[Animats]

The Medium article says to visit the site for the standards.[1] That yields:

    MAX.gov Application Unavailable

    If you are seeing this message and it is not Sunday 2AM-8AM ET then
    please contact MAX Support by clicking here.
    If you’re trying to access MAX Community, please use our snapshot 
    site: MAX Snapshot Community Site

"MAX.gov" appears to be some kind of in-house cloud service for the Federal government.

[1] https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/

Update: now it's up.

[zeckalpha]

It's not fully in house. The idea is to centralize management of services (both in-house and external) for budgeting reasons, since MAX is part of GSA which is part of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget).

[lefler]

MAX.gov was kind enough to run us a proxy in order to support https, and that proxy had a bad day under load. Described more here https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/issues/733

Btw, GSA and OMB aren't connected the way you describe. They just happen to be the respective parent agencies of 18F and USDS-HQ. Here's a tree.

  POTUS
  ├── GSA
  │   └── 18F
  └── OMB
      ├── USDS-HQ
      └── MAX

[Animats]

GSA, the General Services Administration, is the purchasing, construction, and building operations unit of the US Government. They're a huge operation, with a $20 billion budget and operations all over the US. The Office of Management and Budget is a White House staff unit with about 500 employees, most in an office building next to the White House.

GSA has forklifts. OMB has clout.

[zeckalpha]

Thanks!

[skybrian]

And now it's down again.

[Zikes]

It came back up, but in case it goes down again here's a link to the GitHub for it: https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards