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 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.

To me, that's the most important goal of devops tools teams in practice:

"Internal team, what's your current greatest pain point?" -> Make that easier / faster / better

Some people want a leaner government, but they also want that achieved with care and thoughtfulness by domain experts. Chesterton's fence comes to mind.

This seems unlikely. If even 5% of Trump voters don’t want to see this, that very likely means less than half of voters wanted this. That’s a very small margin to work with. From here in Canada it doesn’t look like this is a popular action to take.

I could be wrong and maybe tons of democrat voters want to see this… But what I’m seeing online indicates otherwise.

No candidate received more than 50% of the votes cast in the last US presidential election.

Okay, what I meant is more like "if only 5% of the largest body of voters don't want what the administration they voted for is doing, it's very possible that more than 50% of all voters combined (regardless of who they voted for) don't want what's happening"

no they didn't.

They voted cuz they like daddy trump, cuz he tells it like it is, or some other similar cult bullshit.

The amount of leopards-eating-face, while satisfying, is also overwhelmingly sad in its significant blast radius for those of us that knew what we were getting into, but had no choice but to go along for the horrible ride.

Yes, this is what was voted in: demolition of the existing adminstrative state, and the collapse of America's reputation as a world leader (to be replaced as the world Bully).

But I hardly think this is what voters actually wanted.

Odd claims and you didn't really support it (I use Google to find everything doesn't matter how well organized the site is). Why do you have inherent bias against public sector tech workers

>My tax dollars are better spent not having a website in most of these cases.

Blame your rep for it then. We don't set the budget. We vote in people we trust are in our best interest to set such spending.

> Why do you have inherent bias against public sector tech workers

huh?

Your comment is flagged now, but I recall you saying seething to the effect of "the idea that a government website is laudable is laughable". There were general sentiments that a government website was naturally disposed to he a chaotic mess. I identified that as a bias against a government website. Aka the workers who work on it.

Sound fcc.gov has not been using the USDS playbook.

The US government was funding Afghan farmers to grow 'crops'. I'm fairly sure that wasn't cotton.

in Seeds Of Terror by Gretchen Peters points out those subsidies helped farmers NOT farm opium for the Taliban. If you think of it from an Afghani farmer's perspective: why would you farm any other crop that pays significantly less per yield when you have a family to feed?

Congress doesn't allow for funding of crops in other counties that compete on the international market.

Seems like they do

It was strawberries.

To be fair, most of the value in a government's site should be on access to its services, not on information. The information is usually important enough that everybody wants to replicate it.

That said, I have close access to the people managing one such portal here in Brazil, and I can't even convince them not to use Google Analytics. So, yeah, it would be great if we could make them use simple and clear text on static files. It's just not the most important "great thing" we can accomplish.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

I don't know. Stuff breaks all the time for other more mundane reasons too. I thought you had some inside info about it.

I'm not an insider. I'm a geophysicist. The USGS earthquake site is one of the sites that I cycle through multiple times a day if I get the opportunity.

I can't remember at time in at least the last 15 years when the site has not worked flawlessly serving data about new and historical seismicity from all over the globe in a way that allowed the user to customize the view to fit their own needs.

I agree with a couple of posters that think this may be an effort to rename the GoM to the GoA since all the place names are missing from the Ocean map and the places names that are present on the USGS topo map are full of stupid errors that suggest that they modified naming of water features and it broke something for their map layer.

As an oil and gas industry person I have to chuckle to think about all the things that have to happen for that industry to ever come into compliance with this bullshit renaming. There are thousands of wells in databases globally named with a Gulf of Mexico nomenclature. That's just the wells. Each of them likely has multiple dozen products with a GoM tag to identify the well it belongs to. There are probably millions of line miles of seismic data from dozens of large and small seismic data acquisition projects, all of which use GoM nomenclature since the standard nomenclature in the industry relates things to a Client, Line, Area, Survey or similar parameters so that if it happened in the Gulf it will have GoM in the name somewhere and in the metadata associated with the project since that is how you geolocate things in the industry. You reference it to an actual physical location known to less than a cm in many cases.

Sounds like a lot of busy work for anyone in the industry and possibly an opportunity for a consultant to step in and handle all the renaming that will need to happen if there is any effort to comply. They'll need to know multiple databases upside down and sideways since each operator manages things their own way. And they'll need to be comfortable sitting idle while the IT guys sort out access permissions for every legacy file and folder once they discover where the data management division has them stored. You'll also be the fall guy if some of the data gets corrupted but, shit happens. Sounds like a sweet gig.

Maybe it has to do with feature remaining. Maybe it's an upstream problem from a vendor dealing with the renaming. Either way it may or may not be DOGE specifically.

You seem resolved to absolve them of any responsibility. What's your undisclosed personal connection to this problem of map layers being deleted and others altered to fit a bullshit executive order?

Give us the inside view from your office chair.

You're mistaken about my intent. I don't think DOGE is competent and I do find Musk's slash and burn approach deeply offensive, ineffective. I hope that more of their stupidity will be exposed and that they will be held to account for wreaking havoc on govt. This is coming from a place of looking for more solid evidence of malfeasance and incompetence, not from a place of looking to absolve them.

I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename, and was interested in understanding whether you had inside info about whether it was the people in DOGE. You have a lot of insightful info in your response, but none that looks like a smoking gun to me like "I know someone at USGS who saw it being done", so to me it looks like an accusation that might not stick. That's all. But we're on the same side here.

>we're on the same side here.

Thanks for your clarifying reply as it helps to understand where you're coming from.

>I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename

As I mentioned earlier up in the thread when you raised concerns about things breaking all the time due to incompetence, this site has a long history of delivering timely information to global users without breaking. When massive changes like the ones that we observe happen which affect how information is delivered those things are routinely announced in advance and users are provided an opportunity to use the "upgraded" version of the service and submit observations about usability, etc so that there is ample time to take user input before it goes live, replacing the old method of data delivery and/or display.

These changes happened between breakfast that morning and early afternoon with no announcements to users that anything on the site would be changed. All these display options disappeared and in their place we initially had a single layer with no place name information at all. A user would need to know some geography in order to be able to figure where the new quakes were occurring.

Sadly enough, that means that some users would see a nice map overlay with dots on it but would not know where those events occurred due to deficiencies in their education.

Since that first set of deletions, another layer was added, the USGS Topo layer and that layer has since been updated to rename a large body of water to Gulf of America and that is the label that appears when the site loads. There are place names, roads, terrain, rivers, etc in that layer so it is easier for even the non-geography nerds to determine where an event occurs relative to their own location.

Other changes have happened and from the changes it is reasonable to conclude that the persons making the changes did not have experience using the GIS software that enables all these useful displays. With that in mind it becomes increasingly unlikely that regular USGS employees made these changes since there obviously are people there at the agency who have all the skills needed to quickly change things without breaking them and the normal process of notifying users of upcoming site changes was not followed.

Overall I think it is unfortunate that you have so little trust in federal government employees. I have a dog in the hunt so I have a window into how things work at the federal level. My spouse has had a decades long career in a federal agency and I can tell you that the individual people in the agency are not usually the problem.

Every time there is a new administration that new administration has the opportunity to nominate new leadership for all the departments. You already know this and have seen it in action. The positions are seen as an opportunity to promote the agenda of the new administration and to reward those who helped them be elected. Too often we see people installed as agency heads who have no background domain experience or worse, they have experience in sectors that did not benefit from following agency guidelines about handling federal monies. They are there to shake things up and they bring a list of things that must be changed to fit the new agenda.

The agency employees have to adjust everything that they do to fit the new agenda and this causes inefficiencies in the system as all existing employees have to be trained on how the new director wants the agency to work and on the new director's guidelines and agenda. I can say that it is increasingly common for an agency to need to educate new directors about what they are constitutionally allowed to do so that some of the new agenda does not force nor does it allow anyone downstream to break any existing laws.

Governments are large. Any time something gets large there is the possibility that inefficiencies develop.

The decision to describe government employees as incompetent is inaccurate in general though I'm sure there are exceptions. You think there are "lots" of incompetent people in government and at any description of "lots" between a couple and thousands you are likely correct.

Don't paint them all with the same brush. Maintaining a government position involves annual training and recertifications, deciphering the meaning behind small changes in the text of rules and guidelines that they must follow, and understanding how to manage groups of people efficiently so that everyone stays engaged in their assigned tasks and meets targets assigned by agency "leadership".

My own definition of "lots" based on years of observations and conversations with someone inside a large federal agency is that the least competent are frequently found at the top of the agency and they bring their own group of managers into the agency in order to pivot to their new agenda. Those lower on the food chain must attempt to adjust or seek a transfer to an agency with less induced dysfunction or to a private entity.

Thanks for explaining further.

I don't personally think that rate of competence in federal workforce is worse than any other big organization, especially outside of politically appointed leadership. Massive leadership changes can still create operational disruption by offering the opportunity for career brownnosers to demonstrate their fealty by empowering them to force their zeal onto others. I wonder if something like that happened here, where some MAGAt within USGS staff decided to skip a bunch of review process either to make themselves look good or out of fear that they'd look like they're resisting orders.

Yes. I was walking outside and realized I was wet. Definitely not the rain, there must be a kid with a squirt gun running around.

DOGE are not the only cloud in the sky, is what I'm saying.

We know that the administration ordered the name change for the Gulf of Mexico, and immediately following that order the data layers via USGS broke. Probably because someone (or some organization of geniuses) tried to change it directly without consulting anyone.

Trying to sea-lion your way through this convo after the person replying to you gave a detailed breakdown of the situation is gross. Don't be a sycophant.

See my response above. My intent to look for more info was misread as defense of DOGE. They're a bunch of clowns in a town that has lots of other clowns all entranced to the same person. There are lots of people who could have messed this up as well.

It seems to me that the decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico isn't the crux of the matter. Whether this decision is useful/justified is a totally different matter.

Isn't renaming a place rather common? Even nations were recently renamed (Swaziland, Macedonia).

Therefore the software (database included) managing the data (used by the USGS earthquake's) probably offers a way to rename a place.

Is there any documentation exposing how to perform such a renaming? Is it up to date and accessible (or did someone modify/hide it in order to annoy DOGE)? Was it not strictly followed by the person(s) who tried to rename this Gulf? Are all technical thingies associated to such a renaming free of major bugs?

If all answers to those questions are "yes" then the person(s) who tried to rename is the sole culprit.

If there is a single "no" then at least another person should be put into scrutiny.

I completely agree with the hypothesis that it has to do with feature renaming. DOGE isn't the person who asked renaming, it's POTUS. I don't think DOGE looks competent. I also don't think that they're the only incompetent people in govt.

AFAIK DOGE's personnel is young, and therefore probably cannot tackle the pressure from the POTUS cabinet ("you have a few days to establish everything we asked for"), hence the "Move fast and break things" effect.

Probably broke when changing the Gulf of Mexico name.

I agree. That would explain all the place names for water features being broken.

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.

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...

Doesn't work in what sense though?

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?

The VCs trying to build a new federal government is ironically what we're seeing here.

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.

and accepting of their particular safety records I'm sure.

come back and argue after you take your Tesla down the Dragon's Tail without touching the steering wheel

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

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.