Here’s a fun game the Trump administration keeps playing: destroy a successful government program, wait a few months, then breathlessly announce you’ve “invented” the exact same thing but with obvious corruption mechanisms baked in.
Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new “Tech Force”—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade. You know, until Elon Musk and DOGE gleefully fired the entire 18F team in March and gutted USDS into a husk of what it once was.
USDS and 18F were genuine success stories.
Same basic concept—rotate tech talent through government—but stripped of all the institutional knowledge about what actually works, run by political operatives instead of civil servants, and riddled with conflicts of interest that the original programs were specifically designed to avoid.
The especially galling part? Watching the same tech bros who helped destroy USDS and 18F now celebrate “Tech Force” as some brilliant innovation:
The one actual “innovation” in Tech Force creates a corruption vector that should alarm anyone who cares about government integrity: companies are guaranteeing participants can return to their old jobs after their tour of duty.
Lambert here: Bringing their thumb drives with them, no doubt.
USDS never needed this because it wasn’t a problem—people could always go back to industry if they wanted. What this guarantee does is fundamentally change the incentive structure. Now you have engineers building government systems who know exactly where they’ll be working in two years, and whose interests they’ll be serving. They won’t divest from their stock. They won’t sever ties with their employer. They’ll just be on “leave” while accessing sensitive government data and making technology decisions that could directly benefit their future (and current) employer.