Dave Luetger

“you cannot kill me in a way that matters”

It’s been one year since the elimination of 18F. 🧵

MAKE AN EMERGENCY DONATION to Trans Continental Pipeline right now.

They are a Colorado based org that helps trans people relocate there and they are overwhelmed with requests. CO borders KS, and TCP has the infrastructure to help get people out.

GO DONATE.

tcpipeline.org

Job Opening: Sr Experience Specialist (Remote, US Based)

My org @nngroupux.bsky.social is hiring for a UX role. If you know someone who might be interested, let them know!

www.nngroup.com/news/item/jo...

Engineering Director - Digital Services (0932) The Office of the City Administrator and its 25+ divisions and departments operate core internal and public-facing services in San Francisco.   The Office of the City Administrator’s Mission and Visio...

hallo, I am hiring again! - SF Digital Services is looking for a new Engineering Director careers.sf.gov/role/?id=374...

This reports directly to me, & I’m looking for a practical & flexible technical expert with excellent communication & coaching skills, who is excited to do both. More below...

Americans have a habit of trying to compare all authoritarianism to Nazi Germany. I think in some ways i think it is comforting to view authoritarianism as a foreign ideology. If you want to understand our current authoritarian moment, you need to look to our own past, not to Europe 1/x

Public digital services need to be *so much better* than anything the market offers. You can't switch. You can't get fed up and choose to pay a bit more at Ocado than Sainsbury's because the UX is better. You can't opt out of public services because you're digitally excluded.

From Airbnb to the White House: Joe Gebbia is reshaping the government in Trump’s image The president decimated the U.S. government’s digital design agencies and replaced them with a personal propaganda czar.

I joined design experts in speaking with the writer of Fast Company’s recent article on Joe Gebbia as the first U.S. Chief Design Officer, sharing concerns related to America by Design and its failure to design for America.

www.fastcompany.com/91458973/chi...

This is exactly what I mean when I say that UX has no value when the business model is not "make a thing people want and sell it for more than it costs to make."

The top 10 most profitable tech business models these days are different kinds of scam. You don't need design for that.

"What took generations to build is being dismantled in months, and with it goes not just expertise but what remains of the shared American faith in expertise itself."

they'll kill you then steal food from your neighbors for complaining

In which Matt explains how once again our supposedly amazing “National Design Studio” fails to use simple web tools that have been around since 1995

Russ Vought (piss man) tweet about doing piss man shit: The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.

NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇

Trump admin launches US Tech Force to recruit temporary workers after shedding thousands this year Some of the recruits to government service will be on leaves of absence from private sector companies while working for government — a setup that raises ethical questions about conflicts of interest.

Here's the free tip about federal digital service surfe teams, bringing out of context staff & throwing them at problems solves very little unless they have a mandate, expertise in the areas where they are parachuting in.

Most of all without knowledge transfer it'll be wasted effort.

Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera. Behind closed doors in Washington, top advisers made a series of decisions that had devastating repercussions for the poorest country on earth. We went to South Sudan and found people who died as a re...

This summer, Brett Murphy, @peterdicampo.bsky.social and I went to South Sudan, where the U.S. had been supporting the response to a historic cholera outbreak in the world’s poorest country before pulling the plug.

We found shuttered clinics and dead bodies. www.propublica.org/article/usai...

Remembering Alice Wong On the one-month anniversary of her passing, we honor the acclaimed disability justice advocate, writer, shit-talker, and friend to so many.

it's taken me a while to put this together. but I hope, if you've never heard of her, or even if you have, this tribute to Alice Wong buoys your heart and gives you a good sense of who this incredible person was. www.coyotemedia.org/remembering-...

“It’s an insult to designers, it’s an insult to people who build with thought and care, and it’s an insult to your intelligence as a consumer of websites.”

Please read Matt’s thread.

Stop doing UX cheerleading Design is being hijacked to create legitimacy for bad ideas. We can do better.

No one wants to build bad products. But in an industry where programmers implement features to order, it can be hard to shake that feeling.

This is how orgs see the ROI of UX: as a soothing function to tell everyone they're doing a good job. And as a scapegoat, when we finally learn otherwise.

What the National Design Studio Will Learn the Hard Way Elizabeth Goodspeed's latest op-ed in the Architect's Newspaper about the White House's so-called national design studio gets one thing exactly right: the problem being solved here isn’t real. There ...

Some brief thoughts on the so-called "national design studio" makingpublicwork.com/what-the-nat...

"The existing NDS sites therefore behave more like billboards than public infrastructure. ... What makes this shift hardest to justify is that the federal government already had ... [an] office whose job was to actually make government UX work better. From 2014 to 2025, that work lived inside 18F."

I am sorry to report that the only solution to poor government digital services is the hard work of improving them.

“…not all human needs can be contorted into a profit-generating activity.”

After 15 years across local→state→federal, a simple truth keeps coming back: people don’t want innovation. They want things that work.

New essay on the blog: Stuff should work.

blog.ronbronson.com/stuff-should...

I have struggled so much to tell “the story” of what the hell went down at the beginning of the year, even to my closest friends and family. John summarizes it well in this thread.

My talk for DotGov Design 2025 I had the opportunity to speak at the 2025 DotGov Design conference. My talk was titled “Design for Accessibility and Inclusiveness in Civic Space” which covered topics such as why it's so important t...

Last week I hade the opportunity to speak at @dotgovdesign.bsky.social about accessibility in the civic tech space, why we should all start using assistive tech, and why improving our skills as practitioners is so critically important in this moment. jaredcunha.com/blog/dotgov-...

Procurement Specialist at U.S. Digital Response About U.S. Digital Response U.S. Digital Response (USDR) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to helping governments and civic institutions respond quickly and efficiently to support the...

Come work for me! I'm hiring at @usdigitalresponse.org—somebody with experience as a government procurement FTE who wants to join me in providing pro bono support to governments in the U.S. who want to move to a user-centered, Agile software procurement approach. Remote, full-time, $145–165k.

“…‘I live in this town and I am in favor of this new housing’ as a valid answer, and so the notion that ‘nobody wants this’ becomes circular. Anybody who wants it isn’t really part of the community.”

GitHub - IRS-Public/fact-graph: Fact Graph Fact Graph . Contribute to IRS-Public/fact-graph development by creating an account on GitHub.

The IRS has published a second open source repository (Direct File was the first). Kudos to the team continuing the work. github.com/IRS-Public/f...

No, keep posting! 💀

Direct File died under Trump. Meet the creators planning for its second life After building the IRS’s free electronic filing tool, the Economic Security Project’s Future of Tax Filing fellows are writing a playbook for it to “come back someday” — and pushing for more.

“I hope that [future administrations] pick the tax work back up where it was, which was a lot of momentum. And I hope they take that same energy across the rest of the government. I’m a firm believer, government can be a force for good in people’s lives."