What's especially unfortunate is that experienced USDS employees had already achieved the one software engineering task that is basically impossible for a 19-year-old (or a newly hired USDS employee of any age): convincing a federal department manager that using a static website is a great solution — nevermind also publishing all of its source code and documents on a public github.
USDS really did represent the best of the federal government. They modernized hundreds of websites, brought accessibility and mobile access to the forefront, improved usability, and a lot of that work is invisible, slow, internal politics/battles.
Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
I'm not a federal contractor nor employee, and I am a die-hard Pivotal zealot, so absolutely take the following with a grain of pink Himalayan rock salt:
Although overshadowed by Kubernetes elsewhere in the industry, I suspect that Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS)--which the US General Services Administration's (GSA) internal digital transformation consultancy, 18F, adopted[0] in 2015 significantly influenced the software delivery philosophy of the federal government by making trivial heretofore disastrously cumbersome provisioning, staging, and deployment processes. The step away from hand-provisioned virtual machines to elastic, accommodating environments may have made agile development possible in federal offices, bringing our government into the 21st century, only fifteen years late.
I distinctly remember the switch from "here's your VM" to "here's my code," and--as an application developer--I never want to go back.
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
The most likely reason since it broke so many water features.
Pretty obvious that they aren't sending their best to do their dirty work. These DoGE guys are ultimately expendable and if things go south for the current administration the DoGE guys will need to be absorbent enough to handle all the blame that will fall on them when people begin to be held accountable. They need to be multi-layered Downy guys. The men at the top will slick themselves down with lawyers so it all slides downhill and hang everyone else out to dry once they are past their usefulness date.
This stuff was incredibly valuable when my SO and I were on vacation overseas. Also, I'm sure there are a ton of consular and embassy employees around the world that rely on USGS data. It's just an accident that it's also exporting the work product of the US government overseas.
It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible.
I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
This is so clearly not the case of an underexperienced team trying to accomplish something complicated and failing at it. The goal is to dismantle the government and that's exactly what they're doing.
There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
Oh, I am certain they are trying to destroy things on purpose, but I also think they are terrible at it. For example, watch the scramble as they try to rehire those safe guarding the nuclear arsenal[1]. It's a mess and someone competent could be doing it far better. I don't know if that's a small mercy or not.
Exactly. All of this was stated in advance, in Project 2025 and in tech bro interviews about how much democracy sucks. These people are not subtle, smart, or original; however, they are completely amoral sociopaths who think they can destroy the US and own/control what’s left. I don’t think it’s going to work out as well for them as they think, but in the short and medium term Elon and his shitheels will do a lot of damage, and cause a lot of pain and death.
They are just henchmen following whatever playbook was developed by some reactionary jerks. That’s why Elon and co look for dysfunctional personalities that are easy to control.
The U.S. government is a service with 330 million people who are both users and legal stakeholders, mandated to provide and maintain a variety of services and databases that predate the Internet and personal computing by several decades, and run by a publicly elected executive who is term limited to 8 years. Which Silicon Valley entity do you think comes close to the scope and continuity of service of the U.S. government?
This is a thing someone says if they think Silicon Valley was built in 2005. Semiconductor development built Silicon Valley, and it was not by my relatively limited understanding a "move fast and break things" process.
Move fast and break things started in 2005 which was exactly when Silicon Valley stopped producing companies that could make a profit and instead relied on endless fire hoses of investor cash
Sure, it works great. And if the federal government fails, just call your favorite VC buddies and start a new federal government. Maybe one without one of those pesky constitutions. Why has nobody thought of this?
What's especially unfortunate is that experienced USDS employees had already achieved the one software engineering task that is basically impossible for a 19-year-old (or a newly hired USDS employee of any age): convincing a federal department manager that using a static website is a great solution — nevermind also publishing all of its source code and documents on a public github.
USDS really did represent the best of the federal government. They modernized hundreds of websites, brought accessibility and mobile access to the forefront, improved usability, and a lot of that work is invisible, slow, internal politics/battles.
Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
I'm not a federal contractor nor employee, and I am a die-hard Pivotal zealot, so absolutely take the following with a grain of pink Himalayan rock salt:
Although overshadowed by Kubernetes elsewhere in the industry, I suspect that Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS)--which the US General Services Administration's (GSA) internal digital transformation consultancy, 18F, adopted[0] in 2015 significantly influenced the software delivery philosophy of the federal government by making trivial heretofore disastrously cumbersome provisioning, staging, and deployment processes. The step away from hand-provisioned virtual machines to elastic, accommodating environments may have made agile development possible in federal offices, bringing our government into the 21st century, only fifteen years late.
I distinctly remember the switch from "here's your VM" to "here's my code," and--as an application developer--I never want to go back.
0. See: https://cloud.gov
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Move fast and break things.
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
I believe they deleted all of the map layers because they couldn't figure out how to write "Gulf of America" on them instead of "Gulf of Mexico".
The most likely reason since it broke so many water features.
Pretty obvious that they aren't sending their best to do their dirty work. These DoGE guys are ultimately expendable and if things go south for the current administration the DoGE guys will need to be absorbent enough to handle all the blame that will fall on them when people begin to be held accountable. They need to be multi-layered Downy guys. The men at the top will slick themselves down with lawyers so it all slides downhill and hang everyone else out to dry once they are past their usefulness date.
This stuff was incredibly valuable when my SO and I were on vacation overseas. Also, I'm sure there are a ton of consular and embassy employees around the world that rely on USGS data. It's just an accident that it's also exporting the work product of the US government overseas.
Is this DOGE's doing?
Yes.
It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible.
I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
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That's what you get when you only have a handful of complete juniors reporting directly to a capricious CEO. There needs to be adults in the room.
This is so clearly not the case of an underexperienced team trying to accomplish something complicated and failing at it. The goal is to dismantle the government and that's exactly what they're doing.
There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
Oh, I am certain they are trying to destroy things on purpose, but I also think they are terrible at it. For example, watch the scramble as they try to rehire those safe guarding the nuclear arsenal[1]. It's a mess and someone competent could be doing it far better. I don't know if that's a small mercy or not.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-...
Exactly. All of this was stated in advance, in Project 2025 and in tech bro interviews about how much democracy sucks. These people are not subtle, smart, or original; however, they are completely amoral sociopaths who think they can destroy the US and own/control what’s left. I don’t think it’s going to work out as well for them as they think, but in the short and medium term Elon and his shitheels will do a lot of damage, and cause a lot of pain and death.
They are just henchmen following whatever playbook was developed by some reactionary jerks. That’s why Elon and co look for dysfunctional personalities that are easy to control.
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Move fast and break things is what built Silicon Valley and the modern world. It works, demonstrably.
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.
It works as long as you have investors shoving millions or billions into your behind so you can fix the fuckups
then they are in luck, they have the worlds largest investor behind them (US, Not Musk)
The U.S. government is a service with 330 million people who are both users and legal stakeholders, mandated to provide and maintain a variety of services and databases that predate the Internet and personal computing by several decades, and run by a publicly elected executive who is term limited to 8 years. Which Silicon Valley entity do you think comes close to the scope and continuity of service of the U.S. government?
Oligarchs don't want "government by the people, for the people". They want to own the government and rent it back to the people for massive profits.
This is a thing someone says if they think Silicon Valley was built in 2005. Semiconductor development built Silicon Valley, and it was not by my relatively limited understanding a "move fast and break things" process.
with a not-unsubstantial amount of federal (and CA state) money...
Move fast and break things started in 2005 which was exactly when Silicon Valley stopped producing companies that could make a profit and instead relied on endless fire hoses of investor cash
It works? Are you sure?
Sure, it works great. And if the federal government fails, just call your favorite VC buddies and start a new federal government. Maybe one without one of those pesky constitutions. Why has nobody thought of this?
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Doesn't work in what sense though?
err, Silicon Valley hates to admit it but the Federal government built Silicon Valley...and Tesla.
Yeah. This is the worst example of a lack of self awareness.
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