How 18F Changed the Way Government Agencies Develop Technology

Updated

18F changed government technology development by embedding agile, user-centered practices directly into agency teams rather than delivering one-off products. According to 18F's own account, its work centered on modernizing software development processes, improving public-facing services like websites and applications, and digitizing internal systems. The clearest evidence of a methodology shift comes from the Federal Election Commission: CIO Alex Palmer said 18F "helped the IT team and business owners get involved in the agile development process. It changed our whole methodology." That outcome—business owners and IT staff working together in agile cycles—is the mechanism to look for when assessing whether 18F-style work took hold at an agency.

What 18F actually did

18F described three categories of work:

  • Modernized software development processes — moving agencies toward iterative, agile delivery instead of long specification-then-build cycles.
  • Improved public-facing services — websites and applications that citizens interact with directly.
  • Digitized and streamlined internal systems — back-office workflows converted from paper or legacy processes.

The FEC quote is the most concrete description of the first category: the change was not a tool or a product but a working method in which business owners participate in agile development alongside IT.

Why the approach changed agency methodology

The FEC example shows the pattern. 18F engaged with the agency, brought IT and business owners into the same agile process, and the agency reported that its "whole methodology" changed. The distinguishing feature is involvement of non-technical business owners in development cycles—when that happens, requirements come from the people who run the programs, and delivery happens in short iterations rather than a single handoff.

For a practical test of whether this pattern applies to a given project: ask whether program staff attend sprint reviews, whether work ships in increments shorter than a year, and whether the IT team and business owners share one backlog. If the answer is no on all three, the 18F-style method likely did not take root.

Projects 18F worked on

18F's page lists the following engagements, several of which it labels as interrupted:

Agency Project
NOAA Weather.gov
IRS IRS Direct File
Treasury, Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau TTB application modernization
FVAP.gov Federal Voting Assistance Program
Office of Refugee Resettlement In Care Case Management System for Unaccompanied Children
Maryland Department of Labor Maryland Family Leave and Medical Insurance
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Ninth Circuit website redesign
U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs
Election Assistance Commission EAC web strategy
Council on Environmental Quality Council on Environmental Quality
Permitting Council Permitting Council

The page presents these under "Interrupted projects," meaning work that stopped when 18F was dismantled. If you are tracing the status of any of these services, treat the 18F involvement as ended and check the agency's own site for current ownership.

Current status and where the resources are

18F states it was dismantled by DOGE on March 1, 2025, and that it is taking legal action. The team's public materials remain available: 18F says its work belongs to the public and that it has saved its de-risking guide, engineering guide, and other guides, accessible through the "Get the guides" link on 18f.org.

If you need the methodology rather than the projects, those guides are the practical starting point—they encode the de-risking and engineering practices behind the agile shift described above.