RIP 18F

18F ~~is~~ was a government agency offering digital services to other departments around the government. I initially learned about their work from a project with the IRS called Direct File, and I later learned about some of their other projects; login.gov, creating a design standard, cloud.gov, etc.

When I worked for Bank of America, I had the priviledge of seeing some similar teams flourish in the private sector. Small, innovative teams that followed the same model of contracting their time out across the organization with the goal of spreading best practices and consulting on challenging digital problems. While I never had the opportunity to hire any such team, I did weasel my way into mentorship from some teammates and greatly integrate some of the tools from these teams.

I used their design library so I didn't need to worry about crafting a style guide for my team. I used their component library so I didn't need to teach the fine details of accessibility best practices, as the primatives had them out of the box. I passed along their well-crafted documentation so I could better operate asynchronously with my offshore teammates.

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I often consult Reddit for guides and opinions and whatnot — 2025 is the year of <google search> + reddit now that search is increasingly flooded with SEO'd nonsense.

Occasionally, I'll stumble on a post about something that I actually know about. Maybe it's my little niche of design or accessibility or frontend engineering. In these moments, I have the background understanding to assess the quality of content that I'm consuming. I can read a confident, well-received response and assess it with my own lived experience.

Disillusioning.

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I didn't get to work with 18F. Eliminating that type of team with the promise of increased efficiency is, in a word, disillusioning.