When 18F was shut down, I had to decide what to do with it.
Not the shutdown itself. That was entirely outside my control. But what I did with the experience of it. What I let it become. That part was mine.
18F was the best professional experience of my career. Not because it was easy or comfortable, but because it was rare: a place where the work genuinely mattered, where the people around me were mission-driven in ways that didn’t feel performed, and where the problems we were solving were real problems with real consequences for real people. We were trying to make the federal government work better. Not perfectly. That was never the claim. But meaningfully better. And in many places, we did.
The night I heard 18F had been shut down, I moved through a few different reactions before I found the one that stuck.
The first was anger. That one was easy to understand. The decision felt wrong. Not just strategically or organizationally, but morally. The work had value. The people had given years of their careers to it. The contributions were documented, measurable, real. None of that seemed to matter to the people making the decision. Anger is a reasonable response to that kind of experience. It’s the emotion that says this is not okay, and that’s usually true.
But anger has a short arc. You can’t sustain it without cost, and eventually it either finds somewhere useful to go or it starts eating the person carrying it.
Grief came next. I think grief is the more honest emotion for this kind of loss, not the death of a person, but the loss of something you helped build, something that had meaning beyond the work itself. There’s no clean word for mourning an institution, but that’s what it was. The grief didn’t mean I thought everything had been perfect, or that I was naive about the politics that had always surrounded 18F. It just meant the loss was real. Honoring that felt more accurate than rushing past it.
The third thing, though. That’s the one I had to watch.
Cynicism is quieter than anger and more durable than grief. It arrives with a kind of logic: You built something and it got taken away. The system is designed to grind things like this down. Why would you invest at that level again? It’s seductive because it sounds like wisdom. It dresses up self-protection as realism.
But cynicism doesn’t actually protect you from anything. It just pre-emptively devalues the things you might lose so the loss hurts less. And in the process, it makes you less capable of doing the kind of work that made 18F worth grieving in the first place.
That’s where I kept returning to a line from Marcus Aurelius:
“The best revenge is not to be like that.”
The context Aurelius was writing from is different. He was navigating the particular cruelties of Roman political life, but the observation travels well. What he understood is that the most corrosive effect of harm isn’t what the other person did to you. It’s what you do to yourself in response. The behavior that hurt you becomes the behavior you justify. The disregard that you experienced becomes the disregard you carry toward the next thing. You lose the argument before it starts.
In leadership, I’ve watched this pattern destroy teams, usually in the same shape: someone gets burned once, and the distrust it produces outlives the person who caused it, landing on people who had nothing to do with the original wrong. The damage keeps compounding long after the event that started it is over.
What Aurelius is pointing at isn’t passivity. It’s not permission to ignore what happened or pretend the harm wasn’t real. Accountability and clarity about what went wrong still matter, and in this case, so does saying plainly that 18F’s value is worth defending.
But there’s a real difference between advocating clearly for something you believe in and letting resentment define your behavior and choices. Advocacy is integrity. Letting resentment steer you is a slow erosion of it, dressed up as principle.
The decision I kept coming back to was simpler than it might sound: I didn’t want the people who shut down 18F to determine who I became on the other side of it. That felt like giving them too much. They had already taken the organization. That was enough.
The work 18F was built on: human-centered design, respect for the people government serves, the belief that public institutions can work better and that skilled, committed people can help them do that. That’s not stored in a building or a budget line. It travels with the people who believe in it.
So the question I keep returning to is not about them. It’s about me. Am I continuing to become someone who does that kind of work, wherever I am? Am I staying curious rather than closed? Am I bringing the same care to the next problem that I brought to the ones at 18F?
That feels like a more meaningful form of victory than anything else available to me.
It also happens to be the only one I have much control over.
I started writing this before that night was over.