We are hearing about more layoffs at TTS today, apparently targeting Talent (including PeopleOps). If so, then what was reputed to be by far the best onboarding experience in the federal government is no more, and TTS is now subject to GSA’s OHRM and really the “HR@OPM” mail server that seems to be calling the actual shots.
We’re hearing that other parts of GSA are affected as well, possibly including Fleet and some parts of FAS. Information is still sketchy at this point.
I am happy to hear that one rumor isn’t true: that the TTS Slack has also been taken down. There are 11 years of 18F and TTS history, discussions, examples, links, etc., in there. I can’t tell you how many times in my year or so at 18F I searched for a topic on slack and found buried treasure from earlier iterations of the org. It was like stumbling into the archives of original High Queens and Kings of Narnia and seeing their actual conversations.
Meanwhile, the new alumni collective continues to figure out how to provide each other with mutual aid. A colleague walked me through some incredible social architecture planning to help envision how the greater 18F and TTS alumni and diaspora community might self organize in such as way so as to provide maximum support for the ideas and projects people are working on.
Also meanwhile, those of us fired at midnight on February 28 have some important deadlines coming up, and once again I appreciate my colleagues from the 18F leadership team in exile who discussed how we ourselves are losing track of critical cutoff dates and milestones for filing objections or complaints a well as required processes for any federal employee caught up in a RIF and on administrative leave in the meantime. We are reminding each other to exhaust our flexible spending accounts, and so on.
Folks have volunteered to lead each other through various process involved either with following through on all the ramifications of this illegal firing and targeting of our team or with planning for the future come what may. I so appreciate this form of support.
Out of this, it looks like some sort of nice countdown checklist may emerge that we can put together as a group and provide to each other so that nobody gets left behind or misses a deadline that may affect their rights or their ability to be compensated, get clawed-back pay, or any other form of restitution that may occur in the future.
At the same time, I find myself stuck on the thought that given what has been wrecked and disrupted by this toxic regime, any fantasies about going back to the way things were, what I call the First Thing, are really nonstarters. People didin’t like things before that much anyway, which is partly why they opted for chaos over inertia.
It’s also getting clearer day by day that this Second Thing is really really bad, not what was promised, not what people want, and materially worse than the First Thing that people were already pretty damn tired of.
The job now is to start working on a Third Thing. More about that as we all figure it out.
Leave a Reply