alt Hacker NewsNot always. Both the Digital Service and 18F appear to be (to have been...) good faith efforts to apply state of the art system engineering to the federal bureaucracy, and quite successfully.
This is just one administration co-opted by one anti social elite to do the opposite. Don't extrapolate it out. Place blame where blame is deserved.
I don't think it's just one, unfortunately. It's not even much of a co-opt; more just an inevitable progression of the ideology that was held by that administration since the beginning.