“18F was the people’s tech shop,” one fired 18F worker tells WIRED. “There’s a giant hole left by the closure of 18F. Requests from across the country for help far outpaced 18F’s capacity before the closure.”
Like 18F, the USDS, which the Trump administration rebranded into DOGE, has seen waves of firings and resignations. On February 14, around 50 USDS staffers were terminated, primarily affecting project managers and designers. Last week, another 21 resigned, writing in an open letter obtained by WIRED that DOGE’s “scorched earth approach is driving away the people who actually have the skills to fix the government’s problems.”
Itir Cole, a USDS project lead with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), resigned from her position last week after a majority of her team was fired and locked out of their computers before they could pass along their responsibilities.
“They’re destructive and toxic. I didn’t want to be associated with it or have entanglements because of a deferred resignation,” Cole says of DOGE. “The job changed. I didn’t sign up to work for Elon. I signed up to work for the American people. And when that changed I decided to leave.”
For more than a year, Cole helped manage the development of the CDC’s Disease Surveillance system, which aided in the tracking and prevention of dangerous pathogens and illnesses like Anthrax and Zika across the country.
“It puts vulnerable populations into even more vulnerable situations,” says Cole. “The program is probably going to die. There aren’t enough people to work on it. I know folks who are left over at the CDC are working very hard to find alternative plans.”
Inside GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), which formerly housed 18F, the recent firings have spooked the remaining technologists. Some employees, sources tell WIRED, have been reassigned to more public-facing projects like Login.gov, where Americans sign in to access benefits like VA services, Social Security, and Cloud.gov, which offers cloud hosting services to other agencies.
“The big change in how people are thinking about things is, why did they interview everyone about their skills and shit if they are just lopping off entire appendages of TTS?” one current TTS worker says. In early February, young DOGE engineers, like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, met with TTS workers, demanding information on their work and sometimes asking to review code.
In a Thursday town hall meeting, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer now at the helm of TTS, announced that the workforce reductions at the agency weren’t over. Shedd, says one TTS employee, “sat there four inches from the screen reading the entire time from his prewritten script and looked/sounded like a hostage recording a proof of life video.”
Over the next few weeks, Shedd said, GSA’s tech arm would shrink by 50 percent. Any projects not required by law would be shut down, and the agency would prioritize more public-facing services like Login.gov, Cloud.gov, and FedRAMP, which promotes the adoption of secure cloud services across government.
The DOGE executive order has only authorized the group to operate through the beginning of July, so it’s unclear what will then happen to these projects and teams.