The Government Just Got Musked: The Great 18F Deletion
How the Trump administration, with a little help from Musk, is dismantling government tech in the name of efficiency.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if Elon Musk ran the federal government, wonder no more.
The Trump administration just pulled a late-night, mass layoff of technologists at 18F, a group formed to modernize government services—effectively deleting them, just as Musk hinted on X. Because nothing says “efficiency” like firing the people responsible for making government work better.
Let’s recap: 18F was a government-internal tech consultancy, a group of programmers who built systems like IRS Direct File (so you don’t have to pay TurboTax for the privilege of filing your own taxes), weather.gov (which keeps you from relying on your uncle’s knee pain for forecasts), and covid.gov (which helped people get tests during the pandemic). In short, they were actually making government services functional.
Naturally, they had to go.
Musk’s Government Playbook: Chaos Is the Point
The layoff announcement came at midnight on a Friday—because what better way to modernize government than with the precision of a bad phishing scam? Some employees were even fired twice in the span of a month, reinstated, and then laid off again. It’s the HR equivalent of turning something off and on again to see if it works.
Meanwhile, employees were spammed with cryptic emails about a “Deferred Resignation Program” that sounded like a mix of a severance offer and a Saw movie ultimatum. Then came the interrogation rounds, where nameless DOGE officials showed up late, asked vague questions like “What’s your superpower?” and left. Answering “stability” would’ve been the wrong move.
For those unfamiliar, DOGE is the Department of Government Efficiency, an Orwellian-named entity that has, so far, proven about as efficient as a Tesla Cybertruck’s windows. Their signature move? Disrupt, destabilize, then wonder why nothing works. It’s like Twitter’s collapse, but with the added bonus of national security risks.
When ‘Efficiency’ Means Making Government Worse
The playbook is clear: Claim you’re making government “leaner,” fire people en masse, then sit back and let things break.
If weather.gov stops working, people will turn to unreliable private weather services.
If tax filing tools fail, Americans will be forced back into the arms of predatory tax-prep companies.
It’s a privatization dream, sold under the guise of efficiency.
The irony? Musk and his allies love to claim the government is inefficient—yet they’re the ones making it worse on purpose.
Firing experts, gutting infrastructure, and leaving federal agencies scrambling isn’t modernization. It’s sabotage. And the best part? When things inevitably fail, they’ll blame “big government” and demand even more cuts.
Make It Make Sense
When you run a country like a chaotic tech startup, expect everything to crash. The mass deletion of 18F isn’t about efficiency—it’s about control. The government has been Muskified: lay off the workers, break the system, and call it innovation.
But when your government services start glitching like a bad Twitter update, just remember: this is by design.
That’s the point.
Zahead, Chaos Analyst.