“The 18th floor was a high-tech shop of people’s descent,” the worker on the 18th floor told Wired. “There’s a huge hole left by the closure of the 18th floor. Requests from across the country were far greater than the 18th floor capacity before the closure.”
Similar to the 18th floor, US digital services, which the Trump administration rebranded as Doge, have seen a wave of shootings and resignation. On February 14th, about 50 USDS staff were fired, affecting project managers and designers mostly. Last week, another 21 resigned. Write in an open letter It was obtained by Wired, Doge’s “Scorched Earth Approach is actually driving away people who have the skills to solve government problems.”
Itir Cole, the lead of the USDS project with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), resigned from her position after the majority of her team was fired and allowed to take over responsibility after being locked up from a computer.
“They are destructive and toxic. I didn’t want to be associated with it, and I didn’t want to be intertwined for my resignation,” Cole said of Doge. “The job has changed. I didn’t sign up to work for Elon. I signed up to work for Americans, and when that changed, I decided to leave.”
For more than a year, Cole helped develop the CDC disease surveillance system. This helped track and prevent dangerous pathogens and diseases such as charcoal thra and Zika all over the country.
“It puts vulnerable groups in even more vulnerable situations,” Cole says. “The program will probably die. There aren’t enough people to tackle it. I know that the people left at the CDC are working very hard to find alternative plans.”
Within GSA’s Technology Transformation Service (TTS), which previously housed 18F, the recent firing has shocked the rest of the engineers. According to sources, some employees have been reassigned to more public projects, such as login.gov, according to Wired. Here, Americans sign in to access perks such as VA services, Social Security, and cloud.gov.
“If the big change in how people think about things is just beating down the entire TTS appendage, why did they interview everyone about their skills and shit?” says one of the current TTS workers. In early February, young clumsy engineers like Edward “Big Ball” Coristine met with TTS workers, requested information about their work, and sometimes asked them to check the code.
At a City Hall meeting on Thursday, former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd, who is now at the helm of TTS, announced that the agency’s workforce cuts have not finished. Shedd said, “Sitting four inches off the screen, he looked like a hostage recording a demonstration video of a hostage, sitting on the screen for a whole time from his pre-written script.”
Over the next few weeks, Shedd said the GSA’s high-tech arms will be reduced by 50%. Projects not required by law will be closed, and government agencies will prioritize more public services, such as login.gov, cloud.gov, and Fedramp, to promote the adoption of secure cloud services across the government.
Doge’s executive order allows the group to operate only until the beginning of July, so it’s unclear what will happen to these projects and teams.
