A few weeks ago, a member of the new leadership announced they’d be reaching out to workers to discuss their recent “technical wins”, in order to better understand how the organization worked. The stress on “technical wins” to a cross-functional organization felt significant to me; it also felt significant that most of the sessions seemed to be getting scheduled with folks who’d only recently joined government — probationary employees. Just to state the obvious, this isn’t what you do when you want to understand how your organization works; it is what you do when you’re preparing to slash the size of your workforce. As you might imagine, this caused no small amount of panic across the agency, including within 18F. The new leadership hadn’t communicated these plans to anyone before making their announcement, which left 18F’s own leaders and supervisors frantically working to fill in the information void. Shortly after the announcement, I started hearing about folks who’d had their meetings, but that they didn’t meet with the director who said they’d be conducting the interviews. Instead, they found themselves on a call with people who wouldn’t say where they worked in government; in a few cases, some people wouldn’t disclose their last names, or any part of their names.

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