article does a good job of putting it into context, and discussing how his private rhetoric is just a scarier, more insulting version of stuff he says in public all the time: https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
What kind of context do you think would excuse that sentiment? Given his extensive public record, would you argue that this is somehow out of character for him? It seems rather consistent based on the rest of his career:
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-voug...
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 reacted by pretending they wouldn’t have him setting policy again rather than by saying that’s not what he meant.
I like to make my own decision on how to interpret what someone says, not "trust" someone else to do that.
> https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M
This clip starts at the same point.
Yes, I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I thought it was a different clip. I am just having trouble coming up with an interpretation which would meaningfully change its impact short of, say, it turning out to be an acting class reading lines for the villain’s role, and in any scenario like that he wouldn’t have hesitated to respond and provide that context.
> I've seen Propublica cherry pick quotes
Wait until you see Twitter Files or whatever Elon is going to drop from DOGE.
California here - completely agree that one-sided media clips are a universal occurrence in the modern US media; secondly, completely agree that full speeches, primary sources and thinking for yourself are first-order ingredients in forming real insights and opinions.
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.
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.
> no one following his orders has any immunity
As long as they commit their crimes in DC, they enjoy the ability to be fully pardoned. Outside of DC, you have to have a prosecutor with cohones.
People kept tossing around the term "banana republic" over on other websites. Wasn't sure what it really meant other than plantations, so I looked it up the other day to see what actually qualified. Kind of surreal how many boxes America seems to check lately.
Not quite "oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture." Yet quite a few of the others.
- stratified social classes; impoverished working class [1]; ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites; economy of state capitalism operated for the exclusive profit of the ruling class; collusion between the state and favored monopolies; profit is private property, while debts are the responsibility of the public treasury.
Maybe it's cynicism like noted in other commments, yet the linked chart from the NYT would say "it wasn't always this way" and its not my imagination that the situation has changed over the last 40 years.
[1] NYT, "Our Broken Economy", https://archive.is/ZFnAT
Cynicism is the rationalization of laziness.
Someone has always disagreed with something the government is doing. It has always been the end of democracy as we know it.
And yet, the future then and present now were formed by people who acted.
lol i envy people like you my friend it is a feudal oligarchy wake up learn to read the graffiti
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.
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 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.
Thanks, term I'd never heard of. Usually think of that in terms of an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy".
And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.
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No, absolutely wrong.
Neoliberalism is about a big, functional government that is utopian and takes care of everything for you.
"You own nothing, and you'll be happy."
You can argue in practice it's terrible (subjective, no one really cares about your opinion). But it's hard to argue its GOAL is to be small.
Baffling definition. How did you develop this impression?
No, this is closer to the definition of neoliberalism that people are using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
That is definitely not what neoliberalism is about. GP is correct (though the current situation seems to be something much more extreme).
This needs to be repeated to anybody who'll listen to it.
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.
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).
You can't "doxx" someone working as a government advisor. The public has an absolute right to know.
She wasn't working as a government advisor until a few days ago. She was doing this in her spare time, for free. Or rather for negative amounts of money, since she was paying her own AWS fees. Her husband (who is not involved at all) was also doxxed.
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.
Sadly, the last art of that MO is “…knowing that if you do fuck something up critical, that other people will point out your mistakes, so you have no incentive to actually be right in the first place”.
This comment would land a lot harder if you actually mentioned any specifics.
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)?
Also seems to be unaware of the fact that NGO's are usually soft-power. They are either carrots or sticks in diplomacy or a cover for IC.
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?
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.
I don’t remember the exact amount but after I filed my taxes last year I got a refund from the IRS for under 1 dollar because I had mistakenly put a small typo while entering a 1099 and they automatically corrected my return and sent me a few cents of a refund.
The fact that they are capable of doing that implies how much time we all have to waste doing our taxes.
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.
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.
Most people would just set up auto pay and then it would be functionally the same. Out of sight out of mind. I'm pretty sure separating it wouldn't do anything except cause a lot of enforcement issues when people failed to pay.
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?”
If you want efficiency, then sure, remove them automatically and save everyone the time. But Americans, by and large, aren't into efficiency.
If you want people to visually see where their money goes and when taxes are increased, you do a better job breaking down where it goes when described on a paycheque. Think "$0.82 for military spending; $0.05 for road maintenance" instead of "Federal tax: $317.02"
If you want the people to misunderstand and hate the government, then you make the people do math every month with numbers that change throughout the year and have financial penalties for getting wrong.
You’re saying I can pay the IRS to figure out my taxes for me?
Technically yes, but you'll pay them a lot more than you'd pay H&R Block or any of the other tax prep people.
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.
If the refund is paid in less than 45 days after the tax filing deadline or the day you file your taxes, they will pay you interest. See here: https://www.irs.gov/payments/interest#pay
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
> 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?
In the UK, VAT is incorporated into the price. This does lead to some sort of an awareness issue.
Pretty much everyone does, of course, know that the VAT rate is 20%, but still you always get people complaining that we’re being ripped off when something which costs $1000 ends up being sold here at £950.
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.
Or not on the receipt.
Even in countries where price tags must include VAT/GST, the exact tax content is usually broken down as a line item on invoices and receipts. Best of both worlds.
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).
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.
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:
The first two goals aren't even true, mind you. One of the first things the GOP was looking to do was institute a new tax on workers to pay for a tax cut on businesses and the rich. And they want to cut all regulations for businesses, but keep it illegal for workers to unionize and exert power. The last three points are correct however.
Everything they say is double speak, you have to look at what they say and what they do.
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 minute you save a little money and have a few investments it can start to become complicated quickly. Yet you don't have/make enough money to justify the expense of hiring a professional to properly sort it out. This actually can become a giant headache because it is difficult to be certain that you've done it correctly and not overpaid.
Sure, if you only have a W-2 then it is pretty simple. The issue is that over time people have a tendency to accrue other tax reportable activities as a function of age. It actively discourages people from making some types of potentially productive investments because of the additional tax complexity.
Generally agree for most people. Only caveat is for those with mild amounts of savings (not enough to qualify as wealthy).
Enough 401k, mild investments over time with disposable income, or transfers from friends / family / inheritance, that the process becomes quite challenging. You make a couple thousand on a decent year in capital gains or dividend distributions, yet end up with rather confusing paperwork piles to deal with at tax time. Finding out it was necessary to note each buy / sell and the holding time individually for the entire year just seemed crazy in the detail necessary.
Mild awareness of why the actual wealthy hire accountants and firms with specialized teams and software to deal with those issues.
The part that's also not dealt with, at least in terms of those deductions, is that usually they're related to businesses and expenses. The deductions are available, yet often you have to be treating almost your entire life like a business expense every moment. Business cell phone. Business internet. Business supplies. Business ads, website, and marketing. Business travel. Business property depreciation / amortization. Business legal and accounting. Business mileage. Business loan interest. Business meals.
A (personal opinion) funny one is "Hire your own children as workers." You can write-off the payment you make to them which reduces your taxes and the income they earn can be tax-free if you pay them less than the standard deduction.
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.
> ...where I was trying to follow the rules and pay taxes on some contracting income...
You're an exception and, yeah, it sucks. For somebody who has W-2 income, maybe a 1099-INT, and takes the standard deduction filing taxes is painless and simple.
I've just accepted the $800 - $1,000 cost per year for preparation of my LLC K-1 and personal taxes as part of the cost of being an exception. It sucks, but I just roll it into my rates.
Yeah, I’m not saying that every situation is trivial but the figures I’ve seen have something like 80% of filers using W-2 income so it’s weird when people who don’t have complex property ownership or business arrangements talk like it’s incredibly complicated. Most of us could use Direct File to be just like most other countries in the world, but there’s a now-dominant lobby which tried to block that.
You know how everyone complains "oh I can't do anything this weekend I have to do my taxes"? They want that pain, so that you bitch and moan about the heavy burden of taxation, and then support the party that claims they want to reduce the heavy burden of taxation.
But also, Intuit spends a lot money lobbying.
My friend owned a tax preparation place for awhile. Half her clients could file with the short form. Most of the rest had either dependent care deductions or EIC, that's it. <5% used deductions beyond SALT and mortgage interest. It's a gross business. They charge people for being ignorant and dumb with money (via refund loans)
Hell, I have a fairly complex return. It takes me <90 minutes with a $40 software package.
The complexity is also what allows loopholes to exist for rich people.
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.
Everyone is responsible for their own behaviour but if the legislature doesn't function nothing else will either. And we know the legislature has progressively become less functional, less bipartisan, less legislation passed every decade.
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?
18F was a business unit of the General Services Administration, which was created via 41 U.S.C. 251, the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949. The act transferred the function of the Federal Works Agency and the Treasury Bureau of Federal Supply to the GSA. The agency is directed and authorized to perform a variety of tasks, from real estate, to acquisition, to information technology and telecommunications.
31 USC 1535, The Economy Act, authorizes Federal agencies to purchase from each other in the interests of economy. Obvious application is that rather than have the Social Security Administration lease an office or build a building, they sublease or lease a facility owned by the GSA so Federal demand can be aggregated. 1 big lease is cheaper than 12 little ones.
In the case of 18F, having a consultive entity within the GSA maximizes the value of procurements made by GSA and other agencies. When congress appropriates money to say, the Department of Labor to perform a function, DOL may choose to engage 18F to deliver or assist, avoiding additional procurement and taking advantage of investments and capability already built.
Congress in 1949 recognized that basic concepts like shared services, aggregation and mission focus deliver value and promote efficient operations. The current regime's corrupt interest is obvious to anyone with a brain.
I don't know about 18F, but the shutdowns are far more widespread than that.
18F is not the only department that is being shut down.
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.
Both major parties have been giving up the power of Congress for decades. They’re constantly handing more power to the executive, seemingly because it lets them dodge responsibility. People get mad at you when you do stuff, but if you just vest some power in an executive agency then people get mad at the President instead when that agency does the stuff.
People have been warning for a long time that this concentration of power in the executive is ripe for abuse. And here we are.
With the exception of a few days (which don't really count because of a sick Senator Kennedy and spineless moderate conservativeJoe Lieberman), the Democrats haven't had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in many, many decades.
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".
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%.
> That stuff happens in large part because Republicans get elected after talking about doing the things that you mention
Which in turn works because, even if they don't solve those problems, the problems are real and people experience them. So if you would make the problems actually go away, they would lose the ability to run on them.
> But they also get elected in large part because of the highly unequal and unrepresentative system that they perpetuate
This is what I mean by 46% vs. 51%. There are way bigger problems than the electoral college or district lines, which would only change how and where both parties campaign rather than making anything obviously better.
> including a media system built on feeding people falsehoods utterly disconnected reality (which is another reason ~half of voters voted for them).
This was never great but the thing that really seemed to turn it into a tornado full of broken glass is the interaction between Trump and the traditional media.
Major media outlets were used to politicians fearing them, and then Trump didn't, so the media got more aggressive and less cautious. Which was only effective for a minute until people started to realize what they were doing and that set the media's credibility on fire and made things dramatically worse.
Meanwhile the right-leaning media outlets, which were traditionally more partisan but only a little, saw this and their conclusion was basically "oh, so we can just do whatever now?"
> 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".
The most significant thing you could actually do is replace first past the post with one of the cardinal voting systems (STAR, score, approval), because it would allow for more than two parties. Which in turn would upend the the entire partisan apparatus of both sides which has evolved in that environment and would be maladapted to defending itself and therefore vulnerable to positive change. But it's also a subtle enough change and distinct from any of the usual battle lines that all of the villains you'd be disrupting might not recognize the implications until it has already gone through.
> So if you would make the problems actually go away, they would lose the ability to run on them.
But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on. Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
I think we agree that structural reforms are necessary (like changing voting systems), but I think it's more than just that. There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people. Switching to STAR voting isn't going to fix it. That entire phenomenon has to be actively purged from society in the way that Nazism was purged in post-WWII Germany.
> But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on.
People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.
> Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
Nah, that's just confusing the problem with the rhetoric.
Republicans hype immigration because the Democrats have an immigration problem:
a) "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". b) Generous social safety net.
You can't have unlimited immigration of the world's poor and then give them all welfare; you have to pick one. But Democrats can't choose, so we end up with this nonsense where immigration which is formally illegal is still happening at scale and they're neither willing to formally legalize it nor enforce the law against it.
Which means Republicans get to beat them over the head with it because the Democrats have no response to it when they're legitimately caught in an inconsistent position. To stop that from happening they need to pick which one of the two incompatible things they want.
Likewise, the US really does have a lot of regulatory overhead, and many of the rules are needlessly complicated, inconsistent, blunt, poorly considered or obviously corrupt. The people who actually have to interact with them -- mostly small businesses -- are intimately familiar with it and find it infuriating. Now, some of the rules are net positive, but even those are often still needlessly complicated or in conflict with other, stupider rules. To fix it you would need large teams of smart people go through all the rules, throw out the bad ones (even if they're corrupt and someone wants them that way), simplify the needless complexity, do a cost/benefit analysis that includes the administrative cost of implementation and have the ability to actually modify them. Which requires fastidious people to do something expensive and boring at large scale. But until that happens -- which it hasn't -- there is still a problem.
And in the meantime the Republicans get to say "regulations bad! less regulations!" and have a bunch of people cheer because they know how much the status quo sucks.
> There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people.
Eh. That's kind of one of the things a cardinal voting system does fix.
You're defining the problem too narrowly. The general issue is, in a two party system, both of the parties are big tent parties. Which means that if your party wants both X and Y and you need a majority to get either, the people who want X can go drum up support from people who want Y so their party gets in and they get X, because by nature the other major party will support both not-X and not-Y, so more support for Y is more support for the party that wants X.
If you have a voting system that supports arbitrarily many parties and your party supports both X and Y but X is stupid or unpopular, you can't win by getting more people to support Y because then some other party would come in and support Y but not X and then win because you've convinced people to want Y but not X and now that's actually one of the options on the ballot.
> People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.
But that sounds like you're saying the solution is to just fix all problems. That's never going to happen. There will always be problems of some sort, which means there can always be someone claiming to have solutions.
There are problems and there are problems.
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.
An amazing reform that could be achieved is changing to ranked choice voting from the current first-past-the-post. It'll reduce the incentive for politicians to be radical to stand out, and reassures voters that they won't 'waste their vote' if they put an alternative candidate first.
I once thought this was the solution too, then NYC's ranked-choice mayoral race gave it Eric Adams. Now I don't know. Maybe open primaries?
Ranked choice was the error. You want one of the cardinal voting systems like STAR.
It's way worse than that. The playbook is simple - "it's not us, it's Elon. Trump wants to make america great, Elon went too far. Us innocent legislators didn't see it coming!"
If the democrats grow a pair and shutdown the government by filibustering the budget, Trump will fire (or worse) Elon, scorched earth whatever is left and blame the democrats. They are all about the big lie -- they'll float the idea that Elon was secretly working with the democrats the whole time. If Trump is lucky, there will be an early hurricane or an earthquake in California and the devastation will be Chuck Schumer's fault. Long live the king.
Blame the lobbying efforts of Intuit
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
I have worked at a place with a bot like that. It's one of over a dozen bots in that repository and seems to have been created and maintained by 3 people over the years. I believe 18F peaked at 250 employees.
Some of the terms are genuinely offensive or unprofessional. I'm not sure about some of them, but I'd expect a government agency to show a higher level of sensitivity and professionalism about their language than a private start-up.
I also note that the bot "lectures" people as a private message.
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.
> and chucking out a significant chunk of work they've done
It is unclear how much of the actual work they've done is being "chucked out".
18F did work for various federal agencies, and whatever code 18F wrote for its client agencies would still be in possession of those agencies.
What happens to that code going forward – whether it continues to be maintained by other resources, or whether it just gets archived – is going to be an agency-level decision. Probably some will be kept, others will be thrown out – keeping or abolishing 18F is a separate decision from keeping or abolishing the agency-level projects/initiatives 18F was working on. (And even if 18F had survived, probably some of that code would eventually have been thrown out anyway, since government IT projects frequently end up failing and being cancelled, and 18F involvement is no guarantee against that outcome.)
Obviously, if those projects are going to be kept, removing 18F resources is going to cause a delay to the project – but maybe other resources will be found. It also depends on what percentage of the project resources were from 18F. If a project was 18F-heavy, it may take a big hit, if 18F's contribution was smaller, the negative impact might be smaller.
18F was funded out of the Acquisition Services Fund (ASF), managed by the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) within GSA. FAS is legally obligated to spend ASF funds on federal technology modernization projects. Without 18F, FAS will have to find some other mechanism to spend those ASF funds on technology modernization. So, while of course there will be a delay, agencies which were relying on 18F may still end up getting help from GSA TTS for their modernization projects. I wouldn't be surprised if ASF funds were redirected towards DOGE, and DOGE was then tasked with working on those projects.
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?
>So now trying to avoid offensive language
Building a bot to harangue people about pronoun usage seems like a giant waste of time and resources to me. Those sorts of cultural preferences are a feature of only a very very small portion of the US political culture. Maybe nuking the whole department was a bit strong, I don't know, but if I worked at a place that had tools like that I'd quit, and I think a lot of other people would too. Which suggests that the overall culture of 18F was far from the mainstream of America. It should reflect the middle, no?
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?
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.
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.
> 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 happy to have them.
And I don't think DOGE's remit is completely distinct from that of USDS. Of course, DOGE is a lot broader in scope than USDS, but according to Executive Order 14158 which established it, a big part of its mission is software modernization–same as old USDS was–and DOGE staff appear to include a number of software engineers, which also aligns with that mission.
> I don't know what the quotes around "abolishing a government agency" indicate -- those words weren't used previously in this thread.
You asked the question "Which government agencies have been targeted by Democrats for being too conservative?" – which seems to put 18F in the category of "government agencies" - if it isn't one in some sense, then the question isn't asking for a relevant comparator. And the title of this thread is "GSA Eliminates 18F", and "eliminates" is a synonym of "abolition". So, the premise of your question implies "abolishing a government agency". Which in a sense abolishing 18F is, since it was sort-of-kind-of a government agency – but strictly speaking it isn't, since strictly it wasn't – hence the quotes.
> Do any of the old USDS staff survive?
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?
> Again, your claim here is that it's typical and predictable that new administrations conduct ideological purges on the civil service.
No, I'm not denying this is reaching a level which hasn't been seen before.
But, perceptions of political impartiality of civil servants have been greatly eroded.
Imagine if the situation were reversed, if Democrats had a widespread perception that the federal bureaucracy had a pro-GOP/anti-Democrat bias – can you be so sure they wouldn't do similar things?
I don't have to imagine.
The ICE union endorsed Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 -- the only presidential endorsements it has ever made.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/immigration-customs-e...
The FBI has traditionally leaned Republican (it has never had a Democratic director), as has the US military (especially the Air Force).
Biden did not purge ICE, nor did he replace Trump's FBI director, etc.
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.
>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.
I'm the complete opposite. Swap "anti-woke" with "social justice warrior" and you have my experience across multiple years, both inside and outside of companies.
As far as I can tell all these groups never shut up and it colors their entire life. Far left and far right is just a circle, the join at the same extreme.
What we need is a center. Just stuff that makes sense. The problem is our "sense" has been under attack we've basically collectively lost it.
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).
And after it happens let's keep filing for free.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... the business of America is business, you see ...
Every Republican must swear an oath to uphold Grover Norquist thought
Every time I drive by the huge shiny new Intuit building on 101 near Google, I throw up a little. Regulatory capture in action.
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.
*Norquist
they both have the same goals. that doesn’t make it not true.
"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.
Oh, I know. But the fate of 18F and Direct File are not directly connected.
I know I will be downvoted to hell in this thread for saying this, but the entire income tax scheme is a fraud. The tax code will never be simplified because it was intentionally designed to deceive the average American citizen who has been socialized into thinking that a tax has been imposed on their labor. In reality that has never been the case (power to tax is the power to destroy, pesky human rights).
Ask yourself the following if you have a knee-jerk reaction to disagree with me:
- How many words of income tax law have I read in my entire life? - How many IRS forms have I signed in the past? - Do I know the true legal purpose of the IRS forms I signed?
The truth of the upon whom the income tax has actually been imposed is buried in mountains of legalese that the government knows virtually nobody will bother to read or grok. This paired with labelling anyone who knows the truth a tax protester, tax denier, sovereign citizen, or some similar pejorative, allows IRS to get away with the largest financial crime in history. (To be clear there are many incorrect arguments about income tax law.)
Unfortunately this issue is damn near impossible to convey to anyone in a comment on the internet, but hopefully some brave HNers will realize there is more to be seen here and take a hacker-mindset to it. I recommend reading the book 'Income tax: Shattering the myths' if you care to follow the law and learn more.
“As judges, it is our duty to construe legislation as it is written, not as it might be read by a layman, or as it might be understood by someone who has not even read it.” Meese v. Keene, 481 U.S. 465, 484 (1987)
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 sentence in US tax law should be a wake-up call... The reason the income tax parts of the IRC are so complex is to keep them in perfect accordance with the constitutional limits on taxation while deceiving you. Taxes on income are in their nature excises, which are taxes on privileges. Foreign persons do not have the same rights that we Americans do (I don't necessarily agree with this, it is just how the law works).
Eventually this will come to an end. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people have known about what I am saying for a hundred years. Eventually a critical mass of people will be wise to the scam and HR departments will no longer subordinate perjury by pressuring clueless people to improperly sign a Form W-4, declaring themselves to be a foreign person subject to wage withholding (see Treasury Decision 8734)[0].
[0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-irbs/irb97-44.pdf
This is very interesting. Do you just not pay your income taxes?
To be clear for others, the sibling comment is incorrect and I think is an idea coming from the sovereign citizen movement. You have to pay income tax generally.
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I do my taxes myself almost every time. And they're more complicated than average.
I'm all for simplification, but it's already pretty simple to understand for almost all Americans.
The only part that sucks for all Americans is actually filing, especially when you have to pay some asshole intermediary just to make it slightly faster.
In our state, they streamlined filing. I still have to understand the same things, but it's 3x faster than before. So I know it's possible.
Laying off the one programming team whose products were actually improving my interface with the government was braindead stupid.
Again, yes, simplify the tax code. But for the love of Christ, streamline filing with DirectFile no matter what you do!!
99% of Americans are not supposed to be filing a tax return. Unless you paid US source income to it's foreign owner, you should not be either. What gave you the idea that you needed to?
The IRS rules. But tell me more
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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.
They took the first url offline already. Elons boys working fast.
yeah this agency is kinda what I imagined DOGE was created to be. alas now I am just confused
The purpose of a system is what it does. DOGE was created to facilitate kleptocracy.
And to remove anybody not blindly obedient.
Paradoxically this is a real witch hunt
The people in charge are intentionally ignorant of things that _already exist in government_, like the OIG, 18F/USDS, etc. And since their actual goal is to slash and burn the government so that it's literally unable to function, thus justifying its total collapse since it no longer has capacity, they have to take out the people who actually look for corruption, look into social security fraud, improve government technology systems, etc who would see through and call this shit out.
It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.
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
Seems to mostly just be extinguish in this case, unfortunately.
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.
Why couldn’t they go out and pitch their services to agencies?
USDS has been co-opted and they don't want competition. I would expect nothing less. 18F and USDS used to have some very smart, dedicated people, and it's sad to see these agencies go this way.
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
I do wonder just how large a revenue boost a lot of news outlets saw during the first Trump administration, and how much that played into how weirdly favorably they treated him in this campaign.
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.
Please. None of the media is making hay of Trump's IV-bruise, and credulously accepted the White Houses's statement that he was sharking hands too hard the day before. Half his face is droopy, but that's not notable or worthy of speculation when its Trump.
Yeah I’m plenty critical of the NYT myself (esp. in their last month of coverage), but they do ostensibly cover any big news story, including the ones about Trump. Re:fascism, I specifically remember them covering the “I need generals like Hitler had” comment, to pick a memorable example.
While we’re at it, they even endorsed Harris as an institution, writing;
> I hope the administration that comes in 2029
It’s cute. You people believe there will be next elections.
This defeatist attitude accomplishes nothing. Do not obey in advance
I question your info hygiene if it's led you to a position where you think it's likely there won't be elections in three years. Obviously there will be elections, and either you know there will be as well and are being needlessly inflammatory or have a wildly uncalibrated view of the world.
You technically have a point, even Russia has elections. But that doesn’t matter because they are just for show.
In US you generally gerrymander to the max or throw all sorts of road blocks to discourage voter participation, but we might also see more physical harassment going forward, both for voters and poll workers.
Nobody knows what is going to happen in four years. That includes you.
Prefer to believe.
> I hope the administration that comes in 2029 will not overlook these people's contribution.
if we leave the current crop of democrats in place, they will overlook it. current democrat leadership is spineless and useless
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?
Same brigade who flags all those topics above hostile government takeover?
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.
All valid criticisms. Here are my assumptions:
18F staffers joined the government to make a difference. Most of which likely joined from industry forgoing very lucrative salaries to be the government’s internal tech consulting team. One thing they shipped that the government hadn’t shipped in a long time was the IRS e-file service to the chagrin of the big tax filer companies.
So I assumed in the post that they are capable, mission driven, loyal, hard working (to navigate the government takes dedication) folks that any company and team would benefit from.
AND they were cut not for merit or bad performance but for political reasons by the meme-lord-turned-carnate Elon for dubious reasons.
All of that has me thinking that we as a community should give them a break — in doing so we only would be benefiting ourselves: we’d get new employees and coworkers who are eager to get back to employment who have all those attributes I mentioned above.
Of course the market for jobs is tough as it is. Now with all these federal employees being cut from all parts of the government now likely looking for work in the private sector means competition for roles is only going to get worse. I get that. I feel for all job seekers. You were right to challenge me. Maybe my enthusiasm was unwarranted. It’s just now you know my thinking.
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.
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?
they're talking about federal elections 2 & 4 years. Trump is working to wreck the current independent FBI/NSA/SS and put in toadies loyal to him. They will effectively ignore any malfeasance that red states do at the polls to make sure Trump and republicans win all the races or at least a large enough majority to stay in power indefinitely. So he can call up and say "find me enough votes". It's likely the primary purpose the Project 2025 as first stage and re-enactment of "night of the long knives" in Germany, 1934. Just a bit less bloody and take place over the next year or so.
Hopelessness is their tool, not ours.
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.
There will be election... But how?
- how many free media? - will the queues be longer in some places? - will Trump have money from all the big companies? - Will some people have accidents?
Even Russia, Cuba and North Korea celebrate elections
We sure as shit are or there will be civil conflict. Period.
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
And guess which team is itching to use those guns the most?
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.
The federal government can do a lot to support state actions to disenfranchise people, especially when the courts go along with it. And then there’s the threat of state legislatures to override the popular vote in national elections on the basis of “fraud”.
Related ongoing threads:
A Letter to the American People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43224350 - March 2025 (298 comments)
18F GitHub Repositories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222842
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...
California Department of Technology: https://cdt.ca.gov/
Texas Department of Information Resources: https://dir.texas.gov/
New York State Office of Information Technology Services: https://its.ny.gov/
Colorado also has one: https://oit.colorado.gov/colorado-digital-service
> Massachusetts
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.
There was a guy who posted here in HN about to go work for Doge but he decided to learn physics in Hawaii instead. He sold a company and didn't need to work anymore.
I imagine those are the types attracted to this work to potentially do it for free or cheap
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.
Your phrasing is curious, but let me play this straight: No, never to that point. More in the pacific mode. Current phase: reduce expenditure and financial risk in tech. Consider a move to the west coast, or Canada (again).
Maidan Square situation not inconceivable any more in quite a few countries. Too bad not in Russia though, or as you hint, in the PRC. Our Tiananmen would be the Washington Mall.
And please don’t tweet: send condolences to your Mastodon account or HN. I’ll check this thread every few years.
This isn't a real person you're counseling here. At least it's not a real worldview. Such a person that only now sheepishly is approaching a shift in perspective is an impossibility. There have been ample opportunities prior to this that have been much more horrendous and this person is presenting as if they interpreted all those things in an acceptable light. It's the Zeno's paradox of finally coming around - they pretend like they're getting closer and closer but they never arrive at the actual denunciation. I believe it's a rhetorical device to further cast doubt.
DOGE excuses the laws they’re breaking and the cost increases they’re incurring by claiming that there’s a crisis they have to respond to and that they’re so smart nobody else can do it.
The last thing they need are smarter, more experienced people around who can show that none of those assertions are true and all of the costs being racked up are pure waste.
18F, when it started, was viewed with suspicion by other federal agencies—here were these Silicon Valley know-it-alls, coming in to tell us how to do our jobs. So, basically DOGE.
Except: 18F spent 10 years building trust in the government. As consultants, they met their clients where they were, and acted with empathy and understanding. This is pretty much the opposite of DOGE coming into an agency and seizing control.
18F’s model was geared toward continual improvement over time (“Move slowly and fix things”). It was, I think, a model with a more long term mindset than what is going on with DOGE.
The problem here is assuming DOGE’s stated goal is their real goal.
Stupid, pointless destruction. No part of this is efficient. 18F and the USDS were effective tools for modernization.
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
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?
Keeping a bad process that no one likes is politically expedient for people who want there to be negative sentiments towards the IRS.
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".
Good point, that's definitely part of it.
Tax fraud is just top of mind because the other day I had to endure a smug rich asshole brag about it over dinner and I wasn't in a position to push back, so I'm venting a bit.
So not right wingers? I don’t know many right wingers that enjoy filing tax returns.
These are related: the rich backers of right-wing media have for decades pushed the idea that taxes are this scary, hard process where one mistake can ruin your life. That is not, and has never been, true (the average person audited by the IRS roughly breaks even because they usually weren’t claiming every possible deduction) but it’s in their interest to promote that belief because it supports lowering the rates they pay and the consequences people suffer for cheating (rich people do this in much larger amounts because most of us don’t have the flexibility to engage in creative accounting or enough inventive to do so).
Intuit wants everyone to think it’s so scary that you need to pay them, and the company is run by rich people who would want to pay less in taxes no matter what industry they’re in.
The combination is how you get people arguing for their boss to get a tax cut even if they personally will pay more, because as long as the IRS is a fabled bogeyman they have been told that’s the price of freedom. It took the better part of the 20th century and billions of dollars in funding to teach the point where enough people believed it, but they were patient.
Same reason there is opposition to municipal ISPs. The theory is the public sector should stay away from anything the private sector could theoretically provide. It assumes the private sector will deliver better goods at lower prices due to market pressures.
Intuit
So people hate the IRS and politicians can defund the IRS for tech bros and their companies.
> 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.
I really find this kind of seemingly performative "confusion" at what's happening by high profile people (politicians, media, etc) irritating. As if they don't know. It's similar to how they use every euphemism for the word "lie", i.e. "misrepresentation", "mischaracterization", etc, rather than call a lie a lie.
Also they worked as a shared service taking fees from agencies that required their services and did not have any specific appropriation in the federal budget. This was pure spite and not cost saving at all.
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.
Sometimes I think it's a shame that modern democracies lost the original feature of classical Greek city-states -- exile by popular vote. Maybe this is us rediscovering the necessity for it.
Exiling Musk to the Moon or Mars (at his own cost) would be amusing.
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.
There’s at least one, although as a governor he may not count.
> From the Department of Education, Medicaid, the CDC, and more - Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the agencies and programs that protect Americans every single day.
https://bsky.app/profile/jbpritzker.bsky.social/post/3lisgh4...
what function do billionaires fulfill that 1000 millionaires couldn't do better?
Most millionaires are just older people who’ve earned and invested well throughout their careers. They’re not functionally a replacement for anyone who’s a billionaire because they run large businesses.
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
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They were a well-regarded, non-partisan tech team. What was possibly "unreliable" about them?
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 outperform government-built identity systems.
Internal VA IT resisted years of 18F and USDS-led attempts to refactor the underlying COBOL and MUMPS systems — progress is necessary, but this was not the team to deliver it.
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 of validity of that reason.
Appreciate the ground truth, this is enough for someone to dig further in VA from a journalism perspective.
> IRS was in the works to onboard Login.gov (to replace ID.me)
Has anyone agency completed replacing ID.me with Login.gov?
For that matter do any agencies that support both Login.gov and ID.me have a way for users to switch which one they use?
When the ssa.gov first started asking people who used username/password login to add one of Login.gov or ID.me, I picked ID.me because I already had an ID.me account for use with the IRS and did yet have a Login.gov account.
Since then I've gotten a Login.gov account and would prefer to use that with ssa.gov but there doesn't appear to be any way to set that up. There's nothing I can find in account settings to add another login method to an account.
Current guidance from the SSA login flow is to not use Login.gov if you already have an ID.me account. Identity provider transitions are fraught with peril, and I hesitate to provide guidance that potentially locks you out of the SSA website without any recourse or customer service. Therefore, for the time being, my guidance is to keep using your ID.me idp and login until an official update is provided. I will take a note to provide an update if updated guidance becomes available to me through any channel.
Correction: both Login.gov and Id.me will be the IDP options after March 4th changeover.
https://www.va.gov/?next=loginModal
They're career professionals and career professionals might be loyal to the state instead of the dear leader.
They didn't reliably side with Trump and Putin on all matters. The goal of the Trump administration is the destruction of the US government in order to dismantle it and offer it to billionaire buddies.
Government employees reliably wanted to serve the American people. Their non-partisanship is the entire problem. Please please stop being naive about Trump and thinking they or DOGE is doing anything above the board.
You mean they weren't loyal lackeys who would willingly break laws for the current regime.
Legality is another victim of politicization because now it's determined less by rules and more by your side's dedication to venue shopping and pushing judicial appointments. You need your own judges just as much as you need your own bureaucrats.
This is happening in other countries as well. It seems like people have found some critical exploits in the old separation of powers social technology.
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Federal workers swear an oath to defend the COnsitution against enemies foreign and domestic. When the President is commiting crimes in public and is a blatant tool of Russia, the "good federal workers" must resist as part of their OATH TO THE COUNTRY. It's their oath to resist Trump.
This was January 2017.
> And none of the “good federal workers” spoke up against that. American voters deserve a civil service that will work as hard on mass deportations under Trump as they did on open borders under Biden.
The US is a constitutional republic, not an Athenian democracy. The whole purpose of constitutions is to act as checks against base majoritarian impulses.
The system of “checks and balances” is between Congress, the President, and the Judiciary. Show me where in the constitution it says employees of the executive branch are constitutional actors that have a role within that system?
You might be thinking of unitary executive theory, which is harebrained right-wing fringe nonsense. Public servants in the US swear an oath to the constitution, not to the president, and have an obligation to disobey clearly unconstitutional orders no matter the personal cost (that's what swearing an oath means).
The January 2017 “Resistance” wasn’t about “clearly unconstitutional orders.” It was about opposing Trump’s lawful policies on immigration and the environment.
Everyone agrees civil servants can disobey “clearly unconstitutional orders.” But civil servants must work equally hard to execute the policies of the president regardless of party, right? Biden’s student loan forgiveness was based on thin but colorable legal interpretations that were ultimately found to be incorrect. Civil servants who worked to implement Biden’s policies must work just as hard to implement Trump’s executive order say effectuating mass deportations, correct?
Incorrect. Civil servants must follow the law, and professional obligations must be balanced with ethical and legal boundaries.
“Entrenched bureaucracy” == a government not run top-to-bottom by political loyalists, like every administration in the modern era has had to deal with?
We got rid of the spoils system because it fucking sucked.
I'm still amazed by people who consider "politicization" as something done to the Trump administration rather than caused by it. Decades of peaceful transfers of power without wholesale purges, and now that's all changed for some mysterious reason.
I'm not amazed. The only people who consider that politicization was done to Trump administration are Trump supporters and people who have money to gain by ignoring Jan 6 or his constant attacks on anybody that doesn't support him. To be a Republican today is to be a hypocrite in name, action, deed, and as a key part of your core moral system.
Thats a load of bull. more like they are just doing Putin's bidding by dismantling the US federal government
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It's very sensible to disband 18f simply because founding fathers of US never wrote anything about internet in the constitution.
The veterans now have their own website: https://18f.org/
I've worked closely with 18F staff. They are/were some of the most dedicated folks I've ever had the pleasure to work beside. Based on my interactions, they were very dedicated to web standards that made the web open and easy for all people to use. Some of the best a11y researchers & advisors who had real empathy and compassion. Anyone who picks these folks up for their org is going to be the real winner here.
Is it possible that the 18F website is no longer available? It doesn't seem to work anymore: https://18f.gsa.gov
It was taken down. In general, 18F’s open source work was in the public domain, though, and I know there have been efforts to archive it recently.
Additionally, it looks like some of 18F’s public guides are still available (e.g. the “Derisking” guide, which is all about how to structure your IT projects to be less likely to fail spectacularly: https://guides.18f.gov/derisking/)
Yes they tore it down.
They were doing the one of efficient, cost saving work DOGE claims to be doing and isn’t. Of course they had to go.
https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3ljcgsken3c2x :
"""18F, a digital services unit inside the General Services Administration, has been completely laid off, according to an email I’ve seen. The email says that 18F was deemed “non-critical” and the decision was made with the “explicit” direction of the administration and GSA leadership."""
18f creates shared and open source government resources for technology efficiency, quality, and streamlining such as login.gov, cloud.gov, design packages, and free IRS tax filing
Previously, Elon Musk stated it has been "deleted": https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2025/02/musk-take...
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?
But what can they do? It’s easy in a bloody dictatorship to just raise and take it in your hands, simply unionizing against oppression forces and ignoring personal grave danger. But they are in the US, it’s completely safe there, so it doesn’t work like that. You speak, get angry and wait for some big corporation or bureaucracy to sort it out for you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43148889
It’s funny to watch (probably) the same people in a tutorial-level situation who thought that if I’m a man/human/etc I should stand by their principles and just go and overthrow the dictator of the place I happen to live in.
They were part of the effort, but not the main component. Direct File is still alive and functioning, for this tax season at least.
> 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.
Its even done automatically here in Austria for you. You just have to use a simple to use webapp if you want a tax refund for stuff like donations or tax-writoffable expanses.
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.
(edit: first archive link was not complete) https://archive.is/vEExp
This sucks for accessibility.
Recent posts
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Anil Dash - understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture
https://www.anildash.com//2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-captur...
18f.gsa.gov - https://web.archive.org/web/20250301115820/https://18f.gsa.g...
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?
Probably one of Elon’s companies
Elon and Trump and MAGA are a cancer. And the other branches of government are unable to apply any remedies because it’s as if the body run by Trump is ingesting radioactive material on the daily.
I wonder if Trump is a KGB asset. The way he’s undoing America from within maybe the premise of the movie the Manchurian candidate was not about China running a candidate but Russia.
Two Republican speakers of the house, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy agreed he probably was back in 2016 or so. He and Dana Rorhrabacher.
> I wonder if Trump is a KGB asset.
It's easy to read into his parroting of putin's talking points as deliberate, but I think it might just be "wannabe mobster" talk. If anything it's probably a little more nuanced than uncle vlad pulling the puppet strings, but they sure do seem awful friendly..
I think it's risky to ascribe any real agency or planning to trump. He's a very simple creature, and he wears his cravings and impulses on his sleeve. I'm much more worried about the thinking people operating in his chaotic wake.
There are many conspiracy theories related to his trip to Moscow in 1987, which I don’t ascribe much to, but the connections are there, if only for some “assistance” to be rendered quid pro quo.
I’m a firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor, and like you ascribe most of his and his followers’ actions to stupidity, but there’s clearly also some maliciousness.
There’s more and more speculation among the political punditry that Trump and company might be seeing Vlad as an ally to counter China at the expense of Europe.
But given what little we know about Putin and his cunning as an ex KGB officer and likely one of the richest men on the planet — I’m Willing to go into conspiracy land and speculate that he has the ability to puppet master folks and I wouldn’t be surprised that he got his hooks into Trump.
Decades of so-called conservatives' eagerness to rage against whatever other groups of Americans their mainstream media directs them at is the cancer. Krasnov and Muskow are just the metastasization that will finish killing our society.
I don't know where their actual motives fall on the spectrum from being useful idiots stage-managed by social media bots and foreign agent handlers, to deliberately working for personal rewards in a new Chinese world order. But does it really matter?
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.
> they also stood for equality and diversity, they were proud of their inclusive culture, and outspoken about the importance of representing the entire country
That's so 2024.
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.
18F went around improving tech for other agencies and the government as a whole; shutting them down almost certainly costs money. Just as cutting from the IRS tends to cost money.
They didn’t bother to cut spending to pay for the last two fiscally-disastrous rounds of big Republican tax cuts. Why do it this time?
No, they’re just trying to wreck the government.
They were pretty open about it during the election.
The dismantling of the American government is going as planned I see?
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.
Don’t worry - I’m sure that if Scott Bessent’s ever worried about his job he won’t hesitate to get rid of Direct File.
Lets bet DirectFile is going to be shutdown in the next one year?
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.
What are you talking about? Direct File completes tax return forms for types of income that already have taxes withheld.
If what I'm reading is correct and this was a cost-recoverable function, then it's possible this work will be contracted out to private companies in the future.
Already Trump has said the government will sell federal buildings and rent them instead.
If this continues, it will be very similar to how the kleptocrats took over Russia when the Soviet Union fell...
Pro tip to 18F workers: get rehired as consultants for 2x the wages.
Unfortunately for 18F's workers, the projects they were working on improved the lives of ordinary Americans (like direct-file). There is no appetite in the current administration for such projects.
The original formula for 18F was to hire elite tech workers coming from highly paid corporate jobs to do term-limited stints in public service at lower wages.
Not a problem - they can learn to mine coal.
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.
Yes and no. Needs to be big to be effective, I agree.
But, I saw on a documentary of FIFA corruption that one guy making millions in (I think NY) didn’t file taxes for over ten years, maybe twenty. I didn’t know it was possible until then.
Someone actually downvoted my comment above, can you believe? :-D
I think it is actually a good idea, in theory, but the penalties for failure to file are hefty.
You probably just broke a RICO statute or something...
All of this lament is great, but if you don’t like this, please pick up the phone and call your reps. Every day.
Please. It’s an emergency. No one is coming to save us.
This feels like another designed distraction -- designed to impact real human lives, as humans are only cannon fodder to Trump and co -- that'll either be clawed back or wallow in legal limbo throughout Trump's presidency. I'd like to think there's an enormous backlash coming in the form of mid terms and maybe other things but it's hard to set realistic expectations these days when it comes to American politics
The author's adoption of Elon Musks's irritating "deleted" lingo is quite a vibe though. Not.
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?
The current Republican budget proposal incurs roughly five trillion dollars in additional debt and service cuts, all to allow tax cuts which mostly go to the top 10%:
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy202...
If you went to the average person and asked whether they’d like to have services like Medicaid and SNAP cut so their senior management can pay less in taxes, they’d say no. If you demonize the concept of tax collection, however, then they might go for it because they’re reacting out of fear rather than thinking analytically.
They're okay with it when it's a "tax" paid to corporations.
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".
In the US privatization is conservative, so anything that reduces private profiteering on mandatory activities is by definition “far left”.
That, but also the current system allows rich peoples' accountants to exercise an enormous amount of creativity when determining what their taxes should be, their imagination constrained only by the vague threat of possible audit from a gutted agency limited to limp-wristed punishments. Automation threatens this kleptocratic "freedom."
(The creativity has to do with asset games of fixed overhead that only amortizes on sizable fortunes. Poor people had better file their taxes correctly. If you work for a wage, you are poor for the purposes of this discussion.)
Meanwhile, the French DINUM (direction of digital inside the French government) and BetaGouv (kind of our 18F) organize their "Rules as code" event in 3 weeks.
Our tax filling is free for decades, but lots of things can be made better.
https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/agenda/rules-as-code-rencontre...
Heaven forbid if the US catches up with the U.K. in the 1990s.
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.
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 hear outright wrong arguments for why the USA has not moved to a modern filing system.
The argument I always hear from the right about this is that they worry that making taxes more efficient will allow them (and government action in general) to increase. The right is explicitly committed to reducing that, so it's not in their interest.
Same reason I've heard from people on the right about ending withholding. They think that if people had to cut an actual check to the government every year (or quarter) that people would realize how much it's costing them and be more amenable to reducing it.
> very rich people that want to siphon off profit
Tax preparation is a huge industry in the US, they're going to fight tooth and nail to make sure the government doesn't cut into their business.
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.
IRS had some pretty strict rules. But apparently you just need to replace leadership with an acting toady to override the rules.
E.g: https://bsky.app/profile/jacobbogage.bsky.social/post/3ljc2o...
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.
Open source? Giving stuff away? Sounds socialist mate.
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
They are terrified of asset taxes and want to keep them as bureaucratically inhibited as possible.
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.
I don't get your strong objection. A 1.0 release that is fit for use by >80% of the addressable market, and gets high marks from those users is a "boondoggle"?
Perhaps you overestimate the fraction of taxpayers that itemize deductions, have gig/rental/business income?
Direct File is following a phased roll-out approach to avoid the "big launch" problem that tends to plague government tech projects. The goal is to serve all citizens, but taxes are very complex, and it will take time to address all scenarios.
Also, as the below commenter mentioned, states need to agree to be part of Direct File.
It's available in only 25 states because the other half decided not to participate. Just another maddening example in the long story of how the American system makes it very hard to Do Good Things for the average citizen.
The Norquist argument I have heard is that taxes should be painful. Anything that makes it too easy for the government to get money should be avoided.
So, you know, a policy of making life better for average people.
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> Broadly speaking, I support DOGE's mission. This decision in particular I'm not at all a fan of.
Everything the DOGE undertakes is absolutely justified except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
> the removal of existing power structures within the government that support left-wing causes.
Whoa, I thought DOGE was just trying to root out waste and corruption to save America from its deficit, but now you tell me it's to cement right wing loyalty in the deep state?!
Lol yeah he said the quiet part out loud. Whoopsie.
Not sure why that’s a “whoopsie” - I’m intentionally describing both the stated purpose of USDS and what I believe to be the implicit purpose to be of the Trump administration’s actions.
Those are two different things, at two different levels of abstraction. One of them is written in relatively plain language while the other is based off my own perceptions.
> They are also some of the most vocal extreme left-wing activists I've known well.
Can you give a few examples of the vocal extreme left-wing activism?
18F wrote a slack bot to police "non-inclusive" language. You know, "hey guys" etc.
https://technical.ly/software-development/18f-using-slackbot...
https://github.com/18F/18f.gsa.gov/blob/master/_posts/2016-0...
I sure don't agree that constitutes extreme activism of any kind, but anyway, my question is for Ancapistani and it's about the personal friends referenced in their message.
I understand the best I have with this handle is pseudoanonymity, but I’m not going to be throwing people I know and respect under the bus in a public forum.
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What’s the appropriate number of employees for the federal government?
Government changes over time, and the need for workforce changes with it. The number of employees a government needs is a function of what the government does and provides. Anything else would be artificial constraint, or working backwards from assumption.
Depends on what Congress decides the federal government should be doing, which in turn depends on who people elect to Congress.
In general, the number should be sufficient to meet legal obligations with a bit of lag as it goes up or down as agencies and programs come and go or find their scope changing. If the departments cannot meet their legal obligations because they have too few people (consider if tax return processing takes a year), then staffing probably needs to increase. If most people are idle or grossly underutilized, and the work doesn't have a high seasonal variance like tax processing, then the department or agency should be reduced in size. If the work is seasonal and requires low expertise, then hiring can be seasonal too.
It's not that complicated.
> What’s the appropriate number of employees for the federal government?
I don't think there is one fixed number. What is the point you are trying to make?
This is a non-sequitur. The raw numbers are irrelevant. What are those employees doing?
In abstract, I support a smaller government. In practice, Chesterton’s Fence is an important principle to remember.
For example, the TSA is largely security theater. It would be a real win and legitimate cost savings (unemployment numbers aside) to dismantle the TSA and go back to metal detectors and simpler X-ray machines run by private companies in airports.
On the other hand, getting rid of USAID diminishes America’s stature in the world. Where do you think our power comes from? It’s not solely due to our nuclear arsenal.
These people are destroying the US government’s capabilities and influence for bizarre ideological reasons that are largely grounded in equally bizarre fictional views of the world. It’s going to be _more_ costly, devastatingly so, to US citizens both financially and otherwise in the short and long term.
They could have reduced the size of the government strategically and they could even have done it using this same illegal DOGE technique, but it would have required care and thought, grounded in actual reality.
300 million, bare minimum.
You support DOGE's mission, but not a fan of this decision? Destroying 18F entirely consistent with DOGE's mission and Trump's goals. Why this decision then and not all their other ones?
You wrote a lot of words saying very little.
I'm just an outsider here but it seems very obvious to me that someone could both 1) support the (stated) mission of saving taxpayers' money and reducing the US national debt, and 2) disagree with a specific cut
The stated mission is unavoidably at odds with the implementation.
The gains to be had are pointlessly minuscule in comparison to the federal budget and the actual cost to Americans is extreme.
I think you could make a reasonable argument that their actions aren't actually effective at implementing their mission. I'm not really in a position to judge that, personally. I was just saying I don't think it requires any great cognitive dissonance for GP to agree with their mission but disagree with a specific cut, as was sort of implied by the reply above.
I generally like my own government but I similarly think they've made some serious blunders at times. I don't think that's a huge contradiction (I'm not American FWIW...)
I guess it's the "Stated" mission that I find impossible to believe is the truth. DOGE clearly is not supposed to be about "saving tax payers money" when they include DEI reviews as well. So even your definition removes the baggage of the racism/transphobia/homophobia/misogyny by focusing only on the money when DOGE has not been focused solely on money in the slightest.
Anyone who trusts the "stated" mission of DOGE is a simple child who hasn't followed project 2025
Let's please avoid ad hominem here. I don't think that's contributing to the discussion in the spirit of HN.
I support DOGE’s stated mission - the elimination of redundancy and reform with an eye toward efficiency in general.
Eliminating 18F does not fit into either of those categories.
I believe it was eliminated because it was staffed with people who almost exclusively opposed the current administration’s agenda. This as a political decision.
I’m trying to say that when I put myself in the position of Trump and his administration, I understand why 18F was cut, while simultaneously stating that my belief that 18F did good work and we’ll be worse off without them.
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.
Having conflict free in-house counsel is critical for major buy decisions. The last thing the buyer wants is the seller to write the spec and contract unsupervised. Eliminating technical and legal counsel is an enabling move for corruption.
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> We've been told for a long time that the USA is a racist, sexist, illegitimate nation, founded on slavery and stolen land.
Would it have helped to instead be told that you have poor comprehension skills and limited understanding of nuance?
Because that’s clearly the case if the above quote describes a conclusion that you reached.
Sure. But I can tell you that it was such messaging that helped elect Trump. You can dismiss me as stupid, and all of the electorate that voted for Trump too. But it's not exactly brilliant to configure your messaging only to be properly understood by people as brilliant as yourself.
You've been "told" that? Who's been telling you that? I've seen some people on the Internet say it, sure. Why do they matter to you?
If you think the people who support Trump haven't heard this message, then I don't know what to tell you. They have also failed to hear what sounds to them like love-for-country, from the opposite side.
We can argue til the cows come home how true it is or not, but it has played a role in what we're seeing unfold.
Many people who support Trump also think that people like me and my friends are child-abusing Satanists, that there are secret underground military bases containing millions of abducted children, that there's hidden "med-bed" technology that cures all disease that They have suppressed, that JFK Jr. is still alive, etc. The people who have promoted these ideas have been boosted by the President and his allies, invited to the White House, given positions of power in his administration, etc.
I don't know why the genuinely irrational, harmful things these people believe somehow means that I shouldn't be angry about immensely worthwhile and beneficial programs being shut down on the whim of an unelected billionaire.
A challenging hypothesis that made me think deeply. My perspectives as a non-American who follows their lib / left publications and SM...
Founded on stolen land is historically accurate AFAIK.
Slavery was practised in some regions but I don't remember being told that the US was founded on it.
I have been told that some sections are racist and sexist, especially in so-called "red" states. These beliefs seem to be whitewashed by right media using euphemisms like "all lives matter" or "pro-life".
But the nation itself was not painted as sexist or racist. Indeed, it was often described as mostly welcoming of all races and immigrants.
I don't think it's been called an illegitimate nation and don't see it as such. Rather manipulative and bullying. With bad healthcare and ruthless capitalism. But still a better values-based policeman than the USSR or Russia or China.
I see Trump admin as a higher level success of the racist sexist sections. It is destruction. But by the wrong section of society on the better sections. I see it not as restorative justice but as a path to worse future injustice.
Are those who talked about all this to blame for these consequences? Observing a phenomenon to analyze, criticize, and predict is something we all do. They were just the messengers of a phenomenon that was already in motion.
The phenomenon was irrational brainwashing using euphemisms and disinfo to whitewash unethical ideas, done by the US rightwing media and its corporate backers.
> The phenomenon was irrational brainwashing using euphemisms and disinfo to whitewash unethical ideas, done by the US rightwing media and its corporate backers.
How exactly did a country that elected Obama twice fall to this brainwashing? How exactly did the liberal media fail to counterbalance the brainwashing? Perhaps you could excuse it for the first Trump presidency, but how exactly did all the smart, well-intentioned liberals fail to address the problem and stop it from happening again?
They failed to offer any hope to the people who were seduced by the dark side. Liberals failed. And to keep characterizing this failure as simply a "successful brainwashing by the other side" you completely remove any responsibility from the "good guys". And even worse, you completely remove any opportunity to learn from the situation so that the "good guys" can do something different next time. You've turned the entire left-wing political and media apparatus into hapless innocent victims of an evil empire, who were faultless in the face of an all-powerful right-wing brainwashing regime that had absolute power and was impossible to defeat. That's the most childish of assessments possible.
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).
Remote work doesn't mean it's dead. 91 employees also doesn't mean it's dead. 18F still was a large active team. You are redefining dead to excuse the inexcusable.
This is a good program that should be retained. But theres a nagging thing bothering me about the whole dynamic going on with DOGE critics. You get mad at the waste this represents, the unfairness. Ask your average middle class worker how they feel about the taxes taken out of their paycheck being wasted in the massive amount of waste fraud and abuse we all know happens in government. That is massively unfair. It one thing to lose a job because of a policy change. It’s quite another to have every paycheck docked at threat of state violence to fund the kind of stuff we are hearing about. Budget cuts and shutdowns are normal in business and all too rare in government. The argument that this or that program is good isn’t enough. But we see all these concerns and complaints based on basically that. This ignores the scale and gravity and historical incalcalitrant nature of the problem we actually have to deal with now. It’s not an option anymore. So can we please stop the wailing and gnashing of teeth and absolutely give feedback on what programs are good and why they deserve to be reinstated. I have a feeling they want to wait a year or two to find out what actually mattered.
The average worker doesn’t appreciate all of the different things the government does, and we’ve had decades of polls showing that people wildly misunderstand where money is spent. For example, people think we spend a lot more on foreign aid than we actually do – and also think that we should spend more than we do:
https://www.usglc.org/blog/americans-vastly-overestimate-u-s...
I mention this because there’s another side of this: taxes have been cut massively over the last half century, but a lot of people have not internalized what that means and simply assume that most of the money is going to something they don’t like. Cutting expenditures in any meaningful way means cutting the military, and the big social programs like Medicaid, SNAP, etc. People talk like we’re spending trillions on foreign and buying Reagan’s welfare queens new Cybertrucks but it’s really coming down to whether we want to spend less on the military, deal with our world-leading medical costs, or have rich people pay taxes at the same rates they paid around the turn of the century. The DOGE cuts work out to a few dollars per person total, and that’s before you factor in the significant new costs those cuts have incurred. It’s like looking at your personal budget and saying that the place to cut is your monthly movie date while ignoring rent, food, and car payments.
I think the main criticism of DOGE is that there seems no deliberation at all. They cut whatever Musk and friends don't personally like or what they don't understand after 10 minutes looking at it. Such an effort should be a long careful process, not a hit and run job.
What fraction of those tax dollars do you imagine is going to waste and fraud? Cite your source.
And this isn’t an interesting thought experiment. It’s the whole ballgame. This is the focus of right wing propaganda.
And also consider whether you will change your mind if the actual fraction is <<<1%.
What on earth is the GSA
If OPM is the HR department, GSA is the office manager.
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.
Good riddance.
There are better factions within the government doing truly remarkable things. Largely in DoD and integrated well with industry service providers; all of whom have ample gov't experience. If you can flip bureaucracy in DoD, you can flip it in the rest of gov. Beyond that, every agency should how it's own _18F_