Our former organization, 18F, has been in the news lately since being eliminated by DOGE. For those hearing our name for the first time, we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves.
18F was a digital services consulting group within the federal government. We helped other government agencies fix technology problems and save money by making smarter technology investments. As others have noted, "[our] cost to government was negligible, but [the] benefits were huge."
Our work with partner agencies could take many forms. We might build a new website or system, launch a new program, or help agencies manage a vendor more effectively. Over the past 11 years we worked on more than 450 projects with federal, state, and local agencies, from the Department of Agriculture to Veterans Affairs. We served as product managers, designers, engineers, researchers, acquisition specialists, and digital strategists. 18F was the right choice for so many agencies because we had a proven track record of delivering effective and efficient digital products that met user needs.
Technology experts who believe in the power of government to improve people’s lives
18F staff were accomplished, mid-to-senior career technologists with a passion for making government work better for the American people. But 18F wasn’t just a crack team of technologists from Silicon Valley—we were a diverse group that combined career government employees who had deep institutional knowledge with technologists from across industries to tackle big challenges together. This mix of expertise allowed us to bridge gaps, navigate bureaucracy, and deliver solutions that truly met the needs of the government and the public.
Before coming to 18F, many of us gained valuable experience working in tech, education, finance, health care, the military, and other fields. We learned how to make technology work for people, and brought that expertise to government.
We know smarter technology investments can power better government services. That is the work we came to government to do. Despite what they claim, DOGE has shown no ability to deliver effectively or efficiently for the American people. But 18F has. We have a track record of saving millions across every branch of government at the federal, state, and local levels.
We know how to make meaningful change in government
18F didn’t follow the “move fast and break things” approach to technology. Government services are too important to treat so carelessly. 18F developed evidence-based methods for discovering problems, removing blockers, minimizing risk, and building successful digital products.
We know what it takes to make sustainable, meaningful change in government. It takes willing partners, program and technical expertise, a shared vision, and the courage to keep going when things get hard. We took the time to get to know our partner agencies and the people they served. We worked with them every day. We understood their goals and challenges.
It wasn’t easy. We often represented a new way of working. The organizational changes that enable successful technology projects are often the most difficult for an agency to make. We built trust with our partners and helped them make those big changes, like adopting modern software development practices and establishing a culture of continuous improvement. It was challenging, and not always fast, but it worked.
18F saved taxpayers billions in bad contracts and failed software projects over the past 11 years.
We set the bar for real transparency in government, from implementing the DATA act and helping stand up usaspending.gov to sharing our best practices to benefit other teams within and outside of government. When 18F was in the room, government modernization projects cost millions, not billions, and took months to deliver value, not years.
The impact of our work being stopped
When DOGE abruptly and wastefully eliminated 18F, we were working with our partners on important projects. This is just a sample of the work we were forced to stop.
- Building a new weather.gov for the National Weather Service, providing the agency with a more stable public API, a modern content management system, and an easy-to-use website
- Modernizing the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s case management system to support children who arrive in the U.S. unaccompanied by an adult
- Improving the system that military servicemembers and Americans overseas use to vote
- Helping the U.S. Election Assistance Commission develop a new web strategy so that they could better serve state and local election officials around the country
- Redesigning the website for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the largest of the 13 U.S. Courts of Appeals
These projects were important to our partner agencies and the people they serve. That being said, what’s been lost is much bigger than a set of interrupted projects. An entire ecosystem of dedicated technologists optimizing for the public and supporting civil servants is being dismantled.
Read more about our work at https://18f.org/.