Once, I was part of a team of four people at 18F that saved the Department of Defense $500 million with a single, three-day project. 18F projects saved many millions of dollars as a matter of course, while delivering better results for Americans. Another time I was part of a two-person team (our billing worked out to about half an FTE, as I recall) that partnered with a court for 18 months to help them build, from scratch, an open source case management system to drive the operations of the entire court. The whole thing cost them just a few million bucks, vastly less than they’d been spending on their old system, and today their cost of operating it is a rounding error compared to their old infrastructure costs. All the work 18F did for all their agency partners was open source. Public money should produce public software, for public inspection.

In short, 18F works just how Musk and team pretend that they want government to work. But when his team found it, they destroyed it. 18F’s work is evidence that government works well, which undermines their message that it doesn’t. 18F’s parent agency, the U.S. General Services Administration, turns a profit as an agency. So it has to be destroyed too.