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Comment by coffeefirst | Hacker News Reader

If you wanted to do this for real, your would double the size of 18F (which was doing extraordinary work), and given the Inspectors General a blank check to eliminate fraud. These are both apolitical entities. Frankly the only people this would upset is the legacy government contractors.

So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.

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18F was founded during the Obama administration, so absolutely no one in MAGA-world will ever have considered it apolitical.

One of the many fired IGs last year was investigating Neurolink - so noone in Musk-world will have considered them apolitical either.

Nothing government-related or government-adjacent will ever be broadly accepted as apolitical again in the US, regardless of intent or truth. Its very depressing.

Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization

I don't know how into building organizations you are, but 18f succeeded. they had a small footprint, and outsized impact, and really good relationships with the rest of the government. That kind of effectiveness is really difficult to grow in a massive bureaucracy. If your goal is efficiency you try to nurture that success.

throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.

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