Why I’m leaving 18F

&gt; Every day he [Trump] remains in office, civil servants have to ask themselves if political appointees are being given their positions due to merit, or to personal loyalty to Trump, or someone else in the Administration.<p>Sounds like it was time for the author to move on and I wish him well, but his impact was highest inside the tent. With patience, flexibility and choosing his battles wisely he might have had some influence within his sphere of responsibilities.<p>The author conflates norms for appearances. For good or bad Trump largely dispenses with appearances and practices his political maneuverings in the open, appearances be damned. But the practices are the same either way.<p>I&#x27;ve interviewed for an executive branch position where having voted years prior for the opposite party disqualified me. I&#x27;ve worked in a state campaign where my relatives, having donated to the opposite party, placed me under suspicion. Patronage and loyalty testing are the <i>OLDEST</i> of political practices. None of this is new under Trump, and none of it ever changes except in times of indisputable and existential national crisis.<p>Existential crisis is pretty much upon us. Much blame is deserved across the political spectrum for how we&#x27;ve arrived here.

I don&#x27;t really find this post to be rational. 18F started out as a part of the executive office of the president. Their whole recruiting pitch revolved around the ego boost of the proximity to power. It was later moved under the umbrella of the GSA.<p>Nothing described in this blog post with respect to 18F is exceptional or abnormal. The heads of major agencies and their sub components have always been political appointees. Government agencies reorganize internally constantly. 18F started out life being run by a political appointee and has previously been reorganized from the EOP to the GSA. The only difference now is that the OP doesn&#x27;t care for the politics of the current administration.

Reminds me a bit of this earlier piece on Lawfare: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lawfareblog.com&#x2F;your-city-or-your-soul-moral-compromise-and-government-service" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lawfareblog.com&#x2F;your-city-or-your-soul-moral-com...</a>

I don&#x27;t mean to imply that the actions of the Trump administration are healthy or appropriate. But having just read &quot;Dereliction of Duty&quot; [1] about the Kennedy and Johnson administration and how the Vietnam War was managed in its early days, I think it&#x27;s clear that the kind of behavior here, especially around valuing personal loyalty over competence or being given accurate information is not a new phenomenon.<p>The fallout of Watergate, especially the fact that the executive no longer routinely records conversations, mean that we&#x27;ll never have a good idea of normal&#x2F;not-normal in this context ever again the way that we have it for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. So I can&#x27;t say whether subsequent presidents have made similar decisions, but the &quot;personal loyalty&quot; thing is very definitely not a new thing.<p>Note that this isolation from reality had large-scale disastrous consequences at that time, so this is not to say that we should become complacent about it. But in itself, I&#x27;m finding the &quot;not normal&quot; critique to be a bit shallow; a sort of tu quoque that substitutes for actually criticizing the concrete actions of the administration.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B004HW7834" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B004HW7834</a> -- written by H. R. McMaster, our current National Security Adviser, who I sincerely hope will hold to the standards that he advocates in that volume.

In addition to the obvious political angle, it&#x27;s nice to see an engineer talking about their duty to the populace. Software engineers hand waive this off because we generally aren&#x27;t building things that can kill people. We are however building things that have tremendous impact on people&#x27;s lives, and many in our profession do not seem to take that seriously.

Important reading. More people are going to have to make hard choices like this as the months unfold, I&#x27;d imagine.

Here is the part that&#x27;s news: &quot;18F (and the larger service we created for it and its sibling organizations, the Technology Transformation Service), is being reorganized via administrative order into the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service. [...]<p>&quot;We were subsequently told that the new Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service would [...] immediately become a political position, with a person appointed directly by the White House.&quot;<p>(The rest is standard anti-Trump rhetoric.)