USDS was one of the few orgs that was clearly doing import technology work out in the open [1] inside the federal government. Their mission was to embed into ot

USDS was one of the few orgs that was clearly doing import technology work out in the open [1] inside the federal government. Their mission was to embed into other federal agencies to provide support for making tech decisions. They published design standards, like USWDS [2] (along with 18F), and playbooks for helping orgs that had outdated views on tech. You'd often get a team with a mix of four engineers/designers, typically people that had come out of the SF tech startup world, to help fix outdated practices. Now instead of four engineers/designers you'll get 1 engineer, 1 lawyer, 1 HR professional, and a "DOGE team lead" [3]. As someone that has done work in this space, this seems objectively worse than what was going on for the past 10 or so years. Honestly, it's probably a return to the dysfunctional, lawyer run way of doing tech consulting where their sole purpose is to structure contracts to extract 100s of millions of dollars from the federal government while plopping down a pile of "enterprise" java code that doesn't work. [1] https://github.com/usds https://github.com/usds [2] https://github.com/uswds/uswds https://github.com/uswds/uswds [3] section 3c https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/establishing-and-implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...