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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as he meets with county sheriffs during a listening session in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017.
President Donald Trump has cut an office created by President Obama to improve federal use of technology even faster than the rest of the U.S. government, a new report says.
Known as 18F, the unit within the General Services Administration has fewer than half the 300 workers it had 18 months ago, according to a report on Fedscoop, a website that tracks tech news in government.
The reported 18F attrition rate during the government’s last fiscal year, ended in September, outpaced that of the federal payroll as a whole, other figures show.
According to a report last month from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the federal government employed 2.088 million workers on Sept. 30, 2017, down slightly from 2.097 million a year earlier.
Obama created 18F after website problems slowed initial sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act. The office was tasked with getting government departments to adopt more user-friendly technologies.
Since then, though, other efforts have sprung up outside of government to help improve American’s access to online services.
One, called Code for America, has implemented technology-improvement projects that it says have reduced the average time to fill out applications for some federal and state services.
Read the full report on the GSA’s 18F office here.
