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Comment by eastbayjake | Hacker News Reader

Remember that there are many engineers who would love to work for a Republican administration and would hate working on Obama administration objectives that aren't in line with their personal politics

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True, but as we all know, continuity has inherent value that we would lose under say, a drastic replacement of staff.

I get what you're trying to say but literally every department, bureau, and agency replaces leadership and huge numbers of staff when the White House changes parties. We can argue about whether that's a good thing, but those organizations do seem to weather the change and continue on with their core functions. The State Department is vastly more complex than a tech company yet manages to keep itself in order when one party is swept out and another rolls in. Part of their success is that continuity planning between administrations usually does rise above partisan rancor as staffers hand off their portfolios.

The State Dept can't be replaced by a federal contractor. USDS can; why not award Raytheon or L3 (or Halliburton) a contract, acquihire the best devs from the old team, and lay the rest off?

This is hard to enforce. This is supposedly the rationale already used to farm out massive IT contracts to contractors - that they can attract better talent, etc. But in reality, the contractors often don't really care about quality and instead just want to put butts in seats.

So unless you've written a really solid contract with solid, quantifiable high-quality deliverables, you're out of luck.

The rank and file and core management stay the same, at at agency, it's the political appointees at the top that change for new administrations. This can be dramatic -- at the EPA, Republican leaders tend to dismantle the agency and cease enforcement, while Democrats do the opposite. I'm not sure USDS or 18F are politicized yet, they're making government more efficient. Then again if you hate government and want to dismantle it, getting rid of the all-stars would be a good play.

The USDS leadership (and enough key staffers) are indeed appointees -- that's a concern. And if you look at their bios, many have strong & active ties to the Obama election efforts. That will not escape a party-change in the administration should it happen unless you have a "best for the country" administration philosophy come in and they take a truly non-partisan, objective view of what needs to continue.

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