[skissane]

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

[djur]

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.

[arp242]

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.

[skissane]

> 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.

[thuridas]

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?

[remarkEon]

>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?

[skissane]

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

[djur]

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

[skissane]

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.

[djur]

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.

[skissane]

> 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.