@aaronsnow.net
Led 18F/TTS and the Canadian Digital Service. Presidential Innovation Fellow, Georgetown's Beeck Center, VoProPartners. 206 for life, unlikely to shut up about the Cavs. The dadjokes don't stop just b/c they've grown & gone. https://aaronsnow.net/hi
I've never heard a Bad Bunny song in my life until today, and I haven't understood Spanish since I was a senior in high school. But that halftime show was just brilliant. Joyous, awesome. 10/10.
Carter FWIW your sentence should end "... in North America." His crowds in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries are gigantic.
The Cavs halftime show.
What??!?!??!
#NBA
Cleveland will hold a counter-protest at Huntington Bank Field, running 1995 clips of people booing, pulling the chairs out of Municipal and burning Art Model in effigy, soundtrack by Nirvana and Trent Reznor
Shot: "The last [18F] report urged the courts to 'start small.'"
Chaser: "In mid-2022, the administrative office awarded a five-year, $298 million contract to General Dynamics Information Technology."
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
I see I can count on you to be a contributor to my inevitable side hustle slash passion project justhotelbathroomreviews dot com. Gold star if you also report back on the (nearly always inadequate) lighting for the mirror and the (frequently over-softened) water hardness
If we're going to make people prepare and file taxes, it should be free and easy. IRS Direct File does this, with sky-high customer satisfaction numbers.
Nobody asked for Americans to need tax preparers or filers at all.
Direct File is now open source. Finally.
A short, personal post about why: chrisgiven.com/2025/05/dire...
Massive kudos to the Direct File team for pulling this off and showing their commitment to transparency and earning trust.
We have some news to share with you. 🥄
Today we took legal action to challenge our termination, filing an appeal with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. We did this because we believe the elimination of 18F violated safeguards that exist to protect a nonpartisan civil service.
How did The Rising not show up in this episode? Please say it's because it's getting its own ep!
Outstanding thread for Canada's Election Day
RIP Richie Havens, who died 12 years ago today. Boy, this cover hits differently now youtu.be/JltNLkh03ME?...
A sign that says: Tom's bad dad jokes, day 1808 Today is April Fool's Day Believe nothing and trust no one. Just like any other day.
A guy in our neighborhood has been posting a dad joke in their front yard every day since the pandemic started, and he chose today to get violent
I think about this story every time someone tells me they think our federal government is too big and bloated.
There was, it turned out, almost nothing that was used by almost nobody. In fact when they tried to cut back on some legal industry specific features, they got enormous blowback and had to backtrack. Word was on everyone's desktops, so it had to be many things to many people — a price of ubiquity.
Sure enough, when they dug into how people used Word, they found that the vast majority of users only used about 20% of Word's features.
But **everyone used a different 20%.**
The big knock on Office, and especially Word, was that it was too bloated. Too many features, such a huge install footprint, so wasteful. If you're old enough you remember.
The "bloated" din got so loud that the team conducted a big customer research study to ask the question: what should we cut?
At the time (for reasons not pertinent to this story), MS Office was ubiquitous. Its market share was basically 100%. But being on everyone's desktop didn't mean popular sentiment was also sky high. It was the tool that almost everyone had and used, like it or not. Some people loved to hate it.
A quick story about big "bloated" systems that people love to hate.
When I was at Microsoft a million years ago, I had a friend on the MS Word team who told me this one. (I got the details second-hand; MSFT friends, please correct me.)
18F had already saved the US government over a billion dollars in cost avoidance by the time I left in early 2017. No doubt it and TTS have saved much more since then -- all for the cost of a couple hundred civil servants' comp and benefits annually.
@alt18f.bsky.social saved taxpayers billions, modernized digital services, and made government work better. 💡Now, DOGE has shut it down—eliminating projects that served voters, refugees, military personnel, and more. Read about 18F’s impact ⬇️
🔗 www.wethebuilders.org/posts/what-i...
#altgov #18f
18F story behind my favorite government website:
www.ustaxcourt.gov/dawson.html
I'm told some DC AUSAs got those pizza-threats too. Absolutely beyond the pale.
(1/3) It needs repeating: in 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons to Russia in return for the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.
You might know us from the guides we have put together, like the de-risking guide and the UX guide. Governments all around the world have used them to make services more accessible and add more value to the public — all while saving millions of dollars. You can still find them here: 18f.org/guides/
What happens when you force mission-driven, impact-craving public servants out of their job, their career?
I have no idea. I don’t think they all pack it in and go work for Fortune 500s. Somebody who could harness their energy and experience would reap big benefits.
18F alum here. While I appreciate the well-deserved attention the 18F team is getting, let's address a fundamental misunderstanding of why 18F was so effective in working with other govt agencies to improve their digital services and why starting a consulting company is not a substitute. 1/
You should know that a big part of 18F's work was to make sure multi-million to multi-*hundreds*-of-millions dollar contracts at fed *and* state level didn't go to shitty enterprise IT consultancies that *repeatedly* delivered tech that didn't work, was late, or didn't even do what it needed to
