
Why I’m leaving 18F - hodgesmr
https://medium.com/@noahkunin/why-im-leaving-18f-48970131d547
======
rrggrr
> 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.

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.

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.

I've interviewed for an executive branch position where having voted years
prior for the opposite party disqualified me. I'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 _OLDEST_ 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.

Existential crisis is pretty much upon us. Much blame is deserved across the
political spectrum for how we've arrived here.

~~~
WorldMaker
"This stuff happened before at a smaller scale by everyone," is a terrifying
argument _of_ normalization. It was wrong then. The norms were to crack down
on that sort of thing when it happened. Now it's an excuse because the past
wasn't perfect that we should normalize the worst excesses of wrongness as the
new right. That's frightening.

~~~
lucideer
I think you've read something into the GP that wasn't there. I don't see them
justifying or excusing bad practices anywhere in the post. Merely stating that
they occurred (which is true).

> _The norms were to crack down on that sort of thing when it happened_

This what the GP is really getting at. This was never cracked down on in the
past (I have no clue where you'd get the idea from that it was) because it
wasn't done in the open as it is now. Now that it's blatant, we may finally
have an opportunity to fight it.

~~~
dragonwriter
> This what the GP is really getting at. This was never cracked down on in the
> past (I have no clue where you'd get the idea from that it was) because it
> wasn't done in the open as it is now.

It wasn't done in the open because all kinds of structures, both formal and
informal, were erected to crack down on it after the _last_ time it was done
so flagrantly in the open; OTOH, those have been systematically eroded over
the last several decades so that with the political branches sand judiciary
all in the hands of the same faction, they no longer function to restrain it.

------
pmorici
I don'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.

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't care for the politics of the current administration.

~~~
snowwrestler
I think you might be confusing the U.S. Digital Service, which started in the
executive office of the president and is still there, and 18F, which started
in GSA and is still there.

~~~
pmorici
I should have been more exact. The original 18F team was made up largely of
former Presidential Innovation Fellows a program created by the EOP. The
Presidential Innovation Fellows program predated 18F and was moved under the
purview of 18F when it was created. So you are right wasn't part of the EOP
but everything else still stands. They were created by the head of the GSA, a
political appointee and a program created by the EOP was reorganized into them
at their creation.

------
pmh
Reminds me a bit of this earlier piece on Lawfare:
[https://www.lawfareblog.com/your-city-or-your-soul-moral-
com...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/your-city-or-your-soul-moral-compromise-
and-government-service)

------
andrewla
I don't mean to imply that the actions of the Trump administration are healthy
or appropriate. But having just read "Dereliction of Duty" [1] about the
Kennedy and Johnson administration and how the Vietnam War was managed in its
early days, I think it'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.

The fallout of Watergate, especially the fact that the executive no longer
routinely records conversations, mean that we'll never have a good idea of
normal/not-normal in this context ever again the way that we have it for the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations. So I can't say whether subsequent
presidents have made similar decisions, but the "personal loyalty" thing is
very definitely not a new thing.

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'm finding the "not normal" critique to be a bit shallow; a
sort of tu quoque that substitutes for actually criticizing the concrete
actions of the administration.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HW7834](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HW7834)
\-- 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.

~~~
WorldMaker
The "norm" then was to crack down on the wrong when it came to light.
Watergate's actions were done in secret and the heroes of the story were
journalists investigating the wrongs and trying to correct them.

Just because the past wasn't perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't stop striving
for perfection. Watergate having happened doesn't give the administration a
blank check to carry out Watergate-level actions in public and treat them as
if they were normal and as if they were right.

~~~
andrewla
Watergate was under Nixon, not Johnson or Kennedy -- I was merely pointing out
that the side effect of Watergate was that presidents no longer recorded their
conversations. This prevents us, for the sake of determining what is "normal",
from having a record of what was actually being said by the president and his
advisors while these terrible decisions were being made.

Watergate was a criminal act. The acts of Kennedy and Johnson were not
criminal, just irresponsible. In particular, cronyism and requiring personal
loyalty are not "not normal" as alleged, and the "not normal" argument in
general wears a bit thin and lacks any historical perspective.

~~~
WorldMaker
The article here points out that yes, the "normal" in US politics has since
about the founding of the country been that the only fealty oath used by the
federal government was one to the Constitution and the People. Cronyism and
personal loyalty were not criminal, but were considered unethical and when
such things come to light, it was the job of a free press and other parts of
the government to fix them and make things better. It was never openly
"normal" in any school of American government history to accept cronyism or
personal loyalty. Sure it happened, but the goal was to reduce and/or
eliminate it; that was the presumed "norm".

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

------
EternalData
Important reading. More people are going to have to make hard choices like
this as the months unfold, I'd imagine.

------
skybrian
Here is the part that's news: "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. [...]

"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."

(The rest is standard anti-Trump rhetoric.)

~~~
tinus_hn
> (The rest is standard anti-Trump rhetoric.)

Everybody's saying it so it must be unimportant! It's not new so who cares!

~~~
draw_down
Yeah, people think they're really fucking cool with that sentiment sometimes.
"Oh wow, news flash, VCs are sexist". Super unhelpful attitude.

~~~
kenning
Is this post satire?

