Dismissal notices went out Saturday to about 85 employees of 18F, a federal agency that works on improving government technology — effectively shutting down an office hailed a decade ago as Uncle Sam’s new tech startup.

The news came in an email early Saturday morning from Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who’s now the deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which sets purchasing policy for the government.

“The 18F Office has been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as noncritical,” Shedd said in an email sent at 1:01 a.m. Washington time on Saturday and obtained by Bloomberg. “This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the administration and GSA.”

The small but influential office was once seen as the future of government technology, created out of President Barack Obama’s Presidential Innovation Fellows.

— Bloomberg