[Raphomet]

The USDS is working on vets.gov, not 18F. Apparently this effort involves taking hundreds of microsites that all look and behave differently and combining them into one unified effort. It's not surprising that this would take a long time, and my understanding is that this is one of USDS's top priorities.

I think it's easy to underestimate how hard it is to ship something on the scale of vets.gov from the outside.

Source: had early talks with the VA to join this project. I didn't, but came away with a lot of respect for the team working on it.

[fapjacks]

Right. I am a veteran that uses government portals for certain services, and you are absolutely right. There are so many moving parts behind the "single" portal the government wants veterans to use for access to services and information. I have been using those services for many years and haven't even seen them all, let alone used them all.

[matchagaucho]

18F is/was most definitely contributing to vets.gov.

https://www.vets.gov/playbook/platform/

I'll give vets.gov credit for mobilizing content with responsive design.

But as expected, "uber-portal" strategies that re-purpose content from other sites quickly suffer from entropy and information rot. The portal just becomes a cut-n-paste curation exercise.