#18f

18F – AIO My best friend slowly replaced me and now says I’m “making it weird”

I’m 18F and this is about my best friend (also 18F). We’ve been close since sophomore year. Like, daily texting, hanging out constantly, knowing everything about each other. I genuinely thought we were solid.

Over the last few months, things started shifting and I feel like I’m losing my mind trying to tell if I’m overreacting or just refusing to accept what’s obvious.

She started replying slower. Then skipping plans. Then I’d see her hanging out one-on-one with other people we used to hang out with together. I tried not to jump to conclusions because I know people get busy and friendships change.

But it kept happening. She’d say she was “too drained” to hang out, then post herself out later that night. Or she’d say she forgot to reply. Or she’d promise we’d hang out “soon” and never follow up.

What really hurt was realizing I was always the one reaching out. If I didn’t text first, days would go by. Meanwhile she’s active on social media, tagging other friends, laughing, doing things we used to do.

I finally asked her if something was wrong between us. I didn’t accuse her of anything. I just said I felt pushed aside and confused.

She basically flipped it back on me and made it seem like I was the problem for even bringing it up.

Now I feel embarrassed for saying anything at all, but also angry because it feels like she rewrote the entire situation.

Here are the texts

After that, she didn’t reply for two days. Then she sent me a meme like nothing happened.

Now when I see her in person she’s friendly but distant, and I feel stupid for caring more than she does. Part of me thinks I should’ve just stayed quiet. Another part of me feels like I’m being slowly dropped and gaslit into thinking I imagined it.

I honestly don’t know if I overreacted by saying something or if I’m just avoiding the truth that the friendship is basically over

Am I Overreacting?

Reddit consensus: NOT OVERREACTING (NOR) (86% confidence)

Top comment: “NOR, but give her space. Like—a lot of space. Wait for her to initiate any other interactions and stop responding.”

Notable explanation: “NOR. My best friend and I met during our freshman year of high school. she moved to a different state during our sophomore year, so we were close but not close enough. Then it’s like we had to build a whole friendship from scratch over the phone and we got so much closer over the phone, and now, we’re both freshmen in college.

We only meet up whenever it’s one of our birthdays due to none of us having a car lmao. So, if she wanted to keep you in her life as her best friend, she would definitely try to make an effort. But if she doesn’t want to have you in her life, she’ll gradually start distancing herself from you until you don’t talk to each other anymore.

And please OP stop reaching out first if you know that you guys don’t talk unless you reach out.”

View on Reddit

March 1, 2025

A letter to the American People:

For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.

However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called "the gold standard" of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.

When former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd took the position of TTS director and met with TTS including 18F on February 3, 2025, he acknowledged that the group is the “gold standard” of civic technologists and that “you guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists.” He repeatedly emphasized the importance of the work, and the value of the talent that the teams bring to government.

Despite that skill and knowledge, at midnight ET on March 1, the entirety of 18F received notice that our positions had been eliminated.

The letter said that 18F "has been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical”.

"This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the Administration and GSA," Shedd said in an email shortly after we were given notice.

This was a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.

All 18F's support on that work has now abruptly come to a halt. Since the entire staff was also placed on administrative leave, we have been locked out of our computers, and have no chance to assist in an orderly transition in our work. We don’t even have access to our personal employment data. We’re supposed to return our equipment, but can’t use our email to find out how or where.

Dismantling 18F follows the gutting of the original US Digital Service. These cuts are just the most recent in a series of a sledgehammer approach to the critical US teams supporting IT infrastructure.

Before today’s RIF, DOGE members and GSA political appointees demanded and took access to IT systems that hold sensitive information. They ignored security precautions. Some who pushed back on this questionable behavior resigned rather than grant access. Others were met with reprisals like being booted from work communication channels.

We’re not done yet.

We’re still absorbing what has happened. We’re wrestling with what it will mean for ourselves and our families, as well as the impact on our partners and the American people.

But we came to the government to fix things. And we’re not done with this work yet.

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:

For those who don’t know much about government, the idea of Elon Musk as a serious tech guy who could shake up how the public sector work was appealing. Even people who do know a lot about government were hopeful.

Such hopes now look naive. Musk is not just ignorant about what government does, he chooses to celebrate and make decisions based on that ignorance, defaulting to accusations of fraud to explain things he does not want to understand. He is not interested in fixing government, but in destroying key parts of government, and that takes no great skill. This is not just a point about competing political philosophies, but about state capacity, and specifically tech skills in government. Musk is not just destroying core government functions, he is also destroying the actual tech capacity of government. Because there are, in fact, skilled technologists who work in government. They are not enough of them, and they lacked power to make big changes. They worked mostly in the US Digital Service and 18F, both created in 2014 after the failure of healthcare.gov. And now they are mostly gone. All 18F employees were fired as part of the ongoing Reductions in Force. The US Digital Service no longer exists. It is now the US DOGE Service. It also has seen about 40 people laid off, and 21 employees resigned last week, leaving around 40 experienced employees left.

Here is a thumbnail sketch of the two units: USDS offered support and guidance to agencies, but could not dictate a governmentwide approach on most issues. In times of crisis, or when a President prioritized a policy outcome dependent on digital innovations, it could play a more prominent role, serving as a de facto firefighter for digital governance. The General Services Administration set up its own digital consultancy team, 18F in 2014. This team’s mission is to work with agencies to “[transform] the way the federal government builds and buys digital services.” 18F was a cost recoverable office, meaning that they charge partner agencies for their work rather than being funded directly through a congressional appropriation. Both organizations use similar managerial technologies, which includes agile, iterative design, a user-centric approach, a reliance on data-driven decision making, directly managing relationships with vendors, favoring open-source solutions, the prioritization of platform models, and a flatter organizational culture. USDS and 18F represented a hopeful trend for American government: embedding serious tech skills inside the bureaucracy, rather than relying on private vendors. They care about public services, and represented the most visible public sector manifestation of “civic tech” in government. [...]

DOGE is a step backwards for government tech talent

Musk’s team saw USDS as an an existing shell they could occupy that seemed nominally aligned with goal of modernizing government. A former USDS official, Amy Gleason, had worked for one of the DOGE team, Brad Smith in the private sector, and returned to USDS on the understanding she was helping the Trump transition team. Gleason became the official DOGE administrator last week, though of course no-one believes this to be the reality. She also tried to get the USDS to hire some of the staff who had already signed on to work for DOGE. None made the cut. They did not advertise their connection with Musk, and so their rejections were not clouded by political bias. Their applications failed because they were not qualified. [...] The point is that Musk isn’t bringing in incredible 10X coders to replace bureaucrats. The best evidence we have is that they would not have been hired into a tech role under normal circumstances. The people who could not make it at USDS were hired at DOGE staff because of their personal and professional connections to Musk, and their ideological commitment for downsizing government. This was a poor fit with the existing employees at 18F and the US Digital Service, who believed that technology could be used to make government work better, not to cut its core tasks. [...] The Trump administration does not care about the loss of this talent. Katie Miller, the DOGE spokesperson, posted this about the resignation of USDS officials. Miller does not explain how fully remote workers posted “trans flags” (or rainbow flags for the rest of us). But she herself is representative of DOGE. She has no tech skills, which is fine for a PR person. Her husband, Stephen Miller, has been described as the “Prime Minister” aiding Musk. Musk had previously given Miller’s political groups $50 million dollars. These are the people running tech in government now. (One more fun fact about Katie Miller: According to Wikipedia, she destroyed “hundreds of copies of the school's newspaper, after it endorsed an opposing student government candidate.”)

DOGE team cut 18F

An actual tech-savvy team responsible for civil service such as the IRS' free tax filing software.

(Doing your taxes is a pain in the ass, I know I'm dragging my feet on mine, but the IRS' software made tax filing accessible to low income brackets.)

I mean, I was already saying "it's not if, it's when" based on the abhorrently negligent way the DOGE team was acting with hardware and software.

But if you're gonna keep firing the tech nerds in our government, Musk and the DOGE team are really leaving us open for a cyber attack at this point.

Might as well spread this country's cheeks open and say "Fuck us, cyber criminals" with the amount of gross negligence.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban waded into the latest government tech shake-up on Saturday, posting an unexpected offer of support for newly laid-off federal workers on the social network Bluesky.