The mass firing of federal tech workers at 18F is one of DOGE's most overtly political acts yet

The federal digital services team 18F had a diverse workforce and openly inclusive policies. That's why DOGE killed it.

The jarring news that every single employee of the widely respected 18F team was laid off over the weekend has already begun to recede from view. Or more accurately, it’s already become obscured by other disasters and indignities. But it’s worth pausing to fully grasp what just happened. The wholesale elimination of 18F, a uniquely diverse, skilled, and inclusive group of federal workers, is one of DOGE’s most overtly political maneuvers yet: One designed to punish such a group by erasing it from the government entirely.

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Late Friday night, the messages from federal tech workers started hitting my phone. It had finally happened: At midnight, every employee of 18F, a team of technologists, engineers, and designers in the Technology Transformation Services department that develops open source tools and provides crucial digital support for agencies across the government, had been served a layoff notice. The website had been shuttered. And between 85 to 90 people were told they had been deemed “non-critical” in an email sent by Thomas Shedd, the former Tesla engineer-cum-DOGE operative who Elon Musk installed as the acting director of TTS. The impact would quickly be felt beyond 18F, too, with independent contractors and consultants who worked with the team losing their jobs as well.

“This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership with both the Administration and GSA,” Shedd wrote. “There are no other TTS programs impacted at this time, however we anticipate more change in the future.”

The blow struck hard, even in a time when many are growing numb to the casual cruelty and wanton firings of federal workers. 18F was particularly beloved among many tech workers and federal employees, not just for the projects they made possible, but what they stood for. 18F was a diverse team staffed by people of color and LGBTQ workers, and publicly pushed for humane and inclusive policies.

“18F getting gutted is a huge moral blow to me and a disaster for govtech,” as one federal tech worker told me.

Naturally, the group’s diversity and its apparent progressive values made 18F an early target among conservative activists in Trump and Musk’s circles looking to rid the government of any and all traces of “DEI”—of nonwhite and openly queer employees—as noisily and cruelly as possible. And that’s exactly what they set out to do.

So, in January, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, rightwing activists looking to feed grist to Elon Musk’s DOGE mill converged on 18F. The Daily Wire writer Luke Rosiak proclaimed it “a far-left agency that viciously subverted Trump during his first term,” without providing any substantive evidence to back the statement up. In an X thread that’s been viewed over 13 million times, and that soon caught the attention of Elon Musk, Rosiak mocked 18F’s practices and politics—its efforts to cultivate racial diversity, its rejection of using facial recognition technologies, its resistance to return to office policies, and its transgender and nonwhite employees for existing.

In one particularly nasty post, Rosiak wrote “More of 18F's totally merit-based and nonpartisan employees” over a screenshot of nonwhite and non-gender conforming staff photos—implying they were unqualified “DEI” hires for being nonwhite and using pronouns.

Shortly after, Musk responded to the thread by saying “That group has been deleted.” That was not true at the time, but now it’s clear it presaged what was to come.

“In the beginning people were upset and confused,” a federal tech worker with knowledge of 18F’s operations told me. Now they’re stuck, feeling angry and helpless, but not wanting to give up the mission. “Torn between wanting to keep these jobs and fight for the American public and resignation.”

LinkedIn and Reddit lit up with posts and remembrances of 18F and its staff, with former employees, colleagues, and admirers eulogizing the agency.

“18F was the best place I ever worked,” wrote Carter Baxter, a former employee. “I’ve never seen such a broad and deep assemblage of talent, and every single one of them was absolutely driven to make government work better. For 10 years they were at the forefront of everything government got right. They were there, driving efficiency, saving taxpayer dollars and just flat making things work better across government.”

Many exclaimed how the agency was known for creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer dollars and time—precisely in line with DOGE’s purported mission—but it’s long been clear at this point that DOGE has little real interest in actually locating efficiencies; it’s aim is to hobble the regulatory state, pursue political objectives, and concentrate power.

In fact, in a telling turn of events, the post in which Musk declared 18F “deleted” was a response to one of his followers crowing about (and evidently misunderstanding) 18F’s role in creating Direct File—a program that let taxpayers circumvent the onerous, for-profit TurboTax’s filing software, and instead file taxes directly to the government online. This would improve taxpayer satisfaction, reduce reliance on an outside corporation, and streamline the process of filing taxes considerably—something that, if DOGE had any real interest in efficiency, would be an obvious boon.

Instead, Musk and DOGE were evidently more interested in firing people for what they looked like, all to get a little adulation from sneering posters on X. The result is unknown and potentially incalculable harm to the nation’s digital infrastructures, and to the people who maintained and sought to improve it.

“Personally holding up okay,” one tech worker effected by the cuts told me. “Difficult to see fed friends and colleagues laid off. Really fearful for what that means for all the services, products, platforms that we spent years building and improving.”

Of course, by now, such incalculable harms are being done to crucial departments across the government—thousands of employees overseeing critical systems, data, architecture, and services, from NOAA, to USGS, to GSA, to the Treasury, to just about everywhere at this point. But it’s worth underlining the particular cruelty at work in the destruction of 18F. Clearly, there are political motives when Musk and DOGE go after USAID, stripping funding and laying off staff because conservatives thought some of its programs sounded silly or woke, and financial ones when it dismantles the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that created hassles for Musk’s billionaire buddies. But the killing of 18F is different. It’s the termination and removal of an entire office operating within the federal government on what appears to be the basis of its politics and its demography. No pretense made about performance deficiencies, or that this is about anything other than malice and punishment.

For its part, on March 1, 18F issued a collective statement in response. “We came to the government to fix things,” it read. “And we’re not done with this work yet. More to come.”