The Trump administration puts an end to the jobs of dozens of technology specialists whose large portfolio of projects through the government included the free IRS deposit software and passport services.
The specialists, which belonged to a unit of the General Services Administration known under the name of 18F, have developed software and technological products for various federal agencies, in order to improve efficiency and to better serve the public. In an email to workers in the agency’s technological transformation services over the weekend, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the director of the division, said that 18F had been identified as non-critical and would be cut.
“This decision was made with an explicit direction of the main levels of leadership within the administration and the GSA,” said Shedd in the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times. He added that even if no other technology transformation services program had been affected, “we are planning more changes in the future”.
In letters of dismissal dated on Friday, employees were informed that their roles would be eliminated in accordance with President Trump’s orders to reduce the government. The workers were put on administrative leave until they were officially released at the end of April, according to copies of letters seen by the New York Times.
A spokesperson for the GSA said in a statement that the administration would continue to adopt a technology that would improve and modernize the government’s digital infrastructure and IT capacities in a statement confirming that 18F employees had been informed that they would be dismissed.
Among the branding websites that 18F employees have helped build or reorganize are the free income declaration of the internal income service known as the Direct file and the National Service page, Weather.gov.
But since Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office, 18F was also targeted by Elon Musk, the technological billionaire that Trump has responsible for reducing the government. Mr. Musk wrote last month in an article on his social media platform, X, that “this group was deleted”.
The Obama administration created 18F and the American digital service in 2014 to help agencies develop and integrate digital software, after its defective deployment of Healthcare.gov, which crashed on the first day, consumers were eligible for the purchase of health care plans thanks to insurance exchanges. The new offices have been envisaged as internal technology consulting companies, with the aim of managing costs and improving the efficiency of government’s digital offers.
The American digital service was one of the first corners of the government to obtain a Musc makeover, when Mr. Trump renamed the American Doge service – the operation that Mr. Musk used to reduce contracts and put pressure on government employees to resign.
In the hours following the reception of Mr. Shedd’s opinion on Saturday, 18F employees created a website to broadcast their grievances against the Trump administration and accuse high-ups of undermining an operation that they had welcomed a few weeks before.
Employees of 18F cited an internal meeting in early February in which Mr. Shedd, he said, had “recognized that the group is” the ordeal “of civic technologists” and “underlined several times the importance of the work and the value of the talents that the teams bring to the government”.
Their job had been interrupted so suddenly that the suspended employees continued, that they could not help an ordered transition or even learn where to return their equipment. Before their suspensions, continued the website, the staff 18F worked to help the IRS to support free classification software, to improve access to meteorological data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and to rationalize the process of purchasing a passport.