6 ms·

How we automated federal retirements

103 points by caseysoftware 9mo ago

trelane 9mo ago
[flagged]
- forinti 9mo ago
  A lot of what goes on in government, for good or bad, has nothing to do with who's in power.
  - buckle8017 9mo ago
    this was automated specifically because DOGE ridiculed the previous process
    - Arainach 9mo ago
      This was automated because the need to do so has been recognized for decades. DOGE had nothing to do with it.
      - buckle8017 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        Arainach 9mo ago
        The automation was only possible because of a digitized data source which was created as part of a modernization effort 18+ years ago - 18 years before DOGE ever existed - when it was realized this process needed to be improved and automated.
- tomhow 9mo ago
  Please don't engage on ideological battle or taunting on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
  - trelane 9mo ago
    What is "this," to your eye? What would have made it more palatable?
    - tomhow 9mo ago
      It's covered by these guidelines: Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. It can also be seen as ideological battle or flamebait; though with terse one-liners it's hard to tell what's really meant. It would be much better to share your perspective on what is good about the article, and at least try to persuade those who will be predisposed to be opposed to it to instead see the positives in it.
silexia 9mo ago
[flagged]
- throwaway-11-1 9mo ago
  This admin has fired 270,000 people and yet federal spending has substantially increased. What would you say the goal is?
  - jfengel 9mo ago
    That's it. That is the goal. You found it.
  - stocksinsmocks 9mo ago
    Hear me out: there is no goal. Half your income is spent on supporting an elaborate jobs program of self-licking ice cream cones.
  - parrellel 9mo ago
    Could it be ... gut the federal government like it was a leveraged buyout and then steal everyone's money? Certainly seems to be.
- witte 9mo ago
  > deadwood like bankruptcy for private industry Unless a given industry is too big too fail, or requires millions to billions in corporate welfare, or where bankruptcy voids responsibility of ecological disasters and socializes the damage. Since those things have obviously never happened.
  - rayiner 9mo ago
    It’s bad when the government does those things. That doesn’t change the fact that no such feedback mechanism exists for the government, which comprises almost 40% of GDP (in the U.S. including state and local).
  - silexia 9mo ago
    The government should NEVER bail out a private business of any kind. There should also be no limited liability for companies... that would prevent issues where an owner abuses the environment then walks away with the fortune he made while the company goes bankrupt from lawsuits.
skybrian 9mo ago
I did a brief news search for something from a more neutral party and found this article: Federal retirement processing has slowed substantially this year due to DRP. As OPM continues modernizing retirement systems, another application surge looms. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dark-retiring-federal-employees-face-major-delays/?readmore=1 https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dar... They seem to think the new systems helped: > Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade. > Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM. > “OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network. > But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications. > “A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”
- awwaiid 9mo ago
  It makes sense that this administration would focus investment on making it maximally easy to leave government above all other potential automations.
flufluflufluffy 9mo ago
Ah yes, the Nextjs app with access to personally identifiable information for every federal employee.
- zeroCalories 9mo ago
  I did find that troubling too. I can see the logic of a short lived / well funded project using nextjs, but for something like this that's meant to be a simple form that needs to be reliable, easy to maintain, and long lived, my first thought would be to make a classic restful MPA. Introduction of a complex frontend framework like next seems like it would lead to more headaches than it's worth. Had similar thoughts about the Azur vendor lockin. I seriously doubt they had the traffic to justify needing something like Azur functions and batch processing. I'd love to hear some more justification for why they choose this stack, and if they considered any alternatives first.
  - rafterydj 9mo ago
    If it was really down to two engineers, it's almost certainly what one or both of them were already comfortable or familiar with and no other reason. Six months is such a short time frame for long term projects like this that I imagine they could not spare much time for analysis of alternatives.
    - zeroCalories 9mo ago
      I had assumed that these people were not junior devs left unsupervised to handle important government work.
    - array_key_first 9mo ago
      If you're comfortable with nextjs, you should be even more comfortable with a nodejs SSR application. It's the same thing, but simpler. The HTML doesn't even have to be pretty. We're really just querying a DB, showing forms, and saving forms. Hell, use PHP if you want.
- ekkeke 9mo ago
throw10920 9mo ago
> They had committed to building all of this [a previous modernization effort] on Microsoft PowerApps, a “no-code” tool meant for building simple web apps > When we met with the developers in Macon, Georgia, OPM's engineering hub, they told us the PowerApps experience was so unfriendly that even they were afraid to make changes. Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly. How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?
- calvinmorrison 9mo ago
  > How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases? Really depends. It can work great, I see some really good No/Low code tools in ERP systems. Things like alerts, workflows, custom fields, actions, etc are... you would be surprised the ingenuity of people, but also - yes there are limits. An ERP is practically an opinionated entire operating system with its own data, conventions, rules, ACLs, etc...
  - shermantanktop 9mo ago
    Ingenuity is the word. Some of the things I’ve seen “nontechnical” people do in Excel are boggling. But I wouldn’t build the foundation of an ERP system on stuff like that. I think you’re describing a scripting interface, rather than the core?
    - calvinmorrison 9mo ago
      not scripting per se - yes that is part of it typically, with windows based ERPs, you get scripting for close to free if you can 'drop into' other stuff, like VB, or if your ERP leverages the COM interfaces, has an ODBC or even a straight SQL backend, yes there are many approaches. It's really - how does the scripting interact with the system What i am talking about is more simple 1. user defined actions. 2. common triggers (object X Save, object Y delete) 2. user defined fields on core data tables 3. user defined tables You can go very far with that, and a drop into a VB script, or run a prebuilt action (IE some verb on the object, like "print this document" on Save)
alpha_squared 9mo ago
> Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees. Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.
- yegle 9mo ago
  I took the words at their face value and genuinely thought 2 engineers got this done. In reality there's an OPM engineering team in Georgia.
  - wredcoll 9mo ago
    I mean, the article has paragraphs like: > With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end. Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.
    - awwaiid 9mo ago
      It was downplayed at every other opportunity including the conclusion, emphasizing instead the lone team of two heros. A few shout outs here and there, but the theme was clear.
- pushcx 9mo ago
  It must be part of a larger marketing push; their boss(?) appeared on the Odd Lots podcast a couple days ago to talk about this work: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-to-bring-tech-workers-into-the/id1056200096?i=1000742677639 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-... He spent a lot of time promoting this new National Design Studio's attempt to attract tech works for 2-year commitments to drop into existing orgs, which is basically how the 18F PIF program worked before it was dissolved earlier this year. Perhaps abruptly terminating a program to reinvent it from scratch six months later is very efficient. 18F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F Overview of the related programs: https://willslack.com/pif-18f-usds/ https://willslack.com/pif-18f-usds/ (A warning about Odd Lots: the hosts never question or push back on people talking their book. This especially bad with politicians and political appointees, who are often very creative during their interviews.)
epec254 9mo ago
The key part IMO is buried in the article - there happened to be an existing, perfectly accurate database containing all the required info about each employee - the same info that previously had to be manually found for each retirement. Without this, this effort would not have been possible. > Fortunately, we stumbled on a critical clue. While poring over old documentation, we discovered that OPM actually had data warehouses that stored historic information about every federal employee. Apparently, these warehouses were created as part of a modernization effort in 2007, and HR and payroll offices all across government have supposedly been regularly reporting into it. > For some reason however, this was not well known at OPM, and those that knew about it didn’t know what data it held, nor considered how it could be used to simplify retirement processing. Not many had seen the data, and administrators were initially resistant to sharing access. > From a software perspective, this was the holy grail: a single source of truth that held all the information that the manual redundant steps were meant to review. Because the information was regularly reported by HR and payroll, by the time an employee retired, OPM should already have everything needed to process the retirement, without anyone re-entering or re-verifying information.
- fnordpiglet 9mo ago
  Yeah this stuck out at me - the hubris of the stateless web stack supersedes the 18 years of hard unsung work at building and end to end stateful pipeline that ties out to the penny and handles all the complex business logic and reconciliations seamlessly across god knows how many integrations. No fancy diagrams or pictures of the nameless faceless heroes that had accomplished that act of heroism. For sure recognizing the value is something to trumpet, but that’s the Herculean hero story I want to hear - the DOGE bros who tied it all together with JavaScript frameworks, yawn.
  - foltik 9mo ago
    They seemed to have replaced Mega Bloks with Legos, not skyscraper building materials.
  - xp84 9mo ago
    The only way the database could be harnessed to do something useful is after all the people who were standing in the way in management for the last 18 years likely having been sacked. You can bet any useful project to put it to use was blocked by paper-pushers threatened by the spectre of automation, until most people had forgotten about it. Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.
skybrian 9mo ago
National Design Studios seems to have been created in August: https://archive.is/Gv9nC https://archive.is/Gv9nC > Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to spearhead the new National Design Studio that will seek to make digital services at federal agencies more efficient, two officials familiar with the plan said. > Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create the studio - a new body that one of the officials said appears to be a stripped-down successor to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk. The work described in this blog post seems to have been done under its predecessor, DOGE, given that the launch date was June 2. But apparently these engineers moved to the new organization, so that’s why the blog post is there.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  So, 18F.
  - MrDrone 9mo ago
    Yeah, this is what I don't understand. Why did we gut 18F, which was doing incredible work and make a... a new version? Seems the opposite of reducing waste.
    - kiernanmcgowan 9mo ago
      Because 18F was from the Obama administration
Roguelazer 9mo ago
So what's going to happen in 3 years after these startup bros have left government, none of the frameworks they're using are supported any more, and nobody in the office that they parachuted into is trained to maintain whatever spaghetti they crapped out over three months of all-nighters? There's a reason that we don't build critical infrastructure by giving it to some guy whose entire accomplishments are "working at Airbnb for 10 years"
- fragmede 9mo ago
  You cast too broad a brush! Having worked at Airbnb for 10 years would have been fine. The problem is DOGE was staffed by twenty year olds. How would that have worked? They started at AirBnB when they were 10?
  - wredcoll 9mo ago
    What's the relationship to doge?
    - oneandonley1 9mo ago
      They came into this project from Doge. They just didnt mention it.
      - wredcoll 9mo ago
        I was trying to find evidence for that but nothing popped up, where did you find that?
zeroCalories 9mo ago
[flagged]
primer42 9mo ago
This is exactly how us taxes should work. The IRS already has all the information it needs - it should fill out the form, give you a chance to double check, and then you're done. Sigh...
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  They often don't have all the information.
- awwaiid 9mo ago
  That was built recently and then discarded by this administration to protect intuit TurboTax and similar services.
corndoge 9mo ago
This "national design studio" seems strikingly similar to 18F, which was cut by DOGE earlier this year. Was not aware of it until now. Apparently it was established in August by EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/improving-our-nation-through-better-design/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/impr... Does anyone have a scoop on NDS? Is it composed of 18F staffers?
- ndom91 9mo ago
  Came here to see if anyone had an answer to this too. US Digital Service (USDS) was also "renamed" and turned into DOGE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service). So on the surface it seems that we already had many of these types of orgs, but they killed them all and spun up their own renamed and rebadged versions. That being said, this project does seem like a potential big win.
- scroot 9mo ago
  I would be _very_ surprised if any 18Fers were a part of the "national design studio." It is, at the very least, Doge affiliated, and Doge is who killed 18F.
dfilppi 9mo ago
[dead]
mrstone 9mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 9mo ago
  You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what it's about. You've been told before that we expect better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
preetnation 9mo ago
I love both that this happened and that you did the work to bring attention to it. Heck yeah
coderintherye 9mo ago
Power Apps is just absolutely terrible for forms. Which is sad, because the platform itself is decent and most governmental entities that I've worked with seem to have access to it. If the UI/UX was better and Forms weren't cursed then non-technical teams could maintain their own apps and workflows. Combo'ing it with Power Automate can get a lot of things done. But Power Apps Forms need a complete re-haul and without such a change it will absolutely be the right decision to create something outside of it.
roflchoppa 9mo ago
> Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly. Sounds just like Sharepoint.
Molitor5901 9mo ago
I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.
trelane 9mo ago
As many have pointed out, the data backing the new retirement system was created in 2007. So, amazing collaboration between the George W Bush & Trump admins. I am glad everyone here is applauding the achievement.
bzmrgonz 9mo ago
I am so disappointed they chose MS SQL server. Just imaging the opportunities and the giant annual recurring savings to thr public purse going with postgresql would have brought to thr table(the postgresql ecosystem spreads as far as the eye can see). It's a travesty of epic proportions. Let's hope you at least follow modern coding practices of decoupling and low code/no code to ensure survivability and maintainability into posterity.
- awwaiid 9mo ago
  That is very likely the main part they didn't choose so much as utilize an existing system, flowing the existing infrastructure.

103 points by caseysoftware 9mo ago

trelane 9mo ago

[flagged]

forinti 9mo ago
A lot of what goes on in government, for good or bad, has nothing to do with who's in power.
- buckle8017 9mo ago
  this was automated specifically because DOGE ridiculed the previous process
  - Arainach 9mo ago
    This was automated because the need to do so has been recognized for decades. DOGE had nothing to do with it.
    - buckle8017 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Arainach 9mo ago
        The automation was only possible because of a digitized data source which was created as part of a modernization effort 18+ years ago - 18 years before DOGE ever existed - when it was realized this process needed to be improved and automated.
tomhow 9mo ago
Please don't engage on ideological battle or taunting on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- trelane 9mo ago
  What is "this," to your eye? What would have made it more palatable?
  - tomhow 9mo ago
    It's covered by these guidelines: Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. It can also be seen as ideological battle or flamebait; though with terse one-liners it's hard to tell what's really meant. It would be much better to share your perspective on what is good about the article, and at least try to persuade those who will be predisposed to be opposed to it to instead see the positives in it.

silexia 9mo ago

[flagged]

throwaway-11-1 9mo ago
This admin has fired 270,000 people and yet federal spending has substantially increased. What would you say the goal is?
- jfengel 9mo ago
  That's it. That is the goal. You found it.
- stocksinsmocks 9mo ago
  Hear me out: there is no goal. Half your income is spent on supporting an elaborate jobs program of self-licking ice cream cones.
- parrellel 9mo ago
  Could it be ... gut the federal government like it was a leveraged buyout and then steal everyone's money? Certainly seems to be.
witte 9mo ago
> deadwood like bankruptcy for private industry Unless a given industry is too big too fail, or requires millions to billions in corporate welfare, or where bankruptcy voids responsibility of ecological disasters and socializes the damage. Since those things have obviously never happened.
- rayiner 9mo ago
  It’s bad when the government does those things. That doesn’t change the fact that no such feedback mechanism exists for the government, which comprises almost 40% of GDP (in the U.S. including state and local).
- silexia 9mo ago
  The government should NEVER bail out a private business of any kind. There should also be no limited liability for companies... that would prevent issues where an owner abuses the environment then walks away with the fortune he made while the company goes bankrupt from lawsuits.

skybrian 9mo ago

I did a brief news search for something from a more neutral party and found this article: Federal retirement processing has slowed substantially this year due to DRP. As OPM continues modernizing retirement systems, another application surge looms. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dark-retiring-federal-employees-face-major-delays/?readmore=1 https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dar... They seem to think the new systems helped: > Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade. > Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM. > “OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network. > But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications. > “A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”

awwaiid 9mo ago
It makes sense that this administration would focus investment on making it maximally easy to leave government above all other potential automations.

flufluflufluffy 9mo ago

Ah yes, the Nextjs app with access to personally identifiable information for every federal employee.

zeroCalories 9mo ago
I did find that troubling too. I can see the logic of a short lived / well funded project using nextjs, but for something like this that's meant to be a simple form that needs to be reliable, easy to maintain, and long lived, my first thought would be to make a classic restful MPA. Introduction of a complex frontend framework like next seems like it would lead to more headaches than it's worth. Had similar thoughts about the Azur vendor lockin. I seriously doubt they had the traffic to justify needing something like Azur functions and batch processing. I'd love to hear some more justification for why they choose this stack, and if they considered any alternatives first.
- rafterydj 9mo ago
  If it was really down to two engineers, it's almost certainly what one or both of them were already comfortable or familiar with and no other reason. Six months is such a short time frame for long term projects like this that I imagine they could not spare much time for analysis of alternatives.
  - zeroCalories 9mo ago
    I had assumed that these people were not junior devs left unsupervised to handle important government work.
  - array_key_first 9mo ago
    If you're comfortable with nextjs, you should be even more comfortable with a nodejs SSR application. It's the same thing, but simpler. The HTML doesn't even have to be pretty. We're really just querying a DB, showing forms, and saving forms. Hell, use PHP if you want.
ekkeke 9mo ago

throw10920 9mo ago

> They had committed to building all of this [a previous modernization effort] on Microsoft PowerApps, a “no-code” tool meant for building simple web apps > When we met with the developers in Macon, Georgia, OPM's engineering hub, they told us the PowerApps experience was so unfriendly that even they were afraid to make changes. Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly. How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?

calvinmorrison 9mo ago
> How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases? Really depends. It can work great, I see some really good No/Low code tools in ERP systems. Things like alerts, workflows, custom fields, actions, etc are... you would be surprised the ingenuity of people, but also - yes there are limits. An ERP is practically an opinionated entire operating system with its own data, conventions, rules, ACLs, etc...
- shermantanktop 9mo ago
  Ingenuity is the word. Some of the things I’ve seen “nontechnical” people do in Excel are boggling. But I wouldn’t build the foundation of an ERP system on stuff like that. I think you’re describing a scripting interface, rather than the core?
  - calvinmorrison 9mo ago
    not scripting per se - yes that is part of it typically, with windows based ERPs, you get scripting for close to free if you can 'drop into' other stuff, like VB, or if your ERP leverages the COM interfaces, has an ODBC or even a straight SQL backend, yes there are many approaches. It's really - how does the scripting interact with the system What i am talking about is more simple 1. user defined actions. 2. common triggers (object X Save, object Y delete) 2. user defined fields on core data tables 3. user defined tables You can go very far with that, and a drop into a VB script, or run a prebuilt action (IE some verb on the object, like "print this document" on Save)

alpha_squared 9mo ago

> Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees. Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.

yegle 9mo ago
I took the words at their face value and genuinely thought 2 engineers got this done. In reality there's an OPM engineering team in Georgia.
- wredcoll 9mo ago
  I mean, the article has paragraphs like: > With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end. Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.
  - awwaiid 9mo ago
    It was downplayed at every other opportunity including the conclusion, emphasizing instead the lone team of two heros. A few shout outs here and there, but the theme was clear.
pushcx 9mo ago
It must be part of a larger marketing push; their boss(?) appeared on the Odd Lots podcast a couple days ago to talk about this work: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-to-bring-tech-workers-into-the/id1056200096?i=1000742677639 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-... He spent a lot of time promoting this new National Design Studio's attempt to attract tech works for 2-year commitments to drop into existing orgs, which is basically how the 18F PIF program worked before it was dissolved earlier this year. Perhaps abruptly terminating a program to reinvent it from scratch six months later is very efficient. 18F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F Overview of the related programs: https://willslack.com/pif-18f-usds/ https://willslack.com/pif-18f-usds/ (A warning about Odd Lots: the hosts never question or push back on people talking their book. This especially bad with politicians and political appointees, who are often very creative during their interviews.)

epec254 9mo ago

The key part IMO is buried in the article - there happened to be an existing, perfectly accurate database containing all the required info about each employee - the same info that previously had to be manually found for each retirement. Without this, this effort would not have been possible. > Fortunately, we stumbled on a critical clue. While poring over old documentation, we discovered that OPM actually had data warehouses that stored historic information about every federal employee. Apparently, these warehouses were created as part of a modernization effort in 2007, and HR and payroll offices all across government have supposedly been regularly reporting into it. > For some reason however, this was not well known at OPM, and those that knew about it didn’t know what data it held, nor considered how it could be used to simplify retirement processing. Not many had seen the data, and administrators were initially resistant to sharing access. > From a software perspective, this was the holy grail: a single source of truth that held all the information that the manual redundant steps were meant to review. Because the information was regularly reported by HR and payroll, by the time an employee retired, OPM should already have everything needed to process the retirement, without anyone re-entering or re-verifying information.

fnordpiglet 9mo ago
Yeah this stuck out at me - the hubris of the stateless web stack supersedes the 18 years of hard unsung work at building and end to end stateful pipeline that ties out to the penny and handles all the complex business logic and reconciliations seamlessly across god knows how many integrations. No fancy diagrams or pictures of the nameless faceless heroes that had accomplished that act of heroism. For sure recognizing the value is something to trumpet, but that’s the Herculean hero story I want to hear - the DOGE bros who tied it all together with JavaScript frameworks, yawn.
- foltik 9mo ago
  They seemed to have replaced Mega Bloks with Legos, not skyscraper building materials.
- xp84 9mo ago
  The only way the database could be harnessed to do something useful is after all the people who were standing in the way in management for the last 18 years likely having been sacked. You can bet any useful project to put it to use was blocked by paper-pushers threatened by the spectre of automation, until most people had forgotten about it. Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.

skybrian 9mo ago

National Design Studios seems to have been created in August: https://archive.is/Gv9nC https://archive.is/Gv9nC > Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to spearhead the new National Design Studio that will seek to make digital services at federal agencies more efficient, two officials familiar with the plan said. > Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create the studio - a new body that one of the officials said appears to be a stripped-down successor to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk. The work described in this blog post seems to have been done under its predecessor, DOGE, given that the launch date was June 2. But apparently these engineers moved to the new organization, so that’s why the blog post is there.

fragmede 9mo ago
So, 18F.
- MrDrone 9mo ago
  Yeah, this is what I don't understand. Why did we gut 18F, which was doing incredible work and make a... a new version? Seems the opposite of reducing waste.
  - kiernanmcgowan 9mo ago
    Because 18F was from the Obama administration

Roguelazer 9mo ago

So what's going to happen in 3 years after these startup bros have left government, none of the frameworks they're using are supported any more, and nobody in the office that they parachuted into is trained to maintain whatever spaghetti they crapped out over three months of all-nighters? There's a reason that we don't build critical infrastructure by giving it to some guy whose entire accomplishments are "working at Airbnb for 10 years"

fragmede 9mo ago
You cast too broad a brush! Having worked at Airbnb for 10 years would have been fine. The problem is DOGE was staffed by twenty year olds. How would that have worked? They started at AirBnB when they were 10?
- wredcoll 9mo ago
  What's the relationship to doge?
  - oneandonley1 9mo ago
    They came into this project from Doge. They just didnt mention it.
    - wredcoll 9mo ago
      I was trying to find evidence for that but nothing popped up, where did you find that?

zeroCalories 9mo ago

[flagged]

primer42 9mo ago

This is exactly how us taxes should work. The IRS already has all the information it needs - it should fill out the form, give you a chance to double check, and then you're done. Sigh...

SoftTalker 9mo ago
They often don't have all the information.
awwaiid 9mo ago
That was built recently and then discarded by this administration to protect intuit TurboTax and similar services.

corndoge 9mo ago

This "national design studio" seems strikingly similar to 18F, which was cut by DOGE earlier this year. Was not aware of it until now. Apparently it was established in August by EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/improving-our-nation-through-better-design/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/impr... Does anyone have a scoop on NDS? Is it composed of 18F staffers?

ndom91 9mo ago
Came here to see if anyone had an answer to this too. US Digital Service (USDS) was also "renamed" and turned into DOGE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service). So on the surface it seems that we already had many of these types of orgs, but they killed them all and spun up their own renamed and rebadged versions. That being said, this project does seem like a potential big win.
scroot 9mo ago
I would be _very_ surprised if any 18Fers were a part of the "national design studio." It is, at the very least, Doge affiliated, and Doge is who killed 18F.

dfilppi 9mo ago

[dead]

mrstone 9mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 9mo ago
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what it's about. You've been told before that we expect better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

preetnation 9mo ago

I love both that this happened and that you did the work to bring attention to it. Heck yeah

coderintherye 9mo ago

Power Apps is just absolutely terrible for forms. Which is sad, because the platform itself is decent and most governmental entities that I've worked with seem to have access to it. If the UI/UX was better and Forms weren't cursed then non-technical teams could maintain their own apps and workflows. Combo'ing it with Power Automate can get a lot of things done. But Power Apps Forms need a complete re-haul and without such a change it will absolutely be the right decision to create something outside of it.

roflchoppa 9mo ago

> Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly. Sounds just like Sharepoint.

Molitor5901 9mo ago

I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.

trelane 9mo ago

As many have pointed out, the data backing the new retirement system was created in 2007. So, amazing collaboration between the George W Bush & Trump admins. I am glad everyone here is applauding the achievement.

bzmrgonz 9mo ago

I am so disappointed they chose MS SQL server. Just imaging the opportunities and the giant annual recurring savings to thr public purse going with postgresql would have brought to thr table(the postgresql ecosystem spreads as far as the eye can see). It's a travesty of epic proportions. Let's hope you at least follow modern coding practices of decoupling and low code/no code to ensure survivability and maintainability into posterity.

awwaiid 9mo ago
That is very likely the main part they didn't choose so much as utilize an existing system, flowing the existing infrastructure.