
Why I’m staying at 18F - rch
https://medium.com/@noahkunin/why-im-staying-at-18f-9c9bc77a53fc
======
geofft
> _Politicians may (and will) disagree passionately on what government should
> do. But they all say that for whatever the government does, we should do it
> well._

I'm not sure how far that can hold. That works if you believe that the
government, regardless of which politicians are in power, is doing good work
in good faith. I might think that (for instance) universal healthcare is more
important than airport security and we'd be fine with pre-9/11 airport
security standards, but given that that's not happening, I still support
making airport security more effective and more painless.

But if you fundamentally disagree about whether the government should do a
thing—like, say, whether we should move towards amnesty or deportation for
people who have illegally immigrated here—it doesn't follow that you should
say "Fine, if we're deporting people, at least we should deport them well." Or
if you think it's immoral for government to fund abortions, you wouldn't
conclude "Well okay, at least we should do a top-notch job of funding
abortions." Would it not be better for government to do its job poorly?

18F in particular seems like it is prone to the same danger always present in
private-sector tech: technology helps social changes happen faster and more
effectively, but it has nothing to say about whether the social changes are
good or not. Technology enables us everything from unbreakable encryption to
trivial government surveillance; it has no opinion on whether unbreakable
encryption or trivial government surveillance should exist. If you're worried
about that, you either need to move out of pure technology development, or you
need to _impede_ the production of dangerous technology (which is guaranteed
to be a losing battle).

~~~
noahkunin
OP here. I think about this every day.

Ultimately, it comes down to how you construct the root origin of the problem
facing government right now. For me personally (hence why this post is on
Medium and not on a *.gov) is the lack of both faith and trust (two very
different things) in public structures of all kinds, not just the federal
government.

We've lost that faith and trust for very good reasons, to be sure. We may
forgive, but not forget those indiscretions to put it mildly, and they go back
to the founding of the republic.

The problem as I see it though is that faith and trust have fallen into such
disrepair, it's become a self-replicating negative cycle. So few people
believe govt can do anything well (in terms inclusive of
ethics/effectiveness/efficiency) which leads to apathy, which leads to skilled
people leaving govt or not joining, which leads to further degradation, which
leads to a further undermining both in perception and in actual funding or
authorities from Congress, and on and on it goes.

That cycle is not just observed at the federal level of course. Even more
pernicious to me is the apathy it creates at the state/city (or even
community) level, even if one person or one small group's potential for
positive impact is exceedingly more likely at the level!

I certainly still have my ethical red lines, and I recite them to myself on a
near daily basis so I don't normalize the "might" of the feds with "right".
But I still see the one of the core origins that got us to this point being
the cycle above, so trying to break the cycle is still my #1 priority for now.

------
untog
This is the optimistic view. But it isn't difficult to imagine a Republican
congress drastically cutting the funding available to teams like 18F. Of
course, time will tell, and I agree that it's too early to judge yet.

~~~
andrefrancisco
Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services
out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding
is secure.

*I'm an 18F employee.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress.

Even if 18F is paid out if other agencies budgets, Congress could as easily
prohibit those agencies (or GSA itself) from spending any money _on_ 18F.
Heck, Congress could directly restructure, break up, or abolish the GSA.

Or, they could exercise the recently-revived Holman Rule and simply cut the
pay of every individual (or select individuals) working in 18F to $1/annum. If
you work for the Federal government other than in an office with special
Constitutional protection, no matter what the notional funding structure of
your particular unit, your job, pay, and benefits are not protected against
Congressional action, and you should not be misled to think that they are.

~~~
brianwawok
I don't think they could go under minimum wage.

~~~
dragonwriter
Yes, they can. Minimum wage doesn't apply to the federal government to start
with, and even if it did Congress could include an exception as part of any
legislation that would otherwise violate it.

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petercooper
Sounds reasonable. I don't know about US politics, but in the UK the civil
service is (meant to be) independent of party politics and civil servants are
meant to impartial and work with whoever the government happens to be (indeed,
it's even a half-joke that the civil service _actually_ controls the
politicians who are merely public figureheads).

~~~
huac
The UK parliamentary system makes alliances necessary and difficult for any
particular party to seize total control of power. Hence, the work that civil
servants perform is unlikely to change between Prime Ministers. In America,
well, Jeff Sessions is about to be the Attorney General.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The UK parliamentary system makes alliances necessary and difficult for any
> particular party to seize total control of power.

The Parliamentary system means that there is no separation of powers, so
"total control of power" just means a parliamentary majority, and most
governments have been one-party majority governments (there have been a few
coalition governments, such as the LibDem-Tory coalition that Cameron started
with, but they are the exception, not the rule.)

Now, if the UK had proportional representation, even with a parliamentary
system, that might make one party acheiving total control more difficult than
in the US, and enough parliamentary systems are also PR that people sometimes
conflate the effects of the two features.

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jakozaur
True, a lot of work you do in any government has very little do to with any
political agenda. In fact many officials rarely pursue things that make the
headlines.

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simooooo
Who is this guy? Why does anyone care?

------
Animats
The real question is whether the incoming administration wants the government
to work well. That's what 18F is about. There are many Republicans in Congress
who don't want Government services to work effectively. Mr. Trump, though, may
not think that way. He does like to fire people who underperform.

