‘Triggered’ No More: Fed Tech Arm Deletes ‘Inclusion Bot’ Page After Musk Takeover

The federal government’s central computer programming office was one of the most defiantly left-wing units in all of government, but an Elon Musk lieutenant has taken the reins, and the unit — which engaged in far-left self-indulgence throughout the first Trump administration — is coming to heel.

Staff members have deleted code such as an “inclusion bot” that monitored employees’ messages to chide them for using “racist” terms like “peanut gallery,” a Daily Wire review of code changes showed. Also deleted was a “psychological safety” page warning web developers of the many ways they could be “triggered” while working their high-paid, white-collar jobs.

The General Services Administration’s (GSA) Technology Transformation Service (TTS), and its major component 18F, were once so hijacked by left-wing extremism that they risked the security of a million Americans by falsifying information in the belief that a legally-required security feature was racist, according to a government audit.

TTS/18F is a sister group of the U.S. Digital Service, a White House office that was repurposed as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. On January 24, GSA announced that Thomas Shedd, previously an engineer for Musk’s Tesla, was taking over TTS. Musk is expected to turn his personal focus to GSA, which handles government-wide functions such as real estate, soon.

18F’s logo on X still dedicates more space to the transgender flag than to its own name. But it tracks its code publicly on Github, and logs show the swift deletion of an improbable portion of its code dedicated not to its actual mission, but to flamboyant displays of internal virtue-signaling.

It turned off its “inclusion bot,” which spied on workers’ Slack messages to chide them for using phrases like “drop-dead date” (lecture: “can trigger”), “ninja” (“We want to show respect towards cultural traditions”), “lame” (“arose as a derogatory reference to people with disabilities”), “like crack” (“discriminatory policies that target Black people”), “no problemo” (“arose as a way of devaluing Spanish in favor of an ‘English-only’ United States”), and “guys” (“can make people who do not identify as ‘guys’ feel excluded”).

It deleted a lengthy section of its employee handbook describing how when talking at a meeting, speakers should first describe their appearance so any blind listeners would know if there was sufficient racial diversity.

The document included examples like, “Greetings. I’m Madison, my pronouns are she/they and I’m a middle-aged white woman with an androgynous appearance” and “I’m a brown-skinned black woman with medium length kinky hair.”

(In the screenshots, red and subtraction signs signal that the code has been deleted.)

TTS / Github

It removed a page that said employees should only participate in events where “there are no all white or all male panels,” where “there is a code of conduct with an incident response plan,” and where “participants have a place to share their pronouns.”

It got rid of a rule that emojis must be “in line with our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and “consent” provided if they depicted a person.

It changed linked text to obscure (but did not remove) a page showing how “diversity” actually meant racially segregated workgroups called “affinity groups.”.

18F handbook

While Trump has ordered federal employees to stop working from home, 18F has taken the opposite to an extreme, saying that even when most people were working in an office together, they should not sit in the same room for a meeting, because it might make remote employees feel “othered” for joining by webcam.

It changed its policy of hiring based on “lived experiences” to one based on “Merit Principles.” Equitable hiring meant, in practice, queers colonizing the government agency at a statistically unlikely rate that seemed more like nepotism.

18F’s code on GitHub lists “members” of the organization, including:

Cordelia Yu/GoFundMe

Cordelia Yu, who LinkedIn says is “the Director of Experience Design for the Office of Regulatory and Oversight Systems in the Technology Transformation Services/GSA and an independent researcher at the intersection of social justice, public policy, and democratic theory. They help organizations build inclusive teams to navigate gnarly institutional drama.”  Colleagues funded his 2022 “gender-affirming surgery.” Yu’s blog used the “the 18F project reflection template” to state: “Goals for the last three months: Turn a penis into a p****.”

LinkedIn

Aviva Oskow (she/they), “Brooklyn-based, multidisciplinary designer with a passion for social activism … She is a Principal Product Designer at 18F” who studied “anti-racist equity design.”

LinkedIn

Davida Marion (she/they), a TTS engineer interested in “organizations that value and prioritize their employee experience, especially if they’re providing a positive footprint in the world.”

X

Anne Petersen (they/them), is a graphic designer who wrote in 2023: “Hi: my name is Anne and my pronouns are they/them. My name or appearance should not lead to a presumption of gender. Your assumption may harm me whether or not you intend it to.” She complained about the lack of bathrooms for nonbinary people.”

X

Mel Choyce-Dwan (she/they), 18F product designer and speaker at “Lesbians who tech (queer|inclusive|badass).”

The Daily Wire previously obtained records showing that TTS engaged in open resistance during the first Trump term. After Trump won election in 2016, TTS employees attended “the most partisan meeting [one had] ever attended in government.” Employees said Trump’s victory made them fear for their “safety,” and their morals compelled them to “speak[] truth to power.”

The internal records show that employees said they should be able to keep getting paid while refusing to work on policies they didn’t personally agree with. Then-TTS Director Dave Zvenyach initially told them that was inappropriate, but after employees browbeat him for being white, he recanted and said his initial guidance must have sounded “totally ridiculous.”

Employee Yoz Grahame (“SFO, he/him”) wrote, “It falls to all of us in the organisation, but most of all to those of us who feel safer than others, to uphold our diversity practices, continually improve them, and spread them throughout government.”

Only President Trump’s second term in office has caused them to finally surrender.

Read The Daily Wire’s previous series on TTS:

Part 1: Feds Jeopardized Security Of 1M Americans’ Online Accounts, Citing ‘Equity’

Part 2: Federal Tech Arm Had Pattern Of ‘Gross Mismanagement’ Before ‘Equity’-Induced Cybersecurity Fiasco

Part 3: Federal Agency Focused On Leftist Politics And Pronouns As ‘Gross Mismanagement’ Put Cybersecurity At Risk

Part 4: Chat Records Reveal Epic Meltdown In Federal Agency After Trump Win