I’m one sad 18F wannabe

This is one of the most depressing things I’ve seen online and I’ve seen a LOT of demoralizing websh*t. I don’t even want to link to it so before I do lemme ‘splain.

A lot of people over the past 25 years have busted their butts to do right by the people who have to use government websites. 18F was an organization I wanted to work for – for a long time – and then I watched them get destroyed in 2025. They were my kinda people. The designer-y types, the systems thinkers who were working on making tech stuff, especially the web, work better for the people using everything. From the end users trying to enroll in benefits, for example, and the administrators trying to maintain the websites and systems that make complex processes work. Enrolling in benefits is just one example. The idea that government websites could become a standard was something lots of us had been working towards since the 1990’s.

So now, the people who did that stuff, are mostly done working for the government because the government decided to fire everyone.

Then they decided to showcase their prowess and publish this website:

https://americabydesign.gov

It’s an affront to the people who were doing the work just a year ago. They’re still out there and they’re still worth knowing about. I’ll drop a couple of them here.

• Ethan Marcotte coined the term ‘responsive design’. He’s a really good writer. Check out his website.
• Pavel Samsonov may have a term or phrase attributed to him but I know him from his blog and recommend reading The Product Picnic.

Those two are the real deal. Their words have resonated with me lately because of the connections they’re making to the fundamentals I learned from Peter Drucker, where I went to grad school. Drucker is known as the father of modern management. He’s also someone who saw how profoundly systems thinking impacts people, organizations, and societal wellbeing overall.

But, I’m distracted by the water I found in the basement and the dryness of my skin and the buzzing of the iPhone and my friend who is at home with terminal cancer. I guess I’ll try to get back to some kinda focused explanation of why I am so disgusted by the demise of 18F later when I’m able to form a complete sentence. Or maybe that’ll never happen and this is all I have to offer the interwebs. Some half-thoughts and a couple of stellar writers who say it better than I ever could.