## Notes from 17 December 2025 [[2025-12-16|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2025-12-18|Next note →]] The Trump administration [announced](https://techforce.gov/) the US Tech Force on December 15 - a two-year program to recruit approximately 1,000 engineers, data scientists, AI specialists, and project managers into federal agencies. OPM Director [[Scott Kupor]] (former [[Andreessen Horowitz]] managing partner) is leading the initiative. Participants will work directly inside agencies, reporting to leadership rather than operating as a centralized unit. Compensation ranges from $150,000 to $200,000. Over two dozen tech companies have signed on as partners- Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, xAI, and others - providing training, mentorship, and a pipeline back to private sector employment after the program ends. The scale is ambitious and the urgency is real. But the context is impossible to ignore. This is essentially a recreation of the [[U.S. Digital Service (USDS)]] and [[18F]] - programs that did exactly this work for over a decade, bringing Silicon Valley engineers into government for short stints to modernize federal systems. USDS helped fix Healthcare.gov and built DirectFile at the IRS ([which has now been discontinued](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/it-modernization/2025/11/irs-direct-file-will-not-be-available-in-2026-agency-tells-states/)). 18F functioned as an internal consultancy for agencies. Both were genuine success stories of civic tech. And DOGE dismantled them. On January 20, the USDS was formally reorganized into the 'U.S. [[DOGE]] Service' within the Executive Office of the President, repurposing its existing authorities. By March, 18F was dissolved - Musk tweeted the group was '[deleted](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musks-doge-fires-federal-tech-team-that-built-free-tax-filing-site-2025-03-01/)' - triggering a mass exodus of career technologists. This effectively replaced a decade of institutional memory with a small, opaque team of external engineers, [[2025-06-13|leaving civil society to attempt to archive the scattered knowledge]]. Now, months later, the administration announces Tech Force as if it's a breakthrough innovation. There is also a structural tension between talent acquisition and traditional norms of bureaucratic neutrality. Unlike USDS, Tech Force allows private-sector technologists to serve temporarily without mandatory divestment, expecting many to return to their companies afterward. This flexibility is essential for attracting senior technical talent, whose compensation structures make full divestment unattractive. However, it raises clear conflict-of-interest concerns. The key question is which safeguards apply to new staff coming from companies like Palantir. The core operational challenge lies in the credibility and enforcement of strict recusal and ethics mechanisms in concrete procurement and policy decisions. In any case, the DOGE legacy is increasingly clear: messy, chaotic, institutionally destructive, and ultimately dependent on an alliance (Musk-Trump) that collapsed within months. Early enthusiasm for DOGE (including my own interest in the bias-for-action energy) looks naive in retrospect. The administration that destroyed working civic tech programs is now trying to rebuild them from scratch. That's not efficiency. That's waste.