Government internal consulting team is gone.
Also, Intel needs six more years for that big building.

The Team That Wrote Its Own Resignation Letter

The General Services Administration, or GSA, apparently decided that the internal tech consultancy 18F had solved all of government's digital problems. The team is being eliminated; or, as the official memo will likely read, it is being "right-sized" and "synergized" back into the larger Technology Transformation Services directorate. The fact that the news broke that the GSA would eliminate 18F, according to NextGov, right after 18F posted a rather heartfelt goodbye, A Letter to the American People, suggests a classic corporate communication mishap. The GSA tried to let the team finish their presentation slides before hitting the "End Meeting" button.

We must admire the sheer administrative grace of the whole affair. GSA leadership did not attribute the change to incompetence or malice; they simply acted with the weary patience of someone consolidating two very similar SharePoint sites into one. The team did great work, they achieved their mission, and now they must be absorbed back into the corporate immune system. It is like an employee who successfully fixed the office vending machine and is now being fired because the machine is fixed. This is how the system keeps itself clean; any sign of efficiency is met with swift, bureaucratic optimization.

International Travel Restrictions Are Just a Very Serious Corporate VPN

China has issued a new travel advisory to its leading artificial intelligence researchers and executives, asking them to consider skipping trips to the United States. The Wall Street Journal reports the advice is an attempt to safeguard sensitive technology and corporate know-how from wandering eyes. This is essentially treating the human brain like a flash drive that might get swapped in the airport. The logic is sound from a security standpoint. If your core intellectual property is walking around at a business conference, it is probably going to try to log onto the public Wi-Fi.

It is a new era of talent management where the most valuable employees are also the largest security liability. The Chinese government is just preempting the classic security incident where a tired, jetlagged AI executive connects their laptop to a foreign network and suddenly the whole source code for the next big model gets uploaded to an unsuspecting Dropbox folder. The solution is simple: keep the asset on site, preferably in a windowless room with a snack bar.

Intel's New Office Building Needs Six More Years of Planning

Intel Corporation announced its plan for a $28 billion chip manufacturing complex in Ohio will be taking its time. The project has been delayed until at least 2030, according to Reuters. This is the corporate equivalent of telling the CEO that the new employee coffee machine is on backorder until the next decade. The original timeline was ambitious. We all know that ambitious timelines are the leading cause of project manager gray hair.

A delay of this magnitude is not a failure; it is just a clear sign that the scope of work was never truly defined. Somewhere in the Intel project management department, a poor soul is staring at a Gantt chart that now spans two presidential terms. The chips will be fantastic when they arrive, but at this point, we are less concerned with the transistor count and more interested in the final completion date. Until then, the Ohio fab remains the world's most expensive "Coming Soon" sign.

Briefs

• Waste Disposal (Aesthetic): The most unhinged video wall was built out of old Chromebooks. This is a crucial lesson in corporate recycling; apparently, the only way to get value from e-waste is to turn it into abstract digital art.
• Source Code Leak: A staffer for the Dogecoin Foundation, or DOGE, was found to be posting internal work to a public GitHub. This is a textbook example of confusing a private repository with a public-facing blog.
• Self-Awareness: The Claude Code large language model has apparently learned how to decompile itself. This is not a feature; it is an administrative nightmare, as it means the AI can now audit its own performance reviews.