[HN Gopher] Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National P...
___________________________________________________________________
Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 149 points
Date : 2022-12-02 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattstoller.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattstoller.substack.com)
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Can somebody explain to me why this got upvoted so much even
| though the writer doesn't have a brain?
|
| Booz Allen is not renting us a park, because they don't own it,
| hence they cannot rent it out. Booz Allen is running a website
| and we are paying them fees because that's the money they use to
| run the website. He quotes them as saying as much in the article.
|
| Then he goes on to basically state he has no clue what they were
| paid to run the website, and yet the entire article claims that
| the fees are "junk", regardless of the fact that he has no
| evidence to support this.
|
| Despite this, in the linked article on Booze's website it states:
| _" With more than 45 million users in FY21, the site has
| generated more than $270 million in revenue for the federal
| government"_. Compare that to the 182 Million to be invested in
| Booze over 10 years (18.2 Million/year averaged).
|
| It's not stated how payment takes place, but Booze's wording
| suggests that the government did not have to front the capital
| and instead Booze will recoup it over time, which takes the risk
| off the government of another $400M boondoggle.
|
| Clearly the government is making more money than it is spending,
| which is what you want, rather than a botched government job
| spending $400 Million and having jack shit to show for it. Not
| only that, but Booze's site was completed in only a year, and was
| the first major government site made in the cloud. It has
| continued to expand and has not failed. This is an amazing
| achievement for government work.
|
| Pay them your fees and stop whining, or we'll end up with the
| government failing to make a basic website for 10x the amount of
| taxpayer money. People love to whine when they have to personally
| pay a fee, but they don't care at all when their taxpayer dollars
| are flushed down the toilet in the millions to billions. Out of
| sight, out of mind.
| csours wrote:
| Because Americans will accept fees before they accept taxes. They
| will pay local taxes before they pay state or federal taxes.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I understand why people would prefer user fees to nationally-
| distributed taxes. What rubs me the wrong way is the lottery
| application fees. Charging the people who visit a park is one
| thing. Charging people who want to visit a park, apply to do so
| on a govt website, and are denied, is another. If this was an
| account setup fee I might be able to understand. But charging
| it every time you throw your hat in the ring seems inefficient
| and exploitative.
| em500 wrote:
| It's probably an effective way to prevent bots (or even
| humans) from spamming the lottery if entry to the lottery was
| free or gated by a one-off fee. The exploitative part is
| mostly that these per-application fees are pocketed by a
| private company.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
|
| Would a constitutional against this sort of thing help keep the
| country governable?
| carom wrote:
| Kind of a duplicate?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834006
| phnofive wrote:
| Sorta - I noted this in that thread, since this came second:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834783
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Doctorow actually cites the BIG substack, but adds a bunch of
| other stuff. Unclear...
| cpt1138 wrote:
| Doctorow says "But there's something we can do about this!
| The part of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that
| authorizes agencies to assess fees runs out in Oct 2023, and
| when Congress renews it, they could add an amendment to block
| Booz's junk fees."
|
| What exactly are "we" supposed to do about it?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This is an interesting problem.
|
| The normal state of news is that a story breaks and there are
| 300 near identical articles about it in 24 hours. Google News
| wouldn't have been successful if they hadn't developed a
| clustering algorithm that handles this.
|
| Ordinary clustering algorithms don't work well for documents
| period in my experience and I am not sure if that's the right
| approach to topic identification. But if we're going to get
| past RSS readers having the same failing interface that has
| been failing since 1999 and get past the idea that social
| media is bad because "algorithms = bad" we need some
| algorithm to tame the many "me too" blog posts that come
| whenever a blog post breaks onto the front of HN.
| em500 wrote:
| The article answers it's own question. On the website developed
| for Obamacare:
|
| > The government had spent $400 million over four years - more
| time than it took the U.S. to enter and win World War II - and
| yet, the dozens of contractors couldn't set up a website to take
| sign-ups.
|
| So the answer to the headline question (and also the broader
| problem) is: because the government probably can't develop the
| project successfully in-house.
|
| This is not a particularly American problem. Every few years I
| read about some super costly government IT disaster here in the
| Netherlands. I'm sure locals from most other countries will have
| similar stories to share. So the broader question would be: what
| makes governments apparently unable to get big IT projects done
| right? (I'm aware that there is a big selection/reporting bias in
| the disaster stories.)
|
| According to the article, Booz Allen got a 10 year contract. What
| would it take, when it expires, for the BLM to develop and run
| this successfully in-house?
| tstrimple wrote:
| > what makes governments apparently unable to get big IT
| projects done right?
|
| I wonder why this sentiment is never applied to big IT projects
| in the private sector.
|
| https://faethcoaching.com/it-project-failure-rates-facts-and...
| * According to the Standish Group's Annual CHAOS 2020 report,
| 66% of technology projects (based on the analysis of 50,000
| projects globally) end in partial or total failure. While
| larger projects are more prone to encountering challenges or
| failing altogether, even the smallest software projects fail
| one in ten times. Large projects are successful less than 10%
| of the time. * Standish also found that 31% of
| US IT projects were canceled outright and the performance of
| 53% 'was so worrying that they were challenged.' *
| Research from McKinsey in 2020 found that 17% of large IT
| projects go so badly, they threaten the very existence of the
| company. * BCG (2020) estimated that 70% of
| digital transformation efforts fall short of meeting targets. A
| 2020 CISQ report found the total cost of unsuccessful
| development projects among US firms is an estimated $260B,
| while the total cost of operational failures caused by poor
| quality software is estimated at $1.56 trillion.
|
| I'm in the consulting world and I've been brought in at the
| tail end of multiple BILLION dollar boondoggle modernization
| efforts. These are fortune 100 companies that built their
| fortunes through acquisition and consolidation who have no idea
| how to steer their ship in any sort of effective way. In a lot
| of cases, we're cleaning up after other top 5 consulting firms
| who lead the client on while pissing away hundreds of millions
| of dollars. It turns out damn near everyone is bad at building
| large systems but only the government seems to be derided for
| it consistently.
| gnicholas wrote:
| But the failed Obamacare website was also farmed out to a third
| party contractor. TFA says this, and links to an investigative
| piece on the debacle:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/10/16/meet-...
| panzagl wrote:
| Big IT projects fail. The US federal government for the most
| part only deals in big projects. There's more to it than that,
| but they're mostly details compared to this basic truth.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I think it's a combination of a few things.
|
| - Government jobs don't pay well relative to the private
| sector, _especially_ in software, so the government talent pool
| is lower quality than industry.
|
| - For most government activities, government essentially has a
| monopoly on their implementation, e.g. infrastructure building.
| So people don't have as much of a comparison to know how good
| or badly government is doing. With software, people use
| government software and use privately developed software and
| the difference is obvious.
|
| - Software, perhaps even more than many endeavors, benefits
| from having a single decision-maker in charge of the project
| who has a clear vision of what needs to be done and strong
| conviction on how to do it. Design-by-committee is not a great
| way to design good software. Most government projects wind up
| being some form of design-by-committee, either implicitly or
| explicitly. Even when the government has software built by
| private contractors, the requirements are written by committee,
| the contractors chosen by committee, etc. Very few of the best
| of anything is designed by committee, but the effects are much
| more obvious with software than say, a park.
| mjhay wrote:
| Healthcare.gov was farmed out to well-connected contractors,
| much like most other similar boondoggles (SLS, F-34, Bradley
| fighting vehicle, delayed road projects, etc).
|
| It says a lot more about corrupt and inefficient procurement
| (e.g. cost-plus) than it does about rank-and-file government
| employees. Using many contractors in many different
| congressional districts, all of whom have little incentive to
| deliver on time and on budget, or cooperate effectively with
| each other.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| Fundamentally you're talking about the problem I alluded to
| in the 3rd point: Software projects work best with a single
| (or small group of closely knit) decision-makers at the top
| who bear ultimate responsibility for the implementation of
| the project.
|
| The problem with governmental design-by-committee is that
| it spreads out the responsibility such that the failure of
| the project does not fall on any individual or small group.
|
| The lack of concentrated responsibility breeds an
| environment that incentivizes grift rather than delivering
| value.
|
| If the iPhone bombed, it was going to be Steve Jobs' fault.
| He had final say in all design decisions. If Healthcare.gov
| bombed... whose head rolled? Excerpt from the wiki article
| of Todd Park, CTO in the Obama administration:
|
| '''
|
| The initial version of HealthCare.gov, which was deployed
| on July 1, 2010, was built in 90 days by Park and his team
| at HHS. The first HealthCare.gov was cited by the Kaiser
| Family Foundation as one of the early highlights in the
| implementation of the healthcare reform implementation
| progress. HealthCare.gov was also the first website ever
| "demoed" by a sitting president
|
| The following two versions, from the relaunch of the front
| end in May 2013 to the badly flawed marketplace that went
| live in October 2013, were developed by contractors and
| overseen by officials at the Centers for Medicare and
| Medicaid Services, outside of his purview within the White
| House Office of Science and Technology Policy. When the
| extent of the problems with Healthcare.gov became clear,
| Park was tasked by President Obama to work on a "trauma
| team" that addressed the "technological disaster". Park,
| along with Jeffrey Zients, led the "tech surge" that
| ultimately repaired Healthcare.gov over the winter,
| eventually fixing the marketplace sufficiently to enable
| millions of Americans to find plans and purchase health
| insurance.
|
| '''
|
| How many of those unnamed officials at the Centers for
| Medicare and Medicaid services got fired for a multi-
| billion dollar boondoggle? The reason bureaucracies (both
| government and private) love process, documentation,
| committees, etc., is because the primary goal of any
| bureaucracy, far and above its nominal mission, is to
| continue existing, and a primary part of continuing to
| exist is to avoid blame for anything. Delegating decision
| making to committees and process is a key way to avoid
| blame.
|
| "Who is responsible for this mess?"
|
| "Nobody is responsible, we followed the process. But don't
| worry, we've started the process of forming a committee to
| update our process manual to prevent this mess in the
| future."
| crooked-v wrote:
| I feel it still says something about government employees
| because one can pretty much take it as a given that the
| standard employee pool is basically incapable of building
| relatively basic e-commerce websites.
| mjhay wrote:
| Well yeah, what do you expect when Congress and the GSA
| sets pay for pay for developers at levels far below the
| private sector? I've worked for two different federal
| agencies in the past, and both were more efficient and
| lower BS than most private-sector jobs I've worked at.
| This wasn't IT or development, of course.
|
| It's just taken as a truism that government is always
| inefficient and bureaucratic, but the average ossified
| corporation such as Google is wildly inefficient and
| bureaucratic just the same.
|
| They also aren't necessarily that bad to interact with.
| I'd much rather go to the DMV than interact with Comcast.
| giaour wrote:
| The standard government employee is a project manager
| whose main job is overseeing contractor work. Funding
| cycles make it nearly impossible to hire in house staff
| to actually do work, and there is firm political
| opposition to the federal government doing anything on
| its own.
| medellin wrote:
| Being someone who just happened into a government job for
| my first one out of college that holds true in my
| experience. No good employee stayed in the job more than
| two years and most only one before they got so sick of
| the politics and bike shedding.
|
| The government gets good employees it just loses them all
| very quickly when it fails to compensate them as well as
| provide them with meaningful work.
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> - Government jobs don't pay well relative to the private
| sector, especially in software, so the government talent pool
| is lower quality than industry._
|
| If we're discussing the USA, sure. If we're discussing other
| countries this isn't always necessarily true, and as the
| person you responded to has noted, this happens worldwide.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| That is just one of the three points I made (and I
| personally think the final point is the most salient here).
| Though I'm curious, do you know of any countries where
| government software jobs pay market rate? I would be
| interested to see if their government websites are decent.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > So the broader question would be: what makes governments
| apparently unable to get big IT projects done right?
|
| Signals intelligence people must be building some of the most
| powerful computer systems in the world. They also historically
| have innovated and led the industry in areas like crypto. How
| come they get it right but the rest of the civil service can't?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| It probably helps if your successes _and_ fuck-ups are
| classified for decades
| chrisseaton wrote:
| The rest of the civil service seems almost entirely unable
| to get _anything_ done in computing though. Signals
| intelligence in the UK and US seem to ship quite a lot of
| success, from all the history, leaks, and things you can
| physically see like Bumblehive. Definitely something
| they're doing differently than the rest of the civil
| service.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _For instance, as one camper noted, in just one lottery to hike
| Mount Whitney, more than 16,000 people applied, and only a third
| got in. Yet everyone paid the $6 registration fee, which means
| the gross income for that single location is over $100,000._
|
| Wow, it's like those scummy all-pay auction sites you see
| advertised, where you can buy/win a TV for just $4.29. Incredible
| that this is allowed.
|
| It sounds like there's still no answer as to whether Booz Allen
| was paid cash upfront to build the sites, and it is possible that
| the amount being paid is "fair" in some sense. But if they're
| making six-figures of profit on one lottery for Mount Whitney,
| that seems exceedingly unlikely.
| warbler73 wrote:
| recreation.gov is a .gov site. Which is supposed to mean it is
| owned by the government and not a private run site collecting
| fees for a for-profit defense contractor.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Where is this meaning of ".gov" to be found?
| jonnybgood wrote:
| https://home.dotgov.gov/
| stonogo wrote:
| Here: https://home.dotgov.gov Operated by CISA care of the
| GSA.
|
| Specifically: https://home.dotgov.gov/registration/requirem
| ents/#eligibili...
|
| See also RFC 920:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc920 Section
| "Initial Set of Top Level Domains"
| biftek wrote:
| I previously had little issue with the fees because I assumed
| they went back to the parks due to the .gov domain. Now that
| I know it's just a private 3rd party collecting them and our
| parks and public lands are still underfunded is infuriating.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| >> _For instance, as one camper noted, in just one lottery to
| hike Mount Whitney, more than 16,000 people applied, and only a
| third got in. Yet everyone paid the $6 registration fee, which
| means the gross income for that single location is over
| $100,000._
|
| > Wow, it's like those scummy all-pay auction sites you see
| advertised, where you can buy/win a TV for just $4.29.
| Incredible that this is allowed.
|
| My impression was that those sites use a much scummier model,
| in which whoever buys the last ticket wins. Tickets are cheap,
| but the priority system ("last guy wins") means people buy a
| large number of tickets.
|
| A true lottery in which you buy a ticket for $6 and then either
| win or lose at random is a very different thing. You can't
| spend more than $6 on that.
| pmulard wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but I feel like there are so many conflicting
| parties involved with the US national parks system. On one hand,
| we have groups of people who want to preserve the land as much as
| possible. But often these same people have no problems building
| new roads and swanky new amenities like hotels and restaurants in
| the middle of these parks. Yellowstone has some of the most wild
| and rugged terrain in the lower 48, yet some parts of it feel
| like DisneyWorld.
|
| Which is it? Do we actually care about having natural land we can
| all enjoy, or are we just trying to add a few extra billion in
| our national budget? It all just comes off like a huge grift and
| way to exploit the land.
|
| Then there are parks like Glacier, home to some of the most
| stunning natural beauty in the country, right next to Tribal Land
| with some of the most rampant poverty in the country. Suburban
| families cruise around in their brand new Subarus, while eating
| $30 bison burgers. They barely notice indigenous people, and the
| results of the land exploitation, on the way out.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| How are most people going to enjoy (and therefore care about)
| this natural land without at least some roads, hotels and
| restaurants?
|
| Even in designated wilderness areas, somebody has to build
| roads and cut trail in order for anyone to enjoy it and
| scientists to study the effects of conservation. I think it's a
| tough balance and we need lands all across the spectrum of
| development.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Roads? You walk, ride an MTB, or (especially for park service
| moving construction materials for trail maintenance) use
| horses.
|
| Hotels? I hear they've developed this innovation known as a
| "tent". Thanks to space-age fabrics, you can be warm and dry
| with little more than a bag and some sticks.
|
| Restaurants? Food is fuel, not a social activity. It's not
| that hard to carry your calories on your back. In many parks,
| if there aren't too many roads, hotels, and restaurants
| upstream, you can get drinkable water straight from the
| stream, or run it through a filter. If you don't have to
| carry water in, most parties can pack in enough calories in
| to go for a week or more.
|
| You're not going to get octogenarians and the obese to the
| middle of Yellowstone or the peak of Denali, no, but that's
| OK.
| haswell wrote:
| I recently finished a road trip that took me through 7 national
| parks, and it was interesting seeing the large degree of
| variation in amenities in various parks, and how that changed
| the experience.
|
| By far, my favorite experiences were at parks that had minimal
| amenities, and far fewer people as a result. These places felt
| wild, and to me, that's how they should feel.
|
| The ones that were equipped with paved walking paths, shuttle
| systems (looking at you, Zion), and top tier camping amenities
| (Bryce) were absolutely mobbed with people, making them feel
| like theme parks.
|
| I'm all for ensuring parks are accessible for more people, and
| I'm sensitive to the fact that parks need routes that can be
| accessed via wheelchair, not everyone has physical strength for
| difficult unpaved paths, etc.
|
| But to your point, the experience at those "Disney-ified"
| locations felt very...counterintuitive. Combine this with the
| huge rise in vandalism, rule breaking, and general destruction
| in many parks, and I can't help but feel that a slightly higher
| barrier to entry is a good thing.
|
| If it's challenging (but achievable) to visit a location, I
| feel like there may more inherent respect by the folks who care
| enough to make sure they're prepared for the experience.
|
| Lowering the bar too far has been detrimental, IMO.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > yet some parts of it feel like DisneyWorld
|
| Says it in the name, doesn't it? It's a managed 'park' for
| people's enjoyment, not a wilderness. So it has DisneyWorld-
| like infrastructure.
| 015a wrote:
| You see a scene like this [1] and you wouldn't be blamed for
| thinking that its just some normal highway in the western US.
| Its actually _inside_ Yellowstone; zoom in on the sign and you
| 'll see that its the _exit ramp_ to Old Faithful.
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/maps/@44.4608402,-110.8437926,3a,75y,...
| blululu wrote:
| If you are trying to root out corruption and waste in the
| Federal Government I would suggest looking beyond the Park
| Service. They are asked to do a lot (more each year) with a
| very small budget (that does not keep pace with inflation or
| the amount of places they need to run). The park service needs
| to cater to a wide variety of people who expect different
| things from their recreation.
|
| Personally I think that personal cars should be banned from all
| national parks. The roads are expensive to maintain, and a
| traffic jam to a giant parking lot ruins the park. Denali or
| Rocky Mountain National park have excellent shuttle services
| that really help thin the crowd. But some people really like to
| have their road trips, and having some handicap accessible
| sections is also important. The contradictions stem from the
| very nature of democratic compromise.
| panzagl wrote:
| It's something the NPS has struggled with from the beginning-
| there is a book called "Engineering Eden" that goes into just
| how 'controlled' Yellowstone is and how the objectives have
| changed over the last century.
| briantakita wrote:
| > It all just comes off like a huge grift and way to exploit
| the land.
|
| Bingo. It comes off that way because it is that way. With
| centralized power comes centralized corruption...This article
| is another outrage piece. At best we can expect some token
| gesture as a response but in the end, the powerful & well
| connected get their way by cynically fixing the errors of their
| ways with some new form of corruption.
|
| > They barely notice indigenous people, and the results of the
| land exploitation, on the way out.
|
| Our ancestors were indigenous and at some point we became
| assimilated subjects. I'll give it to the Native American &
| Hawaiian cultures in remembering their heritage. If the public
| outrage is notable enough, I'll wager that Booz Allen will have
| some sort of Native American committee so they can claim that
| they care about the land & people.
| luckylion wrote:
| Do you preserve the land, completely removing humans from it,
| and only allow humans to marvel at it from satellites? How do
| you get the population to care for your lofty goals? Do you
| make it accessible to humans so they can enjoy nature? How do
| they get there if not via roads?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Tongue in cheek: Walk! But I get your point. Usually isn't
| the road accessible parts just a tiny fraction of it all
| anyway?
| blululu wrote:
| Taking this comment seriously I would actually really
| support a more walking centered park system. You are
| correct that a lot of most parks are situated very far from
| roads, but in a lot of parks the best places are close to
| the roads. Personally really dislike having a traffic jam
| in a natural park, or people demanding yet more parking
| spaces in Yosemite valley. The shuttle bus services that
| exist in several national parks are generally really nice.
| They ease up the footprint and maintenance costs of roads
| and parking lots. They make it easy to do some of the more
| interesting through hikes. Obviously I am not saying that
| we should scrap all the roads but I do think that
| emphasizing walking would be a good idea.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-02 23:00 UTC)