Musk is a dangerous phony
White House tech veteran, Waldo Jaquith, posted a Bluesky thread about what Elon Musk’s DOGE saboteurs did on Friday to a federal technology group where Jaquith once worked. We know by now (and as you read on Saturday) that Musk’s “waste, fraud, and abuse” pitch for the cameras and is as phony as Trump University.
Musk possesses “scant interest in constitutional law” and considers oversight of his operations the “dictatorship of the bureaucracy.” His goal is not to improve government or even to shrink it (the Goldilocks question) but to hobble it. So under the pretext of cutting “waste,” he is in fact destroying the government’s ability prevent his becoming … emperor, or something more like Eldon Tyrell or Peter Weyland. Musk would enjoy the comparison.
Pay attention:
18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was demolished by Musk’s team shortly after midnight. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 billion.
18F is *precisely* what Musk and team claim should exist within government. But when his team found it, they destroyed it, because it is evidence that government works well (can’t have that!), and because like Zelensky, 18F didn’t bend the knee.
Trump and Musk are eliminating any part of government that works well, because that undermines their thesis that government doesn’t work. GSA (which houses 18F) turns a profit as an agency. Naturally it has to be destroyed. 18F’s healthy revenue stream also means it must go.
To anybody in leadership at the state or municipal level: 18F’s destruction makes this *the perfect time* to hire experienced technologists, which you all need very badly. Most 18Fers would love to stay in public service. They are spread throughout the country. Go go go!
For any devs wondering what 18F does (did), here’s its GitHub org page, with 1,210 repos. A few were mine! All the work they did for all their agency partners was open source. Public money should produce public software, for public inspection. Those days are over, starting today.
18F did two things, both for agencies that hired them to help with projects: it built software and it taught agencies how to hire & oversee vendors to build software. The former raised the bar by showing agencies what “good” looks like, the latter allowed those practices to expand sustainably.
The work that I led at 18F I naturally feel was really important (I hope all 18Fers felt the same way about their work): codifying the procurement principals that we’d all identified there over the years. I thought this would have a tiny audience. Instead it became a foundational text.
Introduction | 18F De-risking Guide
The work I do today at @usdigitalresponse.org is simply what I did at 18F (software procurement, budgeting, and oversight), except I’m a team of one, dependent on grant funding. I have sent many an agency to 18F when they need large-scale support. But no more—I have nowhere to send them now.
Republican myth-making
I wish we could hire a bunch of 18Fers at U.S. Digital Response, but we’re a small organization, reliant on grants for funding. Heck, my position is only 3/4-time. Instead we’ll work with our state and local partners to create positions appropriation for these folks, and help to make those matches.
18F faced a lot of threats over the years. In the beginning it was mostly from within, frankly. It’s the way of digital services that they break a bunch of rules to get started. Then the threats were external. But I never thought a threat was being too effective for Republican myth-making.
I see folks asking about forking all the 18F GitHub repos so there are copies. Don’t worry, that was done at scale by multiple organizations, weeks ago, anticipating this.
“It’s chaotic, and it feels like it’s chaotic on purpose,” says a former 18F worker describing the demolition of 18F to The Atlantic (gift link). “Move fast and break things” comes to Washington like January 6 without the riot.
Matteo Wong writes:
DOGE’s actions have been widely compared to the playbook that Musk used to decimate and remake Twitter into X: The inefficiency is the point. Asking workers to resign and justify their work through scrambled, aggressive messages almost inevitably prompts exodus and collapse, voluntary or not. But another useful comparison might be to the playbook Musk follows from space programs for his company, SpaceX. Government teams, their staff, and the citizens they serve are like test launches of rocket prototypes: try a new ship design uncrewed, knowing it could well explode, and repeat. But in this case, there are people aboard.
And like everything in Trump’s career, there is a lot of myth-making involved. The gaming community seems ahead of the press in spotting the bullshit behind Musk, suggests one Bluesky poster.
So far the gaming community is really the first to comprehensively debunk the central musk myth that “what’s incredibly difficult and time-consuming for normal people is trivially easy for me” and I assume that’s partly because the consequences for that imploding elsewhere are too high
Btw even when musk talks about working around the clock it’s part of this myth, he’s just saying “oh it’s hard for you to do, but for me it’s second nature.” But like, he doesn’t work. He never learns any new skills or has breakthroughs, he just stays up all night dming rw influencers & doing drugs
Like oh you’re such a “hardcore” worker and singular genius that every tech problem is trivial? And these legacy govt computer systems are giving you fits? Why not simply become a COBOL expert faster than anyone ever has? Oh what’s that, you can’t, because you’re a charlatan & a moron
Musk had been paying someone else to play Path of Exile for him to achieve the alleged high scores he bragged about. It was a lie.
“The man has more money and power than you could ever want,” says Karl Jobst in the video above, “yet he still felt compelled to lie about something so trivial.”
No wonder he gets along so well with Donald Trump. He’s an uber-rich super villain out of a Bond film.
Where’s 007 when you really need him?
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