(Daily Wire) A federal tech agency recently caught risking the nation’s cybersecurity by violating rules and lying in the name of “equity” is dominated by a cabal of perpetually triggered leftists obsessed with politics and pronouns, a Daily Wire investigation shows.
The General Services Administration’s (GSA) Technology Transformation Service (TTS) — whose employees have included a self-proclaimed Marxist organizer and a man who identifies as transgender who raised money from colleagues to “void their gender warranty” — spent its time on projects like creating a social justice robot. The efforts came as the unit lost millions of dollars, repeatedly lied, and put the security of sensitive data at risk with wanton noncompliance with basic security rules, according to watchdog reports and other records reviewed by The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire reported last week that GSA’s inspector general found that TTS tricked federal agencies into violating security standards by omitting facial recognition from software designed to lock up highly sensitive information, privately reasoning that such software was racist. It obtained $197 million in part by falsely telling customers and funders that it was compliant with NIST standards that required biometrics. The scandal affected Login.gov, a service to authenticate Americans’ identity before giving access to sensitive data, and in particular the nearly one million accounts that were sold as conforming to higher-level NIST standards which would have required facial recognition. GSA said it was “completely unacceptable” and that it is pursuing discipline.
TTS — which began as a project called 18F that still operates as one of its largest units — matters because of the importance of technology to modern government and because, like other GSA departments, its work fans out into other federal agencies.
President Joe Biden is planning an executive order that would push Login.gov to every American, FCW reported last month. The IRS plans to implement Login.gov to allow Americans to file their taxes directly to it this April, despite concerns by one of the software platform’s own former leaders that it could not handle it. Though the IRS originally planned to use facial recognition technology — which could cut down on billions of dollars of fraud from people filing tax returns in others’ names — it ultimately decided not to.
The Login.gov cyber-vulnerability and deception disclosed this month was just one of a series of serious rule violations, financial losses, and cyber-vulnerabilities that the GSA acknowledged were the result of “gross mismanagement.” But the breakdown also occurred because the unit, which spent only half of its time working on actual billable projects, was consumed with a shocking level of partisanship.
In 2016, the agency’s inspector general slammed 18F for spending more than $4,000 in manpower on “bots” such as one that corrected gendered language in internal messages between employees.
“The ‘Slackbot’ polices a user’s text for the pronouns ‘guys,’ ‘guyz,’ and ‘dudes.’ When the bot detects these pronouns, it prompts the user to consider replacing the pronoun with an option, like ‘team,’” the IG wrote.
Staff only doubled down after being called out, prompting the creation of a far more expansive social justice robot.
“Pretty soon, we realized that we could introduce a lot more language nudges than just ‘guys,’ and we renamed ‘guys bot’ to ‘Inclusion Bot,’” 18F officials wrote in November 2022.
The new bot objects to calling something “nuts” and suggests replacing it with “bananas” because we “want to avoid stigmatizing mental illness.” It discourages saying something is “like crack” because “We want to avoid stigmatizing addiction. Crack cocaine usage has also been racialized, resulting in discriminatory policies that target Black people.”
Users shouldn’t say “no problemo” because it “arose as a way of devaluing Spanish in favor of an ‘English-only’ United States.” And they shouldn’t “circle the wagons” because “this term arose from colonization,” nor “hold down the fort” because “this term arose as a military phrase.” They shouldn’t conduct a “postmortem” because “This term can trigger emotions related to death.”
