[HN Gopher] Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Acc...
___________________________________________________________________
Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture,
Deloitte
Author : oldprogrammer2
Score : 428 points
Date : 2025-04-11 12:23 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| jpgvm wrote:
| Finally they actually cut something that should be cut.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| I'll believe it when they cut Palantir contracts
| EasyMark wrote:
| This right here tells you everything you need to know. Follow
| the money. Which companies pay the most in lobbying/trips and
| Venn diagram that with those who got cut and you won't find
| much overlap. I'm not sure why reporters aren't tapping into
| these stories that write themselves. Also Thiel is in tight
| with this administration
| gregoriol wrote:
| The cut in the current context, and future consequences, are
| likely going to cut much more than the contracts though.
| rel2thr wrote:
| A correlary to the Gelman effect, with govt spending , it all
| sounds important and reasonably priced unless the spending is
| in your circle of expertise
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Exactly. Gell-Mann Amnesia. The first thing that came to
| mind.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Well... unless it's for temporary projects, government should
| just create the capacity in-house. Having to bring in
| consulting for everything because there is no know-how left
| is pointless.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Is there a reciprocal Gelman where ignorant outsiders assume
| things are unreasonable and wasteful but anyone with
| expertise knows better? (Examples come to mind of Sarah Palin
| ridiculing fruit fly genetics work or DOGE's press
| conferences about children receiving social security when
| they were just receiving survivors benefits)
| giantrobot wrote:
| Authentic frontier ignorance?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I don't see that in practice. The headlines have historically
| been pretty blunt on a lot of wasteful spending. They openly
| discuss obvious waste in congress:
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-
| tell... https://reason.com/2025/01/12/materiel-loss/
| nxm wrote:
| Plenty of USAID wasteful spending was already cut as well
| aqme28 wrote:
| Which USAID spending? I haven't seen anything that I would
| say is both wasteful and significant.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| It's hard to track, because it's all nice websites with
| generic messages like "we make life better" and pictures
| with obligatory diversity faces. E.g. $4.5 billion here
| chemonics.com. Or $3 billion here devalt.org. Where did
| these money go? How can we measure the ROI?
|
| USAID is a corrupt wasteful sinkhole, good riddance to it.
| miltonlost wrote:
| USAID looking for an ROI???? THat's NOT the purpose of
| aiding other countries. You don't need to look for a
| return on an investment. USAid was feeding children in
| places. You're looking for an ROI on saving human lives.
| Learn empathy.
| Smeevy wrote:
| Empathy seems to be in rare supply these days. I've made
| the mistake of talking to these people about the human
| collateral of these decisions and it's waved off like I'm
| bringing up an unpleasant experience in a checkout line.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Musk has said empathy is why democratic western countries
| are failing.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's surprising to me that not more of them object to
| Radio Liberty and its siblings getting ratfucked, since
| those channels are both rather cheap and obviously in the
| interest of whatever regime has the White House.
|
| Running Twitter bots can't compete with the deep reach
| and influence that was built up there over many decades.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Isn't saving lives and feeding children ROI? I think the
| parent comment was stating that these things were not
| measured and therefore the ROI should absolutely be
| known.
|
| You should always measure the impact of the things you do
| and the money you spend, you should never just say "we're
| trying to do this and so the money should always flow".
| If you and trying to feed children you should be able to
| estimate the number of meals you provide and if that
| number is too low you should stop getting money.
|
| I'm not commenting on USAID cuts in particular here, but
| your comment struck me as being rather strange.
| EasyMark wrote:
| That was DOGE's job to tell us why and what, and they did
| none of that. Why is cutting millions to starving people
| in 3rd world countries a good thing? Why is cutting AIDs
| funding for similar situations a good thing? save
| millions now, pay billions later as these situations
| destabilize and make new terrorists and wars.
| EasyMark wrote:
| "randomly made cuts without any thought, precision, or weighing
| of pros and cons". The only cons here are the ones authorizing
| the cutting.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Is this like in Eastern Europe/Balkans, like when someone new
| comes to power they terminate the contracts(aka the grifts)
| signed by the previous regime, so they can give them to their own
| friends instead, then rinse and repeat at the next election
| cycle?
| eej71 wrote:
| Unfortunately that's the direction we are likely headed in.
|
| However, I suspect that in this case, the contracts were
| overpriced and faced an endless series of delays and
| extensions.
|
| Of course, the next set of contracts will probably have the
| same issue. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I mean, there's certainly some of that happening right now (and
| has probably always happened to some degree even in America).
|
| That being said, I think these specific cuts have a real
| possibility of being genuine. I believe this because:
|
| * They actually do align with long-term thinking. In general,
| the DoD (and the federal government... and really all North
| American government as a whole) has been on a multi-decade
| slide of out sourcing more and more capabilities to
| consultancies. This HAS made us all worse at governing. Hegseth
| (for better and worse) has the cover to make this type of cut
| while riding out whatever bumps might come out of this.
|
| * Hegseth also needs to create cover. He's probably about to
| get a giant budget increase (~900billion to an even trillion).
| Actions like this allow him to backup his claim that yes -
| America is spending more on defense, but we're doing so better.
|
| That said, who knows how this specific case will end up.
| codingbot3000 wrote:
| It probably did not need DOGE to find out that these contracts
| where overpriced ;-)
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| ...but it took DOGE to actually get them cut.
| hagbarth wrote:
| I don't think the article mentions DOGE
| selfhoster wrote:
| https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/pentagon-
| cuts-5...
|
| "This latest announcement follows a March 20 declaration
| from Hegseth, where he detailed $580 million in cuts to
| various programmes, contracts, and grants. The overall
| reduction now amounts to nearly $6 billion as part of the
| Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative,
| which aims to streamline Pentagon expenditures and focus
| resources on warfighting capabilities."
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Doesn't mean to say it's not related:
|
| >> _The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump
| administration to implement Department of Government
| Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies._ [0]
|
| [0] https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-
| it-serv...
|
| or: > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15
| /doge-p...
| EasyMark wrote:
| I doubt of DOGE had anything to do with this, these companies
| simply weren't paying enough kickbacks in the form of lobbying
| and gifts to not earn the ire of Trump and his sycophants
| mythz wrote:
| On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a
| good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm
| expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.
| toolz wrote:
| Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has
| literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing
| them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't
| want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers
| bena wrote:
| The Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money
| goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.
| axpy906 wrote:
| Didn't they at one point fail to account for Trillions of
| dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for
| me is unimaginable.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| How many other companies need to fund rebuilding of
| entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in
| the first place...)
| kolbe wrote:
| Auditors don't get access to whatever the modern
| equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca
| stle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...
| jcranmer wrote:
| AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin
| to most people failing an audit because they can't
| produce every single paper receipt for everything they've
| ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the
| Pentagon is (I believe) the _single largest purchaser on
| the planet_ , the fact that much of what it does is
| compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that
| the managerial staff tends to be younger than most
| organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that
| it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally
| dot every i and cross every t.
| timschmidt wrote:
| "September 10th, 2001 then Secretary of Defense Donald
| Rumsfeld acknowledged to the American public that
| Pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion" -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They use auditors with clearance. I'd imagine certain
| programs require _very specific_ auditors to supervise
| them, like how the FISA court works with specific vetted
| lawyers at times.
|
| The more mundane problem is things like "drive that truck
| over there... drive another one back" often result in the
| _exact_ location of an asset being unclear fairly
| frequently.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Your public tax dollars picked Tesla and SpaceX as winners vs
| losers, through billions of dollars of subsidies.
| zpeti wrote:
| Those subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on
| those contracts.
|
| This is such a debunked argument but I guess its
| undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about
| how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government.
| Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then,
| or Arianaspace in the EU.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same
| then, or ArianeSpace ...
|
| Or any of _hundreds_ of other national space programs and
| companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to
| pay 10X the US Govt 's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put
| themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's
| current position of utter global dominance.
| yardie wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of Elmo but Telsa get's subsidies that
| all car manufacturers are eligible for. The fact that those
| manufacturers have to purchase credits from Tesla is their
| decision. If they can't delivery a quality ZEV the public
| wants to buy they have no one else to blame.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This post was true five years ago.
|
| It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have
| survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd
| from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.
|
| In Tesla because of the brilliant behavior of its
| precious CEO, will likely be specifically targeted for
| exclusion from subsidies in the EU, and inevitably at
| home when this administration passes by
| bangaladore wrote:
| > It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have
| survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd
| from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.
|
| This is a bad take. Nobody can compete with BYD. This
| isn't a Tesla vs BYD issue, this is a Everyone vs Cheap
| labor and deregulation issue.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Byd is a product of CCP subsidies, of course they can be
| competed with
|
| It would simply take a government capable of recognizing
| the multifold benefits of EV transition: environmental,
| geopolitical oil independence, energy efficiency,
| associated alt energy rollout and grid adaptation, lower
| total costs and associated economic benefits, reduced
| cancer and air pollution death rates, reduced logistics
| costs.
|
| That's just off the top of my head and I'm not even that
| smart
| addicted wrote:
| They are crowing about increasing the Pentagon's budget.
| jedberg wrote:
| Musk's companies fail their audits too. Tesla can't account
| for $1.4B of government money they received.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Why does this matter? Government either gives loans and
| demands they are paid back, or pays for deliverables. If
| you have to keep your fingers in the books to feel good
| about what's happening, it was a badly structured contract.
| jedberg wrote:
| Because it's my money and I want to know how it's being
| spent, whether it's the government or a private company
| spending it. I had no choice in where that money went, so
| I need transparency on how it's being spent.
|
| That's why _every_ government contractor has to report
| what they are doing with their government money.
| yuppii wrote:
| So you are comparing existing, actual waste with your
| "imaginary" waste that might or might not happen... Go easy on
| the kool aid.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I'm no fan of the Pentagon and certainly think it's a money
| sieve, but why are you asserting that this $5.1B is "actual
| waste" and also not imaginary?
| danparsonson wrote:
| They're not, they're saying that GP imagines genuine waste-
| saving will happen, when in fact it's more likely to be
| fabricated "waste" conjured up by Elmo and his army of
| teenagers.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Deloitte and Accenture would be considered the worst US
| companies if Monsanto/Bayer and Nestle didn't exist. Their
| work is always waste.
| searine wrote:
| Why are they the worst? Genuinely curious.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _existing, actual waste_
|
| Where are you getting that this is "actual" waste, because
| you read some mean things about consultants? Go easy on the
| kool aid.
| cpursley wrote:
| I don't totally trust this DOGE crew and think we should keep
| a hawks eye on them but the whole "they are cutting waste so
| they can funnel the money to themselves!" conspiracy theories
| making the rounds are pretty bizarre... And to what end,
| aren't many of these people already extremely wealthy? I sure
| hope I'm wrong.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Not totally bizarre given some actually bizarre stuff like
| trump & malania crypto coins or DJT.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| You do not become that, by quitting on the waver thin mint.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Current budget appears to be (via
| https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-
| cut... )
|
| > $5.3 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts (the
| combination of $3.8 trillion of tax cuts assumed to be
| "costless" under a current policy baseline plus $1.5
| trillion in additional deficits permitted), deficit
| increases of $521 billion on defense and immigration
| spending, a minimum of $4 billion in spending cuts, and an
| increase in the debt limit of up to $5 trillion.
|
| So savings _plus new borrowing_ will be funded to tax cuts,
| which will likely prioritize those already on higher
| incomes, and corporations.
| muttonhead wrote:
| Because the amoral drive for extreme wealth doesn't stop at
| a certain level of wealth
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| If you have to explain your conspiracy theory with "the
| majority of these people suffers from the same special
| kind of neuroticism", I suggest you get back to your
| whiteboard.
|
| Or you can keep living in a Disney reality where uncle
| Scrooges are the norm and not the exception.
| reciprocity wrote:
| I think you might be misunderstanding op's comment.
| "Because the amoral drive for extreme wealth doesn't stop
| at a certain level of wealth" is a statement that I read
| on its face. One does not need to reach for "conspiracy"
| as a way to explain the behavior of people faced with an
| opportunity to acquire more money: just look at the 5-6
| posts making the same point in this very sub-thread. Did
| you miss those or did you mean to post this reply
| somewhere else? Money is a huge motivator for many
| people.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Nothing misunderstood here. Only someone seriously naive
| or disingenuous would arrive at the conclusion that money
| is the main drive of such people who have already so much
| that they don't know what to do with it. _Especially_
| without proofs, as a "this can only be it!" position.
|
| I'd rather believe wanting power for power's sake than
| this cartoon idea of an old duck diving into a pool of
| well-polished coins.
|
| Truth is that beyond a few truly neurotic exceptions, the
| obscenely rich do use their money. Just not all in
| supercars and yachts, but also to influence what they
| can.
| benterix wrote:
| > And to what end, aren't many of these people already
| extremely wealthy?
|
| I don't know, I really don't know. To this day I can't
| imagine the day I become a president of a big country I
| tell my citizens "BUY MY COINS AND THOSE OF MY WIFE!". It's
| difficult to imagine on so many levels. But yet this guy is
| doing it. So no conspiracy theory is too weird to at this
| point.
| GVIrish wrote:
| Musk intervened at FAA to get a Verizon communications
| contract cancelled while quietly trying to get FAA to sign
| to a Starlink contract:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/03/13/elon-
| mu...
| rtkwe wrote:
| > And to what end, aren't many of these people already
| extremely wealthy?
|
| When's the last time you heard a billionaire say, "I've got
| enough money I don't need to get any more" before they're
| very old and looking to burnish their image with charity
| work?! If they were the kind of person to be ok with more
| money than they could spend in 10 lifetimes they wouldn't
| be billionaires in the first place, at least not
| multibillionaires.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Rich people get that way because they love money. Loving
| money means they want more and more and more, no matter how
| much they get.
| hn-acct wrote:
| Remind me in 6 months.
| pests wrote:
| Won't even have to wait that long. Elon will be stepping
| down at the end of his special employee tenure in a month
| or two in which he expects to save $1T.
| atoav wrote:
| How would you know it is actual waste? This government has a
| track record of cutting things regardless of their
| importance, so you can't rely on the fact they did it alone,
| so what is your source?
| spamizbad wrote:
| We don't know if they're actually cutting waste here. DOGE
| has already had to do a massive climb-down from saving $1000B
| to saving $105B, but most of that $105B has not been shown to
| be true. Actual cuts may only amount to a few billion.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Actual cuts may only amount to a few billion.
|
| And that's assuming the cuts don't have any fiscally
| counterproductive knock-on effects. Which they certainly
| will.
| thechao wrote:
| Do we even have a way of estimating the billions it will
| cost to resecuritize our infrastructure? What about the
| cost in lost soft power? The total knock on effect in
| loss to the economy for not subsidizing basic research,
| that led to the U.S. being a major power in medicine &
| pharma? This is the very definition of penny-wise-pound-
| foolish.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| >> _The pacts "represent non-essential spending on third party
| consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform_
|
| The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers
| to do more in-house.
|
| ... which means more work in-house.
|
| ... done by the same teams they just cut the size of.
|
| Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I
| think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work
| itself well.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Yeah that's going to be the problem. The pay bands are so low
| they would be lucky to get people with degrees at all.
| Definitely not talent
| dlachausse wrote:
| Pay isn't everything. Government civilian GS employees have
| an extremely generous benefits package and usually
| excellent job security. Contractors frequently take pay
| cuts to work directly as a government employee for these
| reasons.
| hobs wrote:
| And now they do not have job security.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That ship has sailed now, though. The benefits and job
| security can no longer be counted on. Government is gonna
| have to compete more on salary, or accept worse
| candidates.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| A silver lining in all this upheaval is the reduction of
| price obfuscation (hopefully) by getting rid of deferred
| compensation schemes that make it difficult for labor
| sellers to evaluate the market.
| dlachausse wrote:
| I said _usually_ for job security because I am familiar
| with the current administration's actions, and the
| benefits have not been touched and would take an act of
| Congress to change. Trust me, there are still lots of
| talented individuals who are eager to join the government
| workforce, even now.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > benefits have not been touched...
|
| If you don't count mass firings, sure.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I don't really trust you on that. Why is the government
| workforce not more capable if there are lots of skilled
| people who want to work for them?
| nothercastle wrote:
| For poverty wages? In my city government workers with
| families almost universally qualify for subsidized
| housing. People in my experience get half my salary, and
| then half of that goes to housing. Maybe some C tier
| talent goes to government but not without wfh, pension or
| other benefits.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Federal IT workers are hardly working for poverty wages.
| In addition to their base salaries, they receive
| additional locality pay, generous benefits like paid time
| off, retirement benefits, inexpensive health insurance
| and life insurance, training and advancement
| opportunities, and the opportunity to receive monetary
| and time off awards. It's not FAANG salaries, but they
| are very well compensated and the working conditions are
| usually great.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _very well compensated_
|
| You'd have to be a GS-14 [0] to be north of $150k base
| salary.
|
| That's tech team manager / senior manager, with a post-
| graduate degree, and 7+ years of experience in the field.
|
| [0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-
| leave/salaries...
|
| > _and the working conditions are usually great_
|
| Really? Because private sector seems a lot more stable
| these days.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Government civilian GS employees have an extremely
| generous benefits package and usually excellent job
| security.
|
| Had. Not have.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Yep this was true a decade or 2 ago not true anymore.
| Generous compared to Walmart, sure but not compared to
| Industry for any type of Technical work.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yeah, I was referring to the job security aspect, given
| all the layoffs.
|
| But yes, the federal package is good, but not fantastic.
| It's on par with what a typical company provides. Salary
| is decent, too. Not FAANG, but not below industry
| average. More or less, just like a typical industry job.
|
| State/city jobs tend to have much better benefit
| packages, but lower pay (often a lot lower). They also
| tend to be relatively chill workwise.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _tend to be relatively chill workwise_
|
| This feels like something that needed past tense.
|
| Some rich asshole I don't know blasting out weekly check-
| in demands to the org-wide list doesn't sound very chill.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Some rich asshole I don't know blasting out weekly
| check-in demands to the org-wide list doesn't sound very
| chill.
|
| Context? The comment was about city/state jobs, not
| federal.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| A Florida man didn't want to feel left out.
|
| https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-
| desan...
| fakedang wrote:
| Last I checked, there was a surplus of tech talent in the
| US who have been subject to layoffs.
|
| Govt gives benefits and job security, at least till the
| next opportunity rises.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Doubt it, many mid/low tier industries still struggle to
| hire because they pay engineering salaries not tech
| money. Government salaries are easily 30-50% lower
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Have you worked with body-shop consultants? I think I'd take
| my chances with an idealistic E-3.
| icedchai wrote:
| I was on a 6-month project with some body shop consultants.
| We were a small, boutique consultancy that outsourced work
| to a much larger body shop. They barely did any work, and
| what little work they did was some of the worst quality
| stuff I've seen in my life. They told us they had completed
| "phase 1" of a project. It didn't work _at all._ And we
| still paid them.
| kurthr wrote:
| Oh, it's fine. They can hire help from Russia to secure our
| infrastructure for a very low price. With the tariffs it
| doesn't really make sense for China to bid, or they'd be
| paying US!
|
| Eventual costs, well that's not really a concern and neither
| is national defense.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| Yeah can't wait until our Nation's Finest are having to use
| Grok Spectacles to identify enemy combatants.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Eh, that might work out.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-
| donal...
|
| > Elon Musk's OpenAI rival, xAI, says it's investigating why
| its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald
| Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already
| patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions
| for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What do you mean?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I thought that was pretty clear; I mean that Grok's
| "unbiased" training seems to align it with anti-Musk
| positions pretty regularly. As such, I'm not super
| fearful of it being picked to run the US government right
| now.
|
| Further examples: https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-
| grok-ai-is-turning-agai...
|
| > For instance, if you ask Grok: "Who is the biggest
| spreader of misinformation on X?" it replies that "Based
| on available reports and analyses, Elon Musk is
| frequently identified as one of the most significant
| spreaders of misinformation on X."
| ForHackernews wrote:
| At least that's cutting out the middleman -many big consulting
| firms are whitelabelling AI nonsense already.
| giarc wrote:
| Agree - train your employees to properly use a $200 ChatGPT
| subscription rather than rely on a $700/hr consultant doing
| the same thing.
| raincom wrote:
| Deloitte, Accenture, etc, have such bad reputations as any
| Indian offshore company TCS, Wipro, etc. Just add more billable
| hours, milk and milk.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I'm expecting every company to now pay less for their services
| because of this cut.
| EasyMark wrote:
| With this administration is about destruction of all government
| spending in order to maximize tax cuts for the top 1% who pay
| for access to The Hill, it really is about that, and not about
| efficiency. Also please point me at all the "fraud" they've
| found and yet for some reason the DOJ isn't charging anyone
| with "fraud". It's all BS. There are well thought out cuts, and
| there is what DOGE and Dump are doing.
| NickC25 wrote:
| All fine and dandy until one realizes that the pentagon's budget
| is measured in the trillions, and this sort of deal probably
| doesn't even deal with mission critical stuff.
|
| That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the
| pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete
| Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt
| our national security readiness.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| The '24 budget was $842 billion.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| 0.61% with just a few contracts
| supplied_demand wrote:
| Were these one-year contracts?
| btucker wrote:
| I'm sure PaywallBuster has reviewed these and confirmed
| they were one-year spending before making their
| statement.
| josephg wrote:
| It might be a small percentage of the pentagon's budget.
| But it's still $5.1bn of taxpayer money being reigned in
| here. It's $13 per person in the country. You could do an
| awful lot of good with that kind of money - from space
| programs to science funding.
| cma wrote:
| The article doesn't say the length of the contract or
| really anything about what it was for.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > from space programs to science funding.
|
| ... which have also been randomly cut.
| dagw wrote:
| _But it's still $5.1bn of taxpayer money being reigned in
| here_
|
| That's assuming that all those consultants were not
| providing any value and that they don't need to be
| replaced by hiring more staff.
| shusson wrote:
| What if they are providing negative value?
| jghn wrote:
| > You could do an awful lot of good with that kind of
| money
|
| Or given to billionaires
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| Exactly. Most of these "savings" will be fed into
| significant tax cuts that are almost certainly going to
| benefit the rich more than anyone else.
| r00fus wrote:
| DOGE is involved - do you think anything is going back to
| useful programs? More likely they'll just buy more SpaceX
| and Tesla.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _You could do an awful lot of good with that kind of
| money - from space programs to science funding._
|
| We sure could.
|
| Will we?
| ajross wrote:
| Those are surely the total contract sizes, not yearly
| billing.
| cma wrote:
| Department of Veteran's affairs budget was $328.1 billion and
| should probably be counted along with DoD since it's
| commitments made for former DoD recruits.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| The term of the contracts were longer than 1 year
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _we do waste a ton of money on consultants_
|
| I bet the median skill of a Deloitte consultant is higher than
| that of the average government office worker.
| dwater wrote:
| The trend for decades has been shrinking the public workforce
| and replacing them with contractors, because Republicans have
| said that the private sector is more efficient. So the
| average government office worker is not a tech, they are a
| contract officer. The government does not have these skills
| internally at the level necessary, if they want this work
| done they have to contract it out. And if these contracts get
| cancelled that money will get spent with another contractor,
| and given how this administration has been acting it will a
| contractor that bends the knee and not one that the president
| has publicly voiced animosity for.
| atonse wrote:
| Yes but do you really believe Deloitte isn't showering them
| with bribes and bending the knee to keep these contracts?
|
| It's not about who bends and who doesn't. They all will.
| Even Tim Cook who famously wears his politics on his sleeve
| has completely bent the knee to Trump.
|
| Money talks.
| dwater wrote:
| Yes, the president has made it clear through his actions
| that $1m will make him reconsider who's an enemy and
| who's a friend and any corporation that hasn't made a
| donation yet is probably calculating what the ROI would
| be and how big a donation to make.
| seanicus wrote:
| Wait are you telling me that Dana White was put on the
| board for Meta as a favor and not his incredible social
| media acumen?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The size of the federal workforce has been remarkably
| stable for decades[1]. It hasn't dipped below 2.7 million
| since 1967 ad only recently cracked 3 million again.
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| And in 1970 the US population was 203 million compared to
| 340 million now.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The comment above wasn't about per capita reductions.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Usually, they recruit government office workers into this?
| They acquire domain knowledge in endless drudgery, then get a
| pay upgrade and get rehired as consultant? The whole
| machinery becomes a whole level more inefficient.
|
| Van der Leyen was famous for squandering german defense
| budget to mc kinsey and co - who poached heads from the
| german rearmament office. National Defense related industries
| should be in general forbidden to hire consultants.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| no, in the US consultants are mostly just a backdoor for
| governments to hire actually competent people at payscales
| that are illegal for the government to use and with
| competitive interview processes that are also illegal for
| the government to use.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| Perhaps, but the profit motivation is completely different.
| One's there to serve and the other to bill hours.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Both are there to collect a check. One can get fired for
| doing nothing and the other cant.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| I'd counter that the cost to the American taxpayer is far
| less when you avoid the consultant upcharge, all else
| being equal.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Perhaps, but that is an entirely independent claim from
| the idea that government employees are passionate self
| sacrificers
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Based on my personal experience and that of many others I
| know, that's about as wrong as one can get. A great many
| government workers are there to collect a paycheck and go
| home (just like many other people working for many other
| employers). Their commitment to 'the mission' hovers near
| zero.
|
| _Just ask them._
|
| Where do people get these crazy ideas about government
| employees? There are some wonderful people in public
| service, but it's not some Wonkaland of saints who toil
| just to help others and do the right thing.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| Personally, I get this from my interactions with the
| reviewers at the FDA. Absolutely buried in work, always
| make the best effort to improve your submission, etc.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| fda reviewers are extremely out of distribution relative
| to almost every government worker except those at, say,
| the Fed. i would caution against trying to generalize
| that because it is mostly people taking a short term
| stint out of their profssional/academic career.
|
| sorta like dining in a michelin restaraunt and deciding
| that cafeteria workers are really good at cooking
| icedchai wrote:
| Yeah, it's not binary. I personally know government tech
| workers, true civil servants, that care and are clearly
| there to serve. These are the type of people you want in
| government. Yes, the opposite cliche that goes home right
| at 5 after barely doing anything also exists. I briefly
| worked with an ex-government "product manager" type that
| was clueless AF. I'm not sure how they even held on to
| their former job.
| masfuerte wrote:
| No chance. The median consultant is a fresh graduate. The
| median government office worker actually knows something.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I have met plenty of fresh graduates who know more and are
| much more productive than older people.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| I have met many new consultants. Most were less
| productive than experienced people.
|
| There are exceptions but few.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Generally I have been found "experience" to be highly
| overrated and companies that lean harder on it to be
| typically legacy/declining/european companies.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| When I worked as a consultant, the majority of the work
| was done by younger/less tenured/lower-level people.
|
| The skill balance (actual, tangible IT/software skill)
| was heavily in favor of the "younger" (as above).
|
| Most of the managers/those in supervisory roles were busy
| "showing impact" and "aligning cross-functional teams".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| unlike the other reply, this is a an accurate description
| of consulting dynamics.
| ebiester wrote:
| I would take that bet. First, government office workers have
| a higher bar to entry. While I've heard criticism of them
| being myopic, it was rarely that they were lacking
| intelligence.
|
| Deloitte consultants have a much wider variance. They too are
| capped on how much they can be paid, but they do not get the
| benefits of government service (e.g. pensions.) They are
| shuffled from subcontractor to subcontractor and the project
| managers are more obsessed with extracting more money from
| the department than finishing the project. The incentives are
| so misaligned as to be comical.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| As someone who has worked in the federal government,
| alongside other federal workers and deloitte consultants,
| you would lose this bet undoubtedly.
|
| "higher bar to entry" -> true civil service style testing
| for jobs is basically illegal in the feds and they have to
| give massive preferences to various interest groups.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You are absolutely right. As someone who has worked in
| government, the replies to you seem hopelessly optimistic
| about the average government worker.. it seems like many
| really cannot comprehend? the gulf in capability.
| burkaman wrote:
| Why? That seems completely wrong, based on my experience with
| both of these groups.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The peak of this was probably flying pallets of dollar bills
| into Baghdad and "losing track of them".
|
| Honorable mention to running air conditioners in Afghanistan
| using gasoline that had to be trucked several thousand miles
| through loosely-held territory at the cost of several service
| member's lives over the years.
|
| It's one of those situations where the roles have been briefly
| reversed, the left complaining about military spending and the
| right promoting it. Except the new budget is apparently going
| to spend MORE on the military, which is almost certainly going
| to be wasted since there's no clear justification or plan for
| it.
|
| Since Eisenhower and before everyone has known that a lot of
| military spending was pork-barrel jobs programs for various
| states, plus a certain amount of overt corruption (see "Fat
| Leonard"). But the media environment and right-wing prevented
| any serious questioning of military spending.
| h1fra wrote:
| they will probably announce a new $5B contract with Palantir next
| week
| splitrocket wrote:
| It will not be announced.
|
| Fun fact: the current Republican administration was pushing a
| budget that substantially increased the federal deficit. The
| one that was finally approved is still a massive budget deficit
| increase.
|
| Obama reduced the deficit by nearly half during his presidency,
| the current FY2025 budget has authorized a $1.9 trillion
| deficit (6.2% of GDP), with reconciliation instructions
| potentially allowing for a staggering $3.3-5.8 trillion in
| additional deficit increases over the next decade.
|
| * Obama's final deficit (2017): $666 billion
|
| * Current 2025 projected deficit: $1.9 trillion
|
| This represents an increase of approximately $1.23 trillion, or
| about 185% higher than Obama's final deficit. The current
| deficit is nearly triple what it was at the end of the Obama
| administration.
|
| Republicans have mastered the art of fiscal hypocrisy:
| campaigning against deficits to win elections, then ballooning
| them with tax cuts for the wealthy, only to leave Democrats
| with the thankless job of fiscal cleanup--for which voters
| reliably punish them at the polls.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| For the unenlightened soul, where is lion's share of that
| money being spent? (preferably in more detail than just "tax
| cuts")
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| There isn't a single Republican budget yet - the house and
| senate have their own versions of the budget they need to
| reconcile. That said, the house budget (which just passed
| yesterday) I believe hews more closely to the Whitehouses'
| proposal.
|
| There's a whole report you can read here: https://budgetmod
| el.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy202...
|
| But as a summary, you can probably look at Table 1. The
| values given are over 10 years, so divide every by 10 to
| get a sense of per year. As written it looks like:
|
| * Overall decrease 170 billion per year in spending
| (overall Federal spending is about 7 trillion per year).
| There are cuts across the board except in DoD, DHS, and
| DoJ.
|
| * Tax cuts decreasing revenue by ~450 billion per year.
| There is a section in the report identifying all of the
| different tax cuts. This decrease in tax revenue includes
| the effect of locking in Trump's first term tax cuts which
| are currently set to expire.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > preferably in more detail than just "tax cuts"
|
| That's like asking what an ocean is but preferably in more
| detail than just water.
|
| But to answer the question, we really can't give more
| detail. Congress passes a budget and delegates out to
| subcommittees to figure out how to spend the money (not
| revenue) that they were allotted.
|
| So a subcommittee has been authorized to find 4.5T of tax
| cuts over the next ten years and we won't know what they
| are until a later date.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| Pretty frustrating to be nearly 50 and this is literally the
| exact playbook over the last half century. Reagan / Bush /
| Trump - 20 years of absolute shit policy (and results) when
| it comes to the deficit that everyone cares about.
| EFreethought wrote:
| > when it comes to the deficit that everyone cares about.
|
| The GOP only cares about it when the POTUS is a Democrat.
| jhickok wrote:
| Not sure why this really matters a ton if they announced a 100+
| billion pentagon budget increase.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Cos now that money can now go straight to more Starlink for the
| pentagon.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| There have been multiple errors posted in this thread, and I
| don't know where those numbers are coming from since the budget
| is public record.
|
| The '25 budget has not yet been approved, but the request is $8
| billion more last year, not $100 billion.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| You're right that Trump's original request for 2025, and what
| Congress has been working on was not bumping up to a
| trillion.
|
| People are reacting to
| https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-
| congress/2025/04...
|
| This would be for the 2026 budget.
| nelblu wrote:
| Good riddance, and hopefully they won't be missed. Here in Canada
| these consultants are just leeches who suck up all the tax
| dollars which could actually be used for something useful.
| josephg wrote:
| Same here in Australia. Over the last decade we've
| systematically reduced the number of civil servants and
| increased the number of consultants in government by many
| times. The result is we've ended up paying through the nose for
| worse government.
|
| The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They
| should be used as little as possible.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| A good portion of Federal Government is just a bunch of leeches
| whose KPI is literally how much money they waste. SO works
| there, in a team of great dedicated people, and they are all
| good and professional, but the whole department can be wiped
| out and nobody will notice.
| timacles wrote:
| You guys are way too optimistic, they're just going to pass
| these contracts to trump, musk and Peter theil buddies. Charge
| more money and also introduce some nepharious bullshit like AI
| data scraping
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum
| filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly
| waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of
| cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have
| that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
| foota wrote:
| I think part of it's probably that the military is the largest
| discretionary spending in the US, and it's not especially
| popular, unlike say NASA or the NPS.
| jghn wrote:
| Yes, the scale is a huge part of it. If some program has a
| $1mil budget and you were to tell me that 25% of it was
| wasted. Well who cares? $250k in the US budget is a rounding
| error on a rounding error.
|
| But if you were to tell me that 25% of the Pentagon's budget
| was waste? That's a big deal.
|
| Yet somehow a certain segment of our population tends to
| focus on the small fries.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 25% waste on single million is not bad. 25% waste on all
| millions spend is very bad... And that 25% is likely under
| estimated in many cases. Or at least some more from 75% is
| inefficiently used.
|
| I admit probably not 25% of all millions is wasted. But
| even if that is half that would be 12.5% wasted... Or
| fourth 6.25%. Fixing of which would still be huge long term
| effect.
|
| So my take is that this needs to be fixed on all levels and
| on all places.
| jghn wrote:
| Sure. But the point is that the people who advocate
| cutting the waste never propose going after the big wins
| first. Instead we cut all the little things that actually
| helps people and use arguments to the effect that the
| waste was adding up in the aggregate. OR, we could just
| not spend a trillion dollars on the military.
| rtkwe wrote:
| And/or they decide on cuts by ^F "diversity" or
| "transition" cutting of programs like the US seed vault
| which stores a lot of different crop seed varieties so we
| can restart our agriculture if there's a blight that
| knocks out our massive monocultures but it's getting axed
| now because it protects crop _diversity_... and that's
| suddenly a kill word for funding because we're being run
| by ideologues and idiots.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There's ways to do that that aren't the mindless slash
| and burn that's happening right now. If it were done
| thoughtfully I'm sure there's places that some fat could
| be trimmed. (And if you're looking for places to do that
| look at the Pentagon who hasn't passed an audit in living
| memory...)
|
| Would it be worth the extra hurdles required to actually
| catch that waste/fraud though? My bet is on probably not,
| it's like the many many attempts to drug test welfare
| recipients, they all wind up costing far more than they
| save because the actual rate is pretty low so catching
| those is far more expensive than what you save.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think we are approximately 30T beyond "slow and
| thoughtful approach to cutting". if you want your program
| to be considered carefully, pass it with the necessary
| tax increases to fund it. don't just punt the tax
| receipts problem to the next guy.
|
| of course, if Trump is doing this all so he can pass his
| tax cuts as seems almost certain, he is no better. but
| frankly yes, the US needs deep cuts and concordant tax
| receipts increases to maintain a sustainable debt
| trajectory and price stability/productivity for the
| middle/working class.
| rtkwe wrote:
| You have to absolutely think about what you're actually
| cutting loads of programs and spending end up with
| positive net effects. If you just demand across the board
| cuts you're killing those positive EV programs which
| leave you worse off than before.
|
| The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary
| number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies
| in the end too.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary
| number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies
| in the end too.
|
| I agree that the problem with debt is not that there are
| foreign holders of US treasuries. But higher debt crowds
| out private investment & borrowing in the repo markets,
| which harms productivity, makes goods more expensive,
| hurts aggregate supply in the long run, and makes the
| poor even poorer.
|
| It also means that the US has to pay increasingly high
| amounts of money on interest financing and the Fed has
| far less room to effectively maneuver to combat inflation
| and ensure sustainable employment levels, as we've been
| seeing in the last few years. Debt is absolutely not an
| imaginary number and anyone who is telling you that
| perhaps doesn't understand the economic weight.
|
| The marginal dollar of US govt spending is generally not
| more welfare enhancing than the alternative of not having
| that debt, not crowding out private investment, etc. -
| particularly when we are in expansionary times (as we
| have up until very recently). With our current debt
| trajectory, we should be raising non-distortionary taxes
| and aggressively limiting spending that is not obviously
| growth enhancing or with strong social justice
| justification. We are starting to see real structural
| problems already emerging from our current debt
| trajectory.
| kenjackson wrote:
| What is waste in this context? Is it the delta from perfect
| efficiency? Is it working on things that have no value
| regardless of efficiency?
|
| I worry that we're not that good at measuring these things.
| And I suspect the measurement of waste is often considered
| waste.
| barnabee wrote:
| Having observed and been part of contracts involving these
| companies, it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80%
| of them don't cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than
| they should.
|
| It's not usually the type of work, it's the specific commercial
| model and mode of engagement with them that's generally at
| fault, often aided and abetted by procurement processes.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| they're a order of magnitude higher for some reasons though.
| I work in consulting, and occasionally larger enterprises
| approach our firm. We almost always decline because their
| requirements from vendor screening, to change review boards,
| to just the amount of sheer meetings it takes to enact a
| change to a title change on the website home page - its not
| worth it.
|
| A couple times we made the mistake of giving a 'go away'
| number and they took it, and then i had to deal with the
| insanity of F500 business...
| ethbr1 wrote:
| This ^ and uncertainty
|
| If I had to break down how consulting contracts are
| actually priced, it'd be: - 50% work
| - 35% requirement ambiguity - 15% customer
| management overhead
| icedchai wrote:
| Based on my experience with a smaller contractor, I think
| your overhead number is low. ;)
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Basically, but with big companies with on hand lawyer
| litigation is much more likely. They want things like
| contingency plans, licensing information, even asking
| what our own financials look like. We just walk and focus
| on clients who don't have so much risk
| curiouscavalier wrote:
| Yep, the procurement process (and related) requires a lot
| be baked into pricing. I'd also be curious what the fully
| burdened rate of in-house staff is compared to consultants.
| I've seen situations in the gov (not DoD) where despite
| high consulting rates, the full cost of hiring was even
| higher per hour.
|
| But I'm loath to defend the big firms. Generally, quality
| plus the ever push for expanding scope leaves a sensation
| of waste. The solution is just going to need more than
| simply tossing them out.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| thats part of it. onboarding vendors is such a PITA
| bringing on a DO-ALL-KINDA-BADLY vendor is preferred over
| a specialist vendor.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of
| them don't cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than
| they should.
|
| I have enough friends who work in University systems and
| government roles (both similarly heavy in red tape) to know
| that many of these institutions would also spend an order of
| magnitude doing it in house.
|
| It's misleading to compare to an idealistic efficient
| organization with no red tape, because government jobs are
| very heavy on red tape. That's where most of the inefficiency
| gets spent, whether it's done in house or by consultants.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Because we shouldn't be cutting research, healthcare and social
| security if we want to have a future as a society.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| well we need to find a way to make these programs sustainable
| then. frankly, medicare is extremely friggin expensive
| because it encourages overutilization - which raises costs a
| ton for everyone.
|
| we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of
| levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes
| significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our
| current fiscal situation.
| miltonlost wrote:
| You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Medicare is EXTREMELY
| CHEAP compared to private insurance. You're comparing
| Medicare in a vaccuum when you should look at private
| insurance.
|
| > we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically
| unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising
| taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of
| our current fiscal situation
|
| Oh wow, we can't raise taxes on the rich? only
| significantly the middle class? Why not the rich?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Medicare is extremely expensive from the perspective of
| the government/taxpayer. That it is extremely cheap and
| allows people to bid up the price of care on the consumer
| side is part of the problem, there is no triage or
| disincentive from overutilization because of how little
| cost share there is.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Lol so yeah, you're not comparing it to private insurance
| which is what TAXPAYERS actually pay themselves. You're
| just a right-wing hack.
|
| "Medicare is BAD because it costs money and is cheaper
| than private insurance. Private insurance is GOOD because
| it costs even more money than we'd pay with Medicare!!"
|
| Your position is "medicare is too expensive" but
| expensive compared to what??
| whimsicalism wrote:
| None of what you said is what I'm saying and you're
| making all sorts of presumptions about what you think I
| believe.
|
| I think you struggle with civil discourse and doubt this
| conversation will be productive, so have a nice day.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Cool. Go back to thinking we can only raise taxes on the
| middle class to pay for medicare and ignoring any taxes
| on the wealthy like you said in your first post. ( we
| simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard
| of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes
| significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our
| current fiscal situation )
|
| Your current fiscal situation is only right-wing talking
| points.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the vast majority of economists agree that there is
| simply not enough income among the wealthy that we can
| reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes
| on the wealthy. i favor raising taxes on the wealthy
| significantly, but there are also hard truths about tax
| receipts and current spending.
|
| https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/taxes-and-
| mandatory-...
| miltonlost wrote:
| You just posted a poll. From 2015 Of not even 50
| economists. That's not "the vast majority" of economists
| in any sense. They did no statistical analysis of who
| said what, so this isn't even statistically valid poll.
| It's just raw numbers, with self-selection bias.
|
| They also vary widely in their comments on what they
| agree with. Even if you think I'm uncharitably reading
| your words, you're entirely misreading the poll and the
| site you posted. You're putting your words in their
| mouths.
|
| "Long run fiscal sustainability in the US will require
| some combination of cuts in currently promised Medicare,
| Medicaid and Social Security benefits and/or tax
| increases that include higher taxes on households with
| incomes below $250,000."
|
| This poll question is biased and doesn't include anything
| about whether taxes on those above $250k need to be
| increased. You're, again, misreading the question that
| asked and adding in your own words about wealthy tax.
| There is nothing in that question that allows you to
| posit these polled economists don't believe "that we can
| reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes
| on the wealthy."
| grandempire wrote:
| > right-wing talking points.
|
| You keep saying this - it's a form of ad hominem.
|
| Also last I checked the Trump administration is not
| exactly full of free market healthcare advocates. You may
| be remembering Paul Ryan from 2012.
| grandempire wrote:
| Society existed before social security.
| snake42 wrote:
| So we should go back to being hunters and gatherers?
| grandempire wrote:
| Yep, those are only the options - social security or
| hunter gatherer.
| wormlord wrote:
| Public health research is good. Bombing civilians in the third
| world is bad. Do you get it now?
| grandempire wrote:
| > Public health research is good.
|
| This is basically a tautology. The question is what's
| actually being funded in the name of public health. Wasting
| money in pursuit of public health which doesn't help the
| public is bad actually,
| wormlord wrote:
| > Wasting money in pursuit of public health
|
| How do you define waste? If research isn't harmful, but
| doesn't produce results, is that waste? Are inconclusive
| results wasteful? What ratio of public utility to cost
| would you consider non-wasteful spending? What about the
| benefits of effectively subsidizing your biotech sector by
| keeping biologists in-demand?
|
| There is more upside (globally) to public health spending
| than maintaining a global empire that deals death and
| destruction. Trying to nitpick is missing the point
| entirely.
| grandempire wrote:
| > If research isn't harmful, but doesn't produce results,
| is that waste?
|
| It's certainly worse that research that does produce
| results. We should try to optimize for research that
| works.
|
| And yes, in the extreme example of spending a lot of
| money and never getting anything of public utility, that
| would be a waste.
|
| > What ratio of public utility to cost would you consider
| non-wasteful spending?
|
| I wouldn't use abstractions like "public health" and
| "public utility". Which specific projects are funding or
| losing funding and what's the impact?
|
| > There is more upside (globally) to public health
| spending
|
| Look inside the abstraction.
| wormlord wrote:
| I get that there's a discussion here over the minutae to
| be had in good faith. I am not qualified enough for that
| discussion. My point is that funding a genocidal empire
| is _inherently bad_ whereas public health funding can
| have inefficiencies but is overall a net good.
|
| The discussion is moot however because the agencies
| aren't being gutted over concerns of efficiency, but
| because of an ideological commitment to free market shock
| therapy. It's like arguing if you should order the fish
| or chicken while the Titanic is sinking. Sure there's an
| argument to be had, it's just not relevant right now.
| yuppii wrote:
| It is unfortunate but most users here are just partizans fueled
| with propaganda. I do not remember this place being such an
| echo chamber 10 years ago...
| bgirard wrote:
| The opinion here isn't homogenous. You'll find a wide range of
| opinion. It will shift based on which posters are active at a
| given time, or even from minor nuances in the story.
| reciprocity wrote:
| I, too, find it bothersome when people refer to an opinion
| written in a post and generalizes as if it were the opinion
| of an entire community. HN is not one person and it's
| incorrect to refer to it as if it is.
| splitrocket wrote:
| "War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe,
| as something that is not what it seems to the majority of
| people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is
| conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the
| masses." - Major General Smedley Butler
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
|
| "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
| fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who
| hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
| This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending
| the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the
| hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any
| true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on
| a cross of iron." - President Eisenhower
|
| Military Spending and Tax Cuts for the wealthy have some of the
| lowest economic multipliers of all government activities:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)
|
| * Education spending: 2.4 (Federal Reserve research) Source:
| Federal Reserve
|
| * Medicaid/healthcare: 2.0 Source: Congressional Budget Office
| Cbpp
|
| * Food stamps (SNAP): 1.73-1.74 Sources: Mark Zandi/Moody's
| Analytics, Americanprogress, Manhattan Institute
|
| * Unemployment insurance: 1.61-2.1 Sources: Blinder & Zandi;
| Urban Institute, Americanprogress
|
| * Infrastructure spending: 1.0-2.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder &
| Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress
|
| * Military spending: 1.5 (average) Source: Federal Reserve
|
| * Middle-class tax cuts: 0.6-1.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi,
| Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress
|
| * Upper-income tax cuts: 0.2-0.6 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi,
| Americanprogress
|
| * Permanent extension of all Bush-era tax cuts: 0.35 Source:
| Moody's Analytics model, Cbpp
|
| Dollar-for-dollar, social program spending consistently
| produces higher economic returns than military spending or tax
| cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy.
|
| $1 billion spent on education or transit creates more than
| twice as many jobs (17,687-19,795) as the same amount spent on
| defense (8,555). -Cigionline
|
| In fact, military spending can actually slow economic growth
| over time; a 1% military spending increase can reduce economic
| growth by 9% over 20 years.
|
| Zandi's analysis of 2010 tax legislation found that 90% of
| economic growth and job creation came from unemployment
| insurance extensions and targeted tax credits, while high-end
| tax cuts had "only very small economic impacts." - Cbpp
|
| Jack Ma was completely correct: US wasted trillions on warfare
| instead of investing in infrastructure.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-...
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I know a lot of people who love to quote Smedley and
| Eisenhower's farewell address, and to a person they support
| military intervention in Ukraine. Also, people who
| unironically were saying "The USA shouldn't be the world
| police!" 10 years ago.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| It's almost like supporting an ally whose sovereign
| territory is being violated is some kind of different
| situation than the US unilaterally performing military
| actions in a variety of locations. Amazing!
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Wasn't every gun and rocket given to Ukraine a theft from
| the hungry and the cold?
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Probably not, since most of what we sent over was
| existing stock. The money had already been turned into
| weapons of war years ago. You can't really turn a gun or
| rocket into a loaf of bread.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| And all of the money that was used to produce new arms?
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| I'm not attempting to justify all military spending by
| the US, and have no desire to do so. I am not one to
| quote Smedley.
|
| I am saying that support for Ukraine is pretty different
| from the kinds of behaviors that make people say "the USA
| shouldn't be the world police!"
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| > I am not one to quote Smedley.
|
| Then why are you arguing with me? I was pointing out the
| contradiction of people who do that. I feel like you
| think I'm saying the US shouldn't support Ukraine. I'm
| all on board with the US supporting Ukraine. I'm saying
| the US needs a powerful military if you want it to
| support Ukraine, which is at odds with people who are
| fully behind the quotes that come from Butler and
| Eisenhower's farewell address.
|
| > I am saying that support for Ukraine is pretty
| different from the kinds of behaviors that make people
| say "the USA shouldn't be the world police!"
|
| And yet, to even consider helping Ukraine in any
| meaningful way, the US needs an extremely strong, modern
| military.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| I don't like it when unlike things are treated as being
| the same, hence my reply.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| They aren't unlike things being treated the same. They
| are two separate and conflicting opinions which are
| concurrently expressed by some people.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| "Some military action can be justified" and "much
| military action that has been done was not well
| justified" are not conflicting opinions.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Part of existing in society is being pragmatic, reasonable, and
| not having black or white thinking.
| mikeocool wrote:
| I have experience in technology and biomedical research.
|
| IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very
| overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH
| grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and
| funding for research institutions is doing great harm to
| progress in modern medicine.
|
| Multiple things can be true at once.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| There is so much fake, useless research produced with NIH
| dollars. Academia, in general, is shot through with rot. To
| wit:
|
| 1) Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford's president, was fired in
| 2023 for having published research containing manipulated
| data.
|
| 2) Claudine Gay, Harvard's president until 2024, was found to
| have committed plagiarism that would have resulted in the
| censure or expulsion of most undergrads in her anemic body of
| publications.
|
| If these are the people who preside over our elite
| institutions, what are we to think is going on among the rank
| and file?
|
| Burn it all down and start over again clean.
| rtkwe wrote:
| And they got caught by the system already... You can't just
| snap your fingers, destroy the entire apparatus of academia
| and get it back again on a whim. It'd be a century or more
| to rebuild fully if you really did try to start over again.
|
| The impulse to cheat is even exacerbated by thinner funding
| not fixed by it because you're pressed extremely hard to
| get results to justify the next grant, and your tenure
| board in 5 years, and there's basically no grant money for
| replication and no prestige at all.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| What do you mean 'they were caught by the system
| already'?
|
| Claudine Gay is _still_ employed by Harvard. According to
| her Wikipedia page, she is the "Wilbur A. Cowett
| Professor of Government and of African and African-
| American Studies at Harvard University".
|
| And she wasn't exposed by folks in academia, but by
| people _outside_ that system.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Tessier-Lavigne only resigned from Stanford's presidency
| and remained on the faculty. His case was _far_ worse in
| my opinion. His research consumed millions of dollars and
| resulted in the misdirection of further millions
| downstream. Everyone knew Gay's work was useless BS, it
| just also turned out to contain plagiarism.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| BTW here is the final report from the law firm who
| conducted the investigation:
| https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/site... A second topic
| which the Scientific Panel examined was Dr. Tessier-
| Lavigne's management and oversight of his scientific
| laboratories. Because multiple members of Dr. Tessier-
| Lavigne's labs over the years appear to have manipulated
| research data and/or fallen short of accepted scientific
| practices, resulting in at least five publications in
| prominent journals now requiring retraction or
| correction, the culture of the labs in which this conduct
| occurred was considered. The Scientific Panel has
| concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne created a laboratory
| culture with many positive attributes, but the unusual
| frequency of manipulation of research data and/or
| substandard scientific practices from different people,
| at different times, and in labs at different
| institutions, suggests that there may have been
| opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and
| management.
| kouru225 wrote:
| So two people lied and you wanna get rid of the system that
| caught them?
| emilamlom wrote:
| It's like people took the idiom "throwing the baby out
| with the bathwater" as a thing to aspire to.
| somenameforme wrote:
| They were both caught by "outsiders" in spite of holding
| extremely high titles at both institutions, which would
| ostensibly entail rigorous vetting. Gay is even still a
| professor at Harvard.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| They are merely exemplars chosen because they were the
| _leaders_ of their institutions. The list is very, very
| long. I invite you to look into the issue further if you
| think I 'm wrong.
| reciprocity wrote:
| Haven't you seen the documentary Inside Job covering the
| 2008 financial crisis? "Burning it all down and starting
| over" is a very immature and myopic perspective and cannot
| be taken seriously as a workable solution. The solution is
| to implement regulation that, very broadly here, enacts
| mechanisms to make private gain for public loss something
| incredibly difficult to do.
|
| There need to be checks against people in positions of
| great wealth, power, and influence because people cannot be
| trusted to self-regulate and Do the Right Thing when large
| sums of money are on the table. "Self-determination of a
| conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IaJwkqgPk
|
| [2]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-05/white-
| hou...
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution
|
| ... in your opinion. More regulation will just lead to
| more and more ineffectual bureaucracy. "More regulation"
| as an answer is why nothing gets built in California.
| "More regulation" is why the Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia
| took 20 years to permit and complete, whereas the same
| can be done in under 5 years in China. "More regulation"
| is why it takes 10 years and $3 billion dollars to bring
| a pharmaceutical to market in the U.S.
|
| More regulation simply empowers the parasitical lawyers
| to gum up the works even further. It doesn't produce
| better outcomes, it produces far fewer outcomes.
|
| Burn it down. Send Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Bharat Aggarwal,
| Ching-Shih Chen, Carlo M. Croce, Andrew Jess Dannenberg,
| John Darsee, etc etc etc to prison. Start over again
| clean.
|
| People who resist this idea act as if we're realizing
| incredible progress and all that would be lost. We
| aren't. Science and medicine are very, very stagnant,
| sclerotic, and riddled with fraud. The liberal arts are
| almost entirely useless (from a taxpayer's perspective).
| rtkwe wrote:
| So what is your actual meaning when you say burn it down?
| Fire some university president heads who've been caught
| or what? You're language is vague but grandiose.
|
| The whole academic pipeline is actually quite delicate if
| we're talking massive disruptions, the current funding
| shake up is threatening to screw a whole class of
| graduates because PIs and Universities don't know if
| they'll be able to pay new graduate students so many are
| massively cutting back the number of admissions they're
| taking or skipping a year entirely. That has a knock on
| effect of screwing up new professors who're still setting
| up their labs because they can't get research started
| quickly to get new grants which can screw up their entire
| careers too. All that to find replace the word diversity
| or because a few high placed people faked some data?
| snake42 wrote:
| What an incredibly myopic view of things.
|
| China has been building nuclear successfully and worked
| out the kinks. The US basically paused all production and
| was trying to start over. You can't seriously blame it
| all on bureaucracy, when a lot of what was lost is
| institutional knowledge. Kind of like how your "burn it
| all down" approach would work for academia.
|
| Despite how things could be structured better, in
| medicine and science we are making progress. Maybe we
| could do better, but I certainly think we could be doing
| much worse.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Why did the U.S. "pause all production"?
| reciprocity wrote:
| It would help further a good-faith discussion if you were
| first more precise in defining what you mean. Please be
| specific with your premise and what you would do to fix
| the flaws you see.
|
| Maybe start with the part where you say "science and
| medicine are stagnant", therefore "we should burn it all
| down and start over". This is how misinterpretations and
| assumptions start and does not benefit mutual
| intellectual understanding.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Have you actually reviewed the plagiarism examples to
| confidently say that this would lead to the expulsion of
| undergrads?
| Aurornis wrote:
| They have been available online. You can go look at them.
|
| Yes, they would have resulted in disciplinary action for
| undergrads.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I have looked at them. The ones that are even meaningful
| are errors, not fraud.
|
| My professor friends are struggling to have meaningful
| discipline for entire essays copied from ChatGPT.
|
| Can you please copy the ones you find most egregious here
| and point to similar examples leading to the outcomes you
| describe in other environments?
| andbberger wrote:
| the rank and file just wants to do some science and have a
| place to lay their weary head. what's wrong with you man
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Don't hate the player hate the game. Academia has been
| perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration
| at all levels of funding and the university. It is not
| possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a
| new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric
| driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over
| production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of
| research into predictable outcomes that cannot be
| considered science because it is trodding well worn paths
| knowing it will produce yet another paper. Meanwhile
| funding agencies, job rules and laws, etc. all incentivize
| hiring PhDs over all other kinds of positions because it's
| usually rather impossible to create lots of forever tenure
| track professor and research scientist positions since no
| one has funding for the next 40 years of a persons career.
| It was wrong that they cheated and they should be removed
| but i understand why they did it.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I do hate the game. That's why I wrote, "burn it down and
| start over again clean". It is a broken, sclerotic system
| who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues
| you've just described).
| mikeocool wrote:
| Claudine Gay's political science and African-American
| studies research was funded by NIH?
| rurp wrote:
| > Burn it all down and start over again clean.
|
| This approach has an abysmal track record historically and
| I expect history will repeat itself here. Burning complex
| systems down is many orders of magnitude easier than
| building them up, and much less fun for the people who like
| burning things down. So the predictable effect is that
| blunt wide-scale destruction almost always makes things
| worse.
|
| Yes Academia and government could be vastly more efficient.
| Almost everyone agrees on that and a lot of work has been
| put into improving things. But doing that in a way that's
| net good requires patience and competence, traits the
| current people running the government openly disdain.
| jordanpg wrote:
| > There is so much fake, useless research produced with NIH
| dollars.
|
| You're going to need more that 2 examples (one of which has
| nothing to do with NIH) to substantiate this claim.
|
| Have you been to the doctor recently? One of your loved
| ones?
|
| See if you can find something important to your family in
| this chart: https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-
| spending#/
|
| Take a look at what was funded recently.
|
| Putting aside how you or your family has personally
| benefited from items on the list, please point out the
| "fake, useless research".
| kshri24 wrote:
| It is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
|
| Coined by author Michael Crichton:
|
| "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
| You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know
| well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You
| read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no
| understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the
| article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward--
| reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause
| rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
|
| In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the
| multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national
| or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the
| newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the
| baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you
| know.
|
| That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not
| operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody
| consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount
| everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of
| falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one
| part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we
| believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to
| read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost
| certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior
| is amnesia."
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I read the news to judge what the propagandist want me to
| know, not to actually learn things.
|
| I find skimming NYT's and FOX's headlines are perfectly
| satisfactory. If anything peaks my interest I do independent
| analysis, putting weight on primary sources. I often try to
| listen in on experts discussing the matter among themselves.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| When do you have time to work?
| dgfitz wrote:
| Fwiw, I listen to sports talk radio whenever I'm not in
| meetings or otherwise physically interacting with someone
| else at work.
|
| The actual "news" stopped being productive to read,
| watch, or listen to when the term "pregnant chads" was
| coined. Been downhill ever since.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| Seems pretty consistent to me. People were also upset when IT
| employees got fired.
|
| The general rule that employees good, contractors bad still
| holds. Even though people seem obsessed with the belief that
| firing public employees and replacing them with private
| contractors will make the government more "efficient".
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| This is a misframing of the sentiment. No one believes there
| isn't waste in government. We just don't believe 5 under 20
| year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, others whose only
| qualification is Elon Musk likes them, are good at identifying
| what's waste and what's important.
|
| And we would like to see a measured approach to reducing waste,
| with some findings released to the people about what the plan
| is going forward and why the cuts make sense, rather than "just
| fire every probational employee" or "just 50% slash the SEC" or
| whatever else they are doing currently.
| grandempire wrote:
| > 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds,
|
| This is a subset - the one the media choose to highlight and
| that's occupying your mindshare.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| What's occupying my mindshare is that we are firing
| hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately
| veterans, while at the same time raising prices of
| everything artificially. Welcome to stagflation.
|
| EDIT: Also, should anyone with a criminal background be in
| charge of what they're currently doing? I'd say no. That's
| just me
| cbsmith wrote:
| There's a presumption in the logic of your statement here that
| if there is any waste in a program, it must be cut.
|
| It turns out that there is generally waste in all operations;
| it doesn't follow that all operations should be terminated.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The internet comment section "pick a side and deride the other"
| doesn't work on these situations.
|
| Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too
| expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have
| disastrous consequences.
|
| Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate
| ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away
| from the consequences. They know they can convince enough
| people that their bold move was a good thing and that the
| consequences will diffuse throughout the years on to other
| people.
|
| This very well could become more expensive to cancel abruptly
| when you consider the second and third order effects.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have
| disastrous consequences.
|
| Destroying everything because you don't know how to fix it or
| work within the system is an amateur move. Weakness
| masquerading as tough guy strength.
| grandempire wrote:
| > Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have
| disastrous consequences.
|
| I think this part is overestimated. It will get fixed.
| tclancy wrote:
| By whom?
| grandempire wrote:
| This comment by saying it will be disastrous. Remember
| all the twitter predictions?
| t-writescode wrote:
| Underfunding and breaking of, for example, unemployment
| benefits systems causes real harm, real loss of
| medication, real loss of house, etc.
|
| But that won't make the news in any meaningful way, and
| the destitute will often be too busy to make loud noises.
| And the populous at large will sigh and shake their head
| and say "what a shame", but the loss can be *enormous*.
| grandempire wrote:
| > Underfunding and breaking of, for example, unemployment
| benefits systems causes real harm, real loss of
| medication, real loss of house, etc.
|
| I thought we were talking about firing IT consultants?
| Let me know when that happens.
|
| > But that won't make the news
|
| I think that would make the news immediately. The media
| is very interested in DOGE and its shortcomings.
| t-writescode wrote:
| > I thought we were talking about firing IT consultants?
| Let
|
| I read this whole thread as being about the broader
| 'cutting' trend,
|
| OOP: when discussing the overall trend of cutting
| programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have
| that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
|
| Parent: Rash moves like this are things politicians and
| corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they
| run far away from the consequences.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Breaking critical systems like SNAP, Medicare/Medicaid,
| weather forecasting and many many many other systems that
| people literally depend on for their being alive *kills*
| people.
|
| Programmers that work on critical systems are actively
| trained to take into consideration every contingency to not
| increase the death rate of their systems, to the best of
| their abilities.
|
| Aggressive, comprehensive and non-robust axing of systems
| when literal lives are on the line - especially when it's
| government systems and those lines maintain any semblance
| of some people's ability to literally be alive - touch and
| impact more lives than any single Boeing plane or NASA
| space shuttle's crash. They are even more critical than
| those systems - though not as flashy when they fail.
| grandempire wrote:
| This is a nerd fantasy where you imagine your skills and
| expertise are what keep society turning.
|
| Computer problems are fixable, and they are secondary,
| and there are many people and services who can be hired
| to fix them.
| t-writescode wrote:
| What are you on about? The systems I'm referring to are
| human systems with lots of humans doing human things.
| Cutting funding, removing departments, those are removing
| the humans doing human things to solve human problems.
| grandempire wrote:
| This is what I replied to in my comment above:
|
| > Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be
| too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan
| can have disastrous consequences.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third
| party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can
| perform
| fckgw wrote:
| The source is the person doing the cutting. Of course
| they're not going to say "We're cutting essential staff for
| no reason"
| mywittyname wrote:
| > This very well could become more expensive to cancel
| abruptly when you consider the second and third order
| effects.
|
| That's the goal. The whole conservative ideology for the past
| 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it
| can complain about government inefficiencies.
|
| What we are seeing is the end game of this idea - turn the
| government itself into an gigantic inefficient corporation
| designed to siphon as much money as possible from people.
|
| In this specific situation, these expensive contractors will
| be replace with _even more expensive_ "AI contractors" that
| work for companies founded by the Global Elite Tech Bros. So
| more money spent on on less outcomes. Destroying the system
| first ensures that there's no direct performance comparisons
| that can be made between the old expensive, but functional
| system and the new even more expensive, disfunctional one
| they created.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| > The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has
| been to make the government inefficient so it can complain
| about government inefficiencies.
|
| People say things like this, but then have trouble
| explaining California, where the left has had a
| supermajority for almost as long.
| fundad wrote:
| And California is an incredibly successful economy and
| people dream of living there.
| airforce1 wrote:
| Then why is everyone fleeing to escape the high taxes and
| crime? California is losing house seats at the present.
|
| Also, I don't know if you can really credit the left's
| supermajority for the success of SV... CA's politics have
| pivoted over the years. Look at an election map of CA in
| 1980 and you'll see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_U
| nited_States_presidentia...
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| To be fair, no one wants their job to go away. The government
| contracting gravy train is massive and has been seemingly never
| ending for a very long time.
| yibg wrote:
| I don't think the majority view is so much there is no waste in
| the other areas. With most people I talk to, the objection is
| mostly with the methods employed and the lack of
| accountability.
|
| For me, I wouldn't have objected to Musk / DOGE going in and
| actually doing an audit of everything to look for waste, fraud
| and abuse. And if actual waste, fraud and abuse are found,
| where evidence and details are provided, I'd personally
| celebrate that.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Ditto. Without proof claiming that 50% of some department or
| other is waste, doesn't convince anyone
| meindnoch wrote:
| Gell-Mann amnesia in action.
| grandempire wrote:
| Yep, the image portrayed of every other government department
| is scientists in white coats looking at cancer cells in a
| microscope, or doctors bandaging soldiers coming off the battle
| field.
| silexia wrote:
| Yes, I agree. The consultants are certainly wasteful, but I am
| personally aware of many employees for the government who
| literally have to do nothing and are actually not allowed to do
| any real work. We need to clean up the waste everywhere.
| keybored wrote:
| Amusing that a newly minted federal department of tech-bro
| adjacent yahoos declares that there is waste but clearly does
| not have any of the expertise--which would probably need to be
| wide-ranging--to be able to actually get rid of the waste
| itself and not just cut indescriminately.
|
| You could get an oncologist to admit that the patient had some
| cells that needed to be removed, due to the advanced cancer.
| But the layman chose to get rid of a couple of perfectly
| healthy, cancer-free limbs.
| fundad wrote:
| Yep. The budget for the Department of War has been too bloated
| for too long and needs to be more efficient. Let's not
| privilege a series of pet projects for a bunch of bureaucrats
| over the reset of government.
| acomjean wrote:
| What were these contracts for?
|
| Networking or day to day software/application maintenance? I get
| they were probably bloated (I did work for a defense contractor
| at one point) but presumably they were doing something. I mean
| isn't Deloitte a accounting firm?
|
| I'm a little worried about the "stand down" attitude against
| cyber attacks.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Week long meetings charging 300/hour etc
| wil421 wrote:
| If you didn't know all the accounting firms have massive IT
| consulting practices then do you really know about them?
|
| I think Deloitte makes about half of their US revenue from
| various consulting projects.
|
| https://www.projectworks.com/blog/2024-the-big-4s-revenue
| ghc wrote:
| At least one contract appears to be for the air force's effort
| to move secure workloads to a multi-cloud environment. Based on
| publicly available slides, I think Accenture is acting as a
| middleman to avoid dependence on Azure or AWS technical support
| creating lock in to their clouds.
|
| IMHO firing Accenture is probably a good move in this case. I
| bet they were extracting money at every opportunity just so the
| gov't could nominally avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
| EasyMark wrote:
| with the current pattern by DOGE, I would say that it's likely
| they monitor grift and do audits of various departments. DOGE
| and Trump has been gutting many government oversight groups
| that are set up to prevent grift and fraud. I suspect 10 years
| down the road we'll find tons of grift under this
| administration after it's no longer in control
| Group_B wrote:
| Great, but it doesn't matter too much as they'll still vote in an
| increased budget that adds more debt. How about we raise taxes a
| bit and stop spending trillions of dollars that we don't have
| each year.
| normie3000 wrote:
| I think taxes on imports just got raised a bit.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I thought that got paused by tweet yesterday.
| EasyMark wrote:
| still 25% on a lot of countries/industris, 10% across the
| board on everyone (at least) and 145% on China, our largest
| manufacturing trading partner.
| apercu wrote:
| Not to be a cynic, but I bet all this means is that Republican
| campaign contributions from Deloitte and Accenture will be down
| and Democratic contributions will go up and new contracts will be
| awarded in the future so that the wealth class (won't someone
| think of the poor shareholders) can continue to steal your money.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys.
| The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases
| for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about
| what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary
| banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the
| experience we need for much, much less.
| sepalous wrote:
| I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient
| through the use of technology. However, the civil service
| simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs.
| Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay
| consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to
| the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense!
|
| It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however.
| The civil service also needs better and more effective
| management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and
| to force through change, both of which are an abdication of
| management's responsibility.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a
| national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay
| people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be
| an additional political roadblock.
| koolba wrote:
| > The government could be made hugely more efficient through
| the use of technology. However, the civil service simply
| doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs.
|
| They should start by disbanding all government employee
| unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based
| promotion criteria.
| azemetre wrote:
| Yes because if it's one thing workers like is removing
| their bargaining power and relying solely on how future
| administrations feel about your job.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| unions should not be able to negotiate against the
| collective will of the people and seniority based
| leveling has been a _disaster_ for the government in the
| US, at least.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You cannot ultimately chain people to their desks. What
| you either get is a "soft" withdrawal of labour (people
| refuse to take the job if they have any other choice
| available, as we're discussing upthread, so you get
| dregs), or the whole thing explodes into "illegal"
| strikes. Which are harder to resolve, because you made
| sure there's no one organisation to negotiate with.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the US has at-will employment, save it with the
| hyperbole. There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people
| would love to have.
|
| Collective bargaining against private actors is fine.
| There should be no collective bargaining against the
| democratic will of the people, any more than some random
| group of federal workers has veto power over law passed
| bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.
| Symbiote wrote:
| > There should be no collective bargaining against the
| democratic will of the people
|
| Presumably this also rules out any company or non-profit
| from negotiating a contract with the government, or suing
| the state.
| azemetre wrote:
| No you see only capital is allowed to bargain with the
| government, labor is not allowed to for "reasons" that
| somehow always seem to benefit capital at their expense.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| workers are allowed to bargain against the government, as
| in "i will not take the job at the pay you are offering."
|
| both private companies and workers should not be allowed
| to band together to deny the government all contracts
| until they get the one they want.
| bumby wrote:
| Your stance seems to be at odds with the freedom of
| association protected by the US Constitution.
| azemetre wrote:
| It's way easier to understand when they just want to
| attack labor and absolve capital, it really is that
| simple for 99% of the discourse you read online.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The protections offered to unions goes far beyond
| standard freedom of association. Generally I think that
| is okay, but not in the case of public unions.
| bumby wrote:
| I think you may be misunderstanding. The right to join a
| union is the right to association. Right to association
| is not something provided by a union. In other words, you
| have a right to collectively bargain for certain working
| conditions and that is guaranteed by the 1st amendment.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > workers are allowed to bargain against the government,
| as in "i will not take the job at the pay you are
| offering."
|
| In the same way that someone is allowed to not breath
| underwater.
|
| A lot of people don't have the luxury of choosing.
| polski-g wrote:
| Unemployment is currently 3.5%.
|
| Every sector of the economy is looking for more workers.
| azemetre wrote:
| That'll change soon, don't worry.
| azemetre wrote:
| Poppycock. Being able to collectively bargain against the
| government is more than legal, it should be encouraged.
|
| They don't have veto power over Congress, it's about
| allowing workers to dictate the terms they seem fair for
| themselves against the US government. If Congress and the
| executive branch can't agree with labor terms with
| workers at the table, that's bad.
|
| Not having unionized federal workers is way way way
| worse.
|
| One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about
| police unions?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If you just want to talk about outcomes, there are a
| number of studies showing the negative impact public
| sector unions have on outcomes - for instance there is
| clear research causally linking union penetration in
| school districts to decline in student outcomes in
| Wisconsin. [0]
|
| > One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about
| police unions?
|
| Not everyone fits into two political buckets. I am
| extremely anti for the reasons above as well as
| additional reasons particular to police unions. I also
| favor big tax hikes, banning guns, and higher spending on
| housing subsidy, snap, etc.
|
| I just also think governments should be capable, student
| outcomes are important, the interest of voters are
| greater than that of govt employees, etc.
|
| 0: https://morganfoy.github.io/papers/Foy_JMP.pdf
| ben_w wrote:
| > There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would
| love to have.
|
| That makes it easy for people to leave the government.
|
| The question you should be asking is: are there _enough_
| people who are _sufficiently competent_ to take on the
| government roles?
|
| Case study where the workers had less power than
| expected: Reagan vs. air traffic controllers.
|
| Case studies where the government had less power than
| expected: Every coup ever, UK's Winter of Discontent
| (even if the long-term result was electorate going for
| Thatcher who gutted the unions), Polish Solidarity
| Movement.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| No random federal workers have veto power over the law.
| Never did.
|
| Having an executive with contempt for the law and the
| concept of separation of powers and judicial review is a
| perversion of democracy.
|
| The democratic rule of the people is driven by the law.
| What laws have the republicans passed authorizing these
| actions?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| what specific actions are you talking about?
|
| e: christ, why am I downvoted for earnestly asking a
| question
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Many of the administrative actions, through the purging
| of 200k employees, are preventing activities that are
| required to be done by law from being done.
|
| I agree it's unreasonable that you're being downvoted. I
| disagree strongly with your position, but you're
| expressing it in a completely appropriate manner.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Yes they should. There are multiple wills of multiple
| peoples.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Nothing says freedom like banning the right to strike.
| Which might work in the short term, but makes the strikes
| much, much more vicious when they do come.
| yrxuthst wrote:
| Federal employees already do not have the right to
| strike, see 5 U.S.C. SS7311.
| immibis wrote:
| Do they have the right to quit?
| lupusreal wrote:
| You know they do.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the problem is there is literally no incentive to make sure
| you are hiring the right people in government. nobody is
| sacked if you dont make your numbers, xyz.
|
| higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient
| condition to get competent operators.
| bumby wrote:
| A counter point:
|
| Salary should be decent, but I'm not wholly convinced it
| needs to be at "market rate." By having reasonable rates
| but below "market" value, you are likely creating a
| selection bias for people who are in it for the mission
| more than they are in it for the money. I think that's a
| good thing.
|
| It's like the idea that politicians should be allowed to
| trade stocks or else you won't get the "best" talent. I'd
| argue I don't want politicians whose primary motivation is
| financial gain.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| we should also start cutting doctor pay to make sure we
| get people who are in it to help others.
| bumby wrote:
| Do you think the best doctors are the ones who go into
| the most lucrative paths, like cosmetic surgery in
| Beverly Hills? You're deliberately strawmanning. The
| equivalent statement on the other side would be: We
| should 10x doctor pay so we only get those people who are
| in it for the money. That's a disingenuous stance as
| well. Let's not pretend that "slightly below market rate"
| for specialized fields leaves people in the poorhouse.
|
| My original point was about achieving a balance to avoid
| hiring mercenaries. I think that is important in domains
| where ethics matter and ultimately leads to better long-
| term outcomes. When people defend the pay aspects being
| the best motivation, they are quietly telling us about
| their own (anti-social) value system.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Doctor pay is already 10x.
| bumby wrote:
| Doctor pay is already 10x doctor pay?
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Pediatric medicine in a nutshell.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Inevitably, that way of setting up an organization leads
| to one of two end-games:
|
| 1-A wealthy ruling class who can afford and feels
| entitled to be the government. See: the British Empire.
|
| 2-A wealthy ruling class who can afford to postpone
| profits while they accumulate power, to eventually trade
| that power for profit through grift. See: western
| democracy.
|
| Pay people as well as possible for their work and
| ruthlessly go after theft, corruption and incompetence.
| That's how you build a lastingly successful system.
| Shades of Singapore.
| evidencetamper wrote:
| Singapore has been independent since 1959, while the USA
| got its own in 1776, and Britain has been around for more
| than a thousand years.
|
| I don't think we can, yet, call Singapore a lastingly
| successful system, considering most of the time since its
| independence has been under a father or his son.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Fair, I won't pretend to know much about Singapore. But
| feels like a better way to set things up than what came
| before.
| jaldhar wrote:
| Re: 1. Cause and effect are backward. Imperial service
| was actually more meritocratic than the domestic British
| government of that time. Look how many names of
| colonialists are Scottish or Irish. The former were
| tossed out of their land during the Highland clearances
| or lost influence when the Union shifted power to London.
| The latter were barred from high office due to their
| Catholic religion. But if you had talent and ambition you
| could go to Africa or India (and then become wealthy and
| ultimately join the ruling class)
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Fair, I won't pretend to know much about the British
| empire. But feels like a decent strawman for my argument.
| ksec wrote:
| It shouldn't be market rate because you get job safety.
| Most have never worked in private sector before and has
| no idea.
|
| Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability.
| Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure
| and hierarchy.
|
| People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most
| working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If
| you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a
| thing in large enterprise. You haven't seen civil servant
| yet.
|
| I cant remember which party it was but stopped the Pay
| Band usage and everyone is simply paid by the starting
| rate. UK civil servant has basically stopped most salary
| increase for a long time.
|
| Because of that, instead of pay raise a lot of people got
| promoted which is basically everyone in every department
| has inflated grades. These promotion are also
| problematic, again, not based on merit. There are now
| more SCS1 than ever.
|
| 40% of work are irrelevant and made up by seniors to
| improve their chance of promotion. Another 50% of the
| work are getting around bureaucracy, only 10% of the work
| are actually useful.
|
| And there is no way to fix it. Ministers dont want to fix
| it because they rely on cvil servant to get things done.
| Civil servant internally lack the interest to reform. And
| if anything the power of a department is measured by how
| many staff it has.
|
| But none of these are new. We are now close to 50 years
| since Yes Minister first aired. And the documentary
| remains relevant, and everyone should watch it if they
| want to understand more. And as far as I can tell, this
| is not UK specific.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Most have never worked in private sector before and
| has no idea._
|
| The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years.
| The average age is 47.2 years old. I don't know how to
| reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have
| been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to
| work for the government or it has some wonky distribution
| or something else is going on that you should elaborate
| on.
| wiether wrote:
| The tenure is for the job or overall in the government?
|
| Here in France it's quite common for government employees
| to jump through agencies during their career, so the
| average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite
| big.
|
| Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is
| about the UK.
| bumby wrote:
| For the government. The stats are based on employer, so
| even if you switch roles or organization, you are still
| counted in the same "federal employment" bin.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I can't speak to the UK at all, but I've met less than
| five people who started their government jobs right out
| of high school or college. They'll be able to retire on
| their pension 33 years later at about 3/4 of their max
| salary -- so, at roughly 51 or 55. (The pensions are
| funded by employee contributions.)
|
| It's well known in the workplace who they are, because
| people are really fucking envious.
| wat10000 wrote:
| You also create a selection bias for people who are bad
| at what they do and can't get a better paying job.
| bumby wrote:
| Again, this assumes the main motivation is money. Ie if
| they could get a better paying job, they would. You can
| select for highly skilled people who also aren't putting
| money as the top priority. The point I'm getting at is
| that pay can be a noisy proxy for skill and we should
| probably not assume they are tightly correlated in all
| domains.
|
| One person once said the people at the NSA are much more
| like Marines than Silicon Valley types. They're more
| interested in the mission than in getting rich. The fact
| that so many people look at a job as a money optimization
| problem says a lot about society.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >this assumes the main motivation is money
|
| People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not
| just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay
| to avoid writing or saying all of that out).
|
| You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to
| 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour
| weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and
| not expect a decent pay to quality of life at work ratio.
|
| If you do not increase quality of life to make up for
| lower pay, you will end up with less driven or less
| capable people. Note that quality of life also includes
| security of income, which can reduce that type of stress.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree and I think that supports the idea that salary
| alone is a bad metric for skills. Many people will take a
| lower pay to support a mission they are passionate about.
| To claim that makes them lower skilled or that they
| couldn't get a higher paying job elsewhere is an overly
| simplified mental model. Sometimes the job itself is what
| leads to the higher quality of life.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| No one is passionate about taking care of too many
| patients and making sure they document everything to the
| T to prioritize not being sued for millions of dollars.
| bumby wrote:
| This is a different argument. And there are plenty of
| people who put up with the bad parts of a job because the
| good parts are rewarding. Nobody should be so naive to
| think every job is all rainbows and puppy breath.
|
| If your stance is that the healthcare system needs
| improvement, I'd agree. If your point is that the best
| doctors are the people who have money as their top
| priority, I'd disagree. I'd extend the latter to say, we
| may not get a better healthcare system by just paying
| people more. Throwing more money at a bad system tends to
| make a worse system.
|
| Do you think we'd get better doctors if we could create a
| new system that lets them focus the majority of their
| effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system
| and just gave all physicians pay raises?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a
| worse system.
|
| There are most likely decreasing returns on both ends of
| the scale.
|
| >Do you think we'd get better doctors if we could create
| a new system that lets them focus the majority of their
| effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system
| and just gave all physicians pay raises?
|
| "A new system" is too nebulous, but step by step reform
| is the obvious way forward. From decreasing unnecessary
| requirements for new doctors (there must be a way to not
| have to completely sacrifice one's 20s and early 30s and
| still become a doctor), to tort reform that allows for
| sensible judgments, to increasing funding for residency
| and medical schools to allow for higher supply of
| doctors, etc.
|
| Also, doctor pay (per hour or per patient) has been
| declining in real terms for many, many years now. Which
| is not bad in and of itself, but when you are
| simultaneously decreasing remuneration and quality of
| life at work, intelligent people will pick up on that
| signal to look elsewhere to sell their services.
|
| A lot of US healthcare is performed by smart people from
| poorer countries who just want a chance for their kids to
| grow up in the USA. That the country relies on that
| arbitrage has always been ridiculous to me.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree with basically all of this. The one distinction I
| would make is that the pay reduction is real terms is
| across all kinds of domains so I don't think it's
| particularly unique of physicians, but part of a larger
| issue. Same with the cost of education/training etc. In
| other words, I think the healthcare issues you highlight
| may be emblematic of bigger systemic problems.
|
| With all that said, it's still a different argument than
| "pay = ability". Put differently: the $ amount in TFA
| could be used to increase Congress member pay from $174k
| to $10MM each. Do you think that would result in better
| politicians?
| mediaman wrote:
| Agreed. Many people I know who work in state government are
| always on or planning their next vacation, or in the middle
| of another home renovation, and lightly joke about their
| "work from home."
|
| It's just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to
| actually perform, and combined with environments such as
| WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking
| like a fairytale life paid for by other people.
|
| This happens in the private sector as well, but tends to
| correct over time - hence big tech's layoffs, especially of
| managers and nontechnical staff, after the excesses of
| 2021-2022.
|
| I don't think this is true of all state employees, but it
| seems to happen more with the educated professional class
| with more abstract work.
| treis wrote:
| It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it
| how absurd government work can be. I was briefly on the
| 2020 census project as a sub-sub-sub-contractor.
|
| The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated
| most statistics like unemployment rate for the
| government. So lots of PII and therefore strict
| background checks.
|
| All good except that they hired people before the checks
| were done. And the checks were slow so people were
| waiting months before getting access to systems.
|
| That's pretty bad, but at the start at least we were in
| meetings. We couldn't do anything without system access
| but at least we could get up to speed on the project and
| provide general advice.
|
| Someone somewhere got word of that and one day there were
| armed Federal agents outside the offices. No badge = no
| entry and thus ended our participation at all in the
| project.
|
| But it did not end our getting paid. I was flying into DC
| costing $2kish in expenses per week and I think I was
| being billed out at nearly $8k a week (I got $2.5kish of
| that). If I tried to do any actual work for that money
| someone would have literally shot me.
|
| That went on for months because the background checks
| took that long. There were dozens of us in that situation
| and several hundred thousand in government money was
| burned for literally no benefit.
|
| I don't know exactly where that project ended up but it
| did not get used for the 2020 census.
| fads_go wrote:
| Not sure where you get your information. Many civil
| servants are motivated to do what is right for their
| country, civil service tends to draw mission-oriented
| people. People who are typically willing to go above and
| beyond to make things work.
|
| Think about the teachers who buy classroom supplies out of
| their own meager paycheck because they want them for the
| lesson, and 'cost-cutting' means they don't have enough
| resources in the school.
|
| Think of all the people at the CDC, or at NOAH, or similar.
|
| In any large organization, and the Fed Government is > 2m
| employees, so it counts, you can easily find example of
| people who are driven and people who coast.
|
| And actually, people are sacked in the fed if they don't
| make their numbers, or they are quietly sidelined.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more,
| however. The civil service also needs better and more
| effective management. Consultants are used as both liability
| shields and to force through change, both of which are an
| abdication of management's responsibility.
|
| Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because
| politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very
| attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function
| is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not
| everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You
| eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense,
| including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup
| eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating
| manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became
| unworkably complicated.
|
| PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing
| government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private
| sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value
| extraction layer on top of it.
| aantix wrote:
| Salary banding doesn't attract the talent you need. Maybe, good
| enough?
|
| E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences,
| write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly
| contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same?
| Terrible deal.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| You can solve this by either having wide bands or by
| preferentially promoting those that make extra contributions.
|
| Just increasing the salary band would do a lot to attract
| more talent, which is a good-not-perfect solution. Last time
| I checked going to work at a federal job would have cut my
| total compensation in half, but if it was just a 20% cut I
| would have looked deeper.
| aantix wrote:
| With that much liberty, there's no point to the bands in
| the first place. They become meaningless.
| Angostura wrote:
| Certainly within the NHS, except for exceptional
| circumstances you start at the bottom of the band,
| irrepective of talent/experience - moving up throught the
| band purely on time-served. Depressing
| Ziggy_Zaggy wrote:
| The federal service DOES have a pay-banding system
| (AcqDemo) that CAN support the extra compensation but it's
| currently NOT being adequately implemented. If the system
| actually implemented the next pay-band to be cover roughly
| pay-grade that covers the $100k to $250k income level that
| wasn't MGT focused and instead technical "do the work in a
| team setting" focused (NOT tech director - useless position
| - should be eliminated).
|
| Also, the current pay-pool system is NOT effective bc MGT
| is NOT able and/or willing to fight for their employees who
| work to get a reasonable pay-bump and instead the game is
| always "can't pay my employees more than me or my MGT
| buddies".
|
| The federal service culture insists on paying MGT positions
| more than technical higher-talent positions in over 80% of
| cases.
| 1024core wrote:
| TIL people contribute to Open Source for money.
|
| Just FYI: everyone who contributes to OSS makes the same!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| tons of people are paid to contribute to oss..
| misnome wrote:
| I'm paid to work on OSS.
| keybored wrote:
| This site has this weird streak where you have people talking
| about making things for the sake of making them, people
| talking about hustling and making money--and these events are
| discrete. Then you have the third event where people on
| behalf of some group step in and say that people who make
| whatever and "go above and beyond" would never, ever do what
| they are doing if something even _slightly_ more egalitarian
| than whatever the status quo represents would have been
| implemented.
| cbsmith wrote:
| One of the great things about arbitrarily breaking contracts is
| that you save money in the short term, and signal future
| contractors that they need to charge even more exorbitant rates
| in future government contracts because you can never be sure
| if/when you will get paid.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> arbitrarily breaking contract_
|
| Arbitrarily breaking contracts usually trigger clauses where
| you have to pay damages/penalties for doing that, so
| Accenture most likely isn't loosing any money here. All
| government contracts tend to have clauses like these, at
| least where I'm form.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yes, they do often have such clauses, which carry a lot of
| weight when they aren't ignored.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I think consulting companies are outsourcing the work to lower
| wages countries like India, so it might not cost the taxpayer
| more.
| bumby wrote:
| Oftentimes, the consulting companies are outsourcing _back_
| to the government but for free. The dynamic is something
| like:
|
| 1) Consultant is hired to solve a problem.
|
| 2) Consultant struggles to understand the nuances of the
| problem.
|
| 3) Consultant relies on government employees to hand-hold
| them through the solution, effectively subsidizing the
| consultant with free labor.
|
| 4) Consultant writes it up in a final report with their
| company logo on the title page and gets paid.
|
| Maybe that's not necessarily bad if it eventually solves the
| problem, but it does seem pretty inefficient for the
| taxpayer.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is nonsense. The consultants charge above market rates,
| regardless of their own costs.
|
| Consultancies have never saved the government money.
|
| US governments hire consultants because they have been
| obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually
| hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid
| situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable
| you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about
| downstream effects.
|
| The government is _obligated_ to provide it 's services, and
| that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give
| you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job.
|
| Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem
| by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets.
| They pay well above market rates for the position too, which
| is insane.
| patcon wrote:
| > for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about
| what they talk about
|
| Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh
| graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-
| time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding
| landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that:
|
| 1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their
| field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that
| bet on future innovation and 2. Grad students have very little
| power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better
| positioned to see new intersections emerge.
|
| Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner
| that the expert can extract from simply by having them around
|
| So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just
| cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these
| big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
| veqq wrote:
| > grad students
|
| No, fresh 22 year olds with bachelor degrees.
|
| > effective institutional ecologies
|
| More so, they act as liability sponges. Leadership can blame
| them for any problems, poor decisions etc.
| butler14 wrote:
| "but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally
| operate as effective institutional ecologies"
|
| Nah
|
| the secret sauce is "who you know"
|
| it's a tale as old as time
| zer8k wrote:
| > Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh
| graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than
| long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding
| landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that
|
| This is generous. I have worked with these consultants. These
| aren't mom-and-pop startup consultancies. These guys charge
| extortionate rates and provide bottom-barrel talent. One
| agency, who will not be named, sweet talks you with product
| managers and then exports 90% of the technical labor overseas
| to the lowest bidder. You pay _expert_ prices for this. Even
| their MBAs are tacit manipulators. I remember one project
| before we canned them - the PMs were constantly revising
| their "go to market strategy" conveniently around the time
| the contract would be up for negotiation.
|
| > So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't
| just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of
| why these big orgs generally operate as effective
| institutional ecologies
|
| Realistically, new-grads are willing to work 14x7 and shower
| and sleep in the office. That's why.
|
| These consultancies are a malignant cancer on business and
| the health of their employees.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| > Assuming they are akin to grad students
|
| I think that's the problem. They're not. I know some folks
| who went to consulting shops like this. They're invariably 2
| types of people: people who got very high GPAs but cannot
| actually code a working program, and people who got pushed
| into the degree for various reasons but have zero passion.
| Note I'm not saying you need *passion* to be in this
| industry. But these people literally did not care if what
| they were doing was programming or washing dishes (beyond the
| pay delta and their parents (financier's) opinions).
|
| And to some degree that's the point of these places. They
| take in the 40% of each CS class that can't fizzbuzz, put
| them through an internal bootcamp in their generic crud
| framework they fork every time they get a new customer, then
| unleash them on the world, either as "staff augmentation" or
| doing contract work.
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| Yeah sadly I have a similar experience from my school.
| People going into consultancy were either people that just
| did software engineering to quickly move into a management
| position and make more money, or people that were not
| passionate about the domain or the students that under
| performed. We'd have consultancy agencies come advertise
| basically saying "don't worry we have LOTS of positions
| open".
| mattmanser wrote:
| It's pretty clear you've never met any of these graduates.
|
| I had a bunch of friends at uni who went into these roles,
| from a range of degrees.
|
| They do not have that capacity, they know nothing about the
| real world, and they brought no insights.
|
| And later in life, they will openly tell you that. That they
| knew nothing, we're a complete waste of everyone's time if
| involved in real work, but most often were being charged out
| at ridiculous figures to sit in a room and photocopy stuff
| that didn't need photocopying. Because that was chargeable.
| varispeed wrote:
| This is unlikely, because previous Tory government created even
| stronger bond by changing IR35, to basically remove small
| independent companies from the market and created virtual
| monopoly for these corporations.
|
| Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).
| parthdesai wrote:
| If you're from UK, you should read the book "When Mckinsey
| Comes to Town[0]", it has a chapter on how it fucked up NHS.
|
| [0] - https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-
| Consulting/d...
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| Yeah. Also might be a bias from my school, but for the software
| engineering specialty, in average the worse a student was
| performing the more likely they'd end up working for a
| consulting company after graduation. A few exceptions (student
| with a goal of moving into management positions) but none of
| the students that were either very good or passionate are
| working in the consulting world now. I am sure there are some
| skilled consultants, and these companies have their use, but I
| am always shocked to see how much governments spend on them.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Yeah, but that's going to make your spreadsheet look different.
| cavisne wrote:
| In addition they use their government work to increase private
| sector profits, either implicitly "we work with your
| government" or explicitly (PWC offering briefings on tax policy
| they were helping with to the targets of the tax policy)
| overstay8930 wrote:
| These guys are massive scammers, I worked with them over multiple
| projects and the only thing I remember is by the end of each one,
| everyone was memeing on them for how poorly made everything they
| did was.
| esbranson wrote:
| We know damn well all these stories will do is trigger "muh
| Trump" and "muh Elon" responses. Especially from non-Americans
| who have no idea how their own government works or what it's
| doing.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| I used to work at Avanade (a sister company of Accenture and
| Microsoft). They hired new grads and pushed them onto client
| projects. They live on big companies incompetence.
| nova22033 wrote:
| https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-hegseth-reveal-whoppi...
|
| Trump, Hegseth reveal whopping figure they want for the next
| Pentagon budget $1T budget would be a 12% boost over current
| levels
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I thought the interesting thing was this quote from Hegseth:
|
| > The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party
| consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth
| said in the memo released late on Thursday.
|
| I obviously don't know the details of these specific contracts,
| but the general sentiment that qualified federal employees can do
| better than overpriced private contractors is something I agree
| with, at least in broad brushstrokes.
|
| But, that said, this would appear to be in direct opposition to
| DOGE and the Project 2025 playbook - here is a recent article,
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-pr....
|
| This is why I hate what DOGE is doing. I could definitely get
| behind a _coherent_ effort to streamline the federal government
| and save money - BTW, this _was_ done rather successfully by
| Clinton and Gore in the 90s, who eliminated a huge portion of the
| federal workforce, they just didn 't go on stage with chainsaws
| to promote it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv....
| But now it's just "throwing bombs", and the overt corruption of
| the administration leaves me little faith that government will
| actually become more efficient with this current kakistocracy.
| 1024core wrote:
| The Government _can't_ be streamlined because the right
| incentives are not in place, and human beings respond to
| incentives.
|
| For example: if a bureaucrat does not use up their budget, it
| is (often) reduced proportionately in the next iteration. So
| these people have an incentive to use up the entire budget, if
| they want to have any hope of getting their requests next year.
| As a result, they will often do wasteful spending. I know this
| from experience, because in my previous life as code monkey in
| a small-ish government contractor, my boss had made it an art
| form to figure out who had extra money left over near the end
| of the fiscal year and pitch them ideas. A few 100K here, a few
| 100K there and the company was making decent money just
| mooching off of the leftovers from Federal budgets.
|
| If you want to fix the Federal government, you have to
| incentivize the officials to be rewarded for saving money.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Wait till you find out the exact same budget thing happens in
| the private sector. It is the world that needs streamlining
| not just government.
| r00fus wrote:
| The capitalist world perhaps. Some countries properly
| invest in infrastructure and people because they're not
| captured by private equity.
| _JamesA_ wrote:
| The big 3 get hired to protect managers. Hire a smaller
| consulting firm and the project goes sideways you both get fired.
| Hire a big firm and it goes sideways they get fired - until the
| next project.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Sounds like the contracts are not written correctly then.
| arbor_day wrote:
| Yup, sort of the whole point. There's a lot of cost plus
| contracts floating around here, which is a terrible
| incentive.
| pmontra wrote:
| Or: you both get fired but they hire you because of all the
| money they made anyway.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the
| new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a
| bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near
| DC for 50k/yr.
| icedchai wrote:
| I know some solid gov (some ex-gov now) tech folks in DC. These
| are experienced, staff+ engineer types who want meaningful
| work. The pay isn't that low. Is it FAANG level? No. But
| they're still making solid six figure salaries.
| swsieber wrote:
| So, realistically speaking, we've seen lots of corruption
| protections stripped away in parts of the federal government -
| SEC to stop prosecuting things, Inspector Generals fired, loyalty
| pledges, etc.
|
| Who would need to be on board with changes in the Pentagon to
| strip away protections there? I'd assume it's quite a bit more
| insular than other parts of the federal government.
| knowitnone wrote:
| until they have a $1mil dinner with Trump
| heisenbit wrote:
| Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead
| of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known
| drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy
| setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting
| consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating
| a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and
| is not something one would do in the private sector except the
| most dire circumstances.
| tw04 wrote:
| The _ONLY_ time this occurs in the private sector is when
| corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a
| business they plan on killing.
|
| Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of
| dismantling the federal government and privatizing what
| departments aren't filled with party loyalists at the expense
| of the average US citizen.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| 96 of 301 projects complete, 58 in progress *
| https://www.project2025.observer/
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Whether you support it or not, for government, that's
| really some incredible efficiency. almost 1/3 complete in
| 100 days
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Easier to destroy than create.
| starkparker wrote:
| I mean, let's not act like firing people and cancelling
| contracts without caring if you get sued or break things
| is substantially more difficult than, say, closing
| browser tabs
| dleeftink wrote:
| The most efficient system is the one that is none. But it
| also ceases to be a system.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Whether you support it or not, for government, that's
| really some incredible efficiency. almost 6 millions Jews
| and millions of other undesirables eliminated in a few
| years.
|
| Efficiency uber alles is foolish thinking.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's amazing that people so committed to constitutional
| principles were able to enact the largest tax increase in
| history without the advice and consent of congress.
| Impressive even for tax and spend republicans.
|
| In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that
| type of arbitrary action led to revolutions.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Huh? Trump won the popular vote. Maybe make better
| arguments in the next election if you don't like the
| current leader, rather than _a violent revolution to
| overturn a democratically elected leader_
| immibis wrote:
| Adolf Hitler was also democratically elected.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| lol, Godwin's law Used to have to be at least a few
| comments deep. Now its just automatic
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Trump is President, not king or Caesar.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| They absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress
| can stop this at any time. They elect not to. Their
| silence is consent in this case. You can attribute that
| silence to active support or cowardice but either way
| they can stop it and don't so they approve of it.
|
| "In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that
| type of arbitrary action led to revolutions." Not sure if
| you have taken a look at Britain lately but they
| absolutely don't care about what the citizens want.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The latter comment is a reference to one of america's
| founding events being triggered by an ~8% tariff on
| foreign imports by americans, levied by a unilateral
| power who thought themselves king of the territory.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Yup, I read that wrong, my fault
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The law is still the law regardless of the congress's
| desire or ability to execute change. A change in the
| majority doesn't require a proactive affirmation.
|
| With respect to the British Empire, you may want to
| review the concept of "no taxation without
| representation".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress can
| stop this at any time. They elect not to._
|
| I don't mean to be graphic, but being forced into silence
| ("you could have stopped me") is absolutely not consent.
| The Trump administration is _full_ of people who will
| need to go to jail if were to keep our republic.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'll join you in getting downvoted for absolutely no
| reason. It's a shitty thing they're doing, but your
| observation is correct. My job working on NIH-funded
| research projects is directly in their path, so I wish
| they weren't stomping a mudhole across science and
| technology. But they are, and, as you note, they're doing
| it very effectively and with incredible speed.
|
| If it's outside our capability as a community to even
| acknowledge that they're moving fast, how can we note
| that they're moving _way too fast_ to be doing it right?
| lazide wrote:
| But they are doing it right - by their metric. Which is
| not the one others want them to be using.
| karaterobot wrote:
| By their own metrics, sure, maybe. I don't actually know
| what the real measurement of success is for them. But, to
| clarify, I didn't mean doing it right by their metric, I
| meant in my estimation, or [gestures broadly] _our_
| estimation.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's easy to destroy things - especially when no heed is
| paid to laws or down stream effects.
|
| I mean, carpet bombing New York City would demonstrate
| "incredible efficiency" - as it would probably take much
| less time than demolishing a single building in the city
| following the laws.
| rayiner wrote:
| Promises made, promises kept.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| The data on hostile takeovers by "corporate raiders" very
| much does not support the characterization here.
|
| The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies
| that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's
| unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company
| is heading towards oblivion one way or another.
|
| Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets
| wind up as net job creators on a 5-10 year time horizons.
| That's despite the fact that they do usually start by
| divesting assets that don't make sense and laying off non-
| productive employees. But divested assets aren't generally
| killed - they are usually sold to somebody else who often
| does something better with it.
|
| Also, companies conduct massive downsizing and
| rationalization _all the time_ when in distress, and not only
| when they are taken over by a "corporate raider".
|
| In the private markets, these actors are definitely
| distasteful. They do cleanup work that feels bad, and they
| often get rich doing it. But they also serve a _necessary_
| role in the markets.
|
| Companies that are egregiously misusing capital and resources
| are a drag on the economy. It's a bad thing for there to be a
| bunch of zombie companies holding onto assets that could be
| used in better ways.
|
| A more generous framing would be something like a home
| flipper. They buy properties that are a mess, clean it up
| real good, throw out the old stuff for recycling, install
| some modern appliances, and sell it to somebody else.
|
| One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent
| force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects
| grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are
| achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's
| mission.
|
| I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration
| (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing
| to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting
| stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the
| mission.
| miltonlost wrote:
| > One of my laments is that there is no automatic
| equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow,
| projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether
| they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the
| agency's mission.
|
| There was. It's the GAO and the inspectors general of the
| agencies, both of which have been gutted by this
| administration.
|
| > I'm not defending the specific actions of this
| administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but
| it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through
| its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and
| not serving the mission.
|
| LMAO, you're not defending the specific actions, but you
| know enough about the actions to know that they are
| "cutting stuff that is irrational". This is a defense of
| DOGE but with the "no, i'm NOT defending Musk" veneer that
| doesn't pass muster. You're giving this administration the
| benefit of the doubt and a large amount of good faith that
| they have not earned.
| mattfca wrote:
| you cant call out a bias when you are doing the exact
| same thing.
| albedoa wrote:
| You absolutely can. What on earth are you talking about.
| wadadadad wrote:
| This deviated from the original topic, and I'm not
| following your metaphor flows. How does your post relate to
| consultants specifically? Is there an implication that
| consultants not part of the 'mess'?
|
| You say "No automatic force... whether (the agencies) are
| achieving any progress)". Don't we have oversight agencies
| and committees? I'm not following your 'grow and grow'; can
| you provide evidence that all agencies just 'grow and grow'
| without achieving progress? If not all agencies, then be
| specific.
|
| Also, what evidence is there of "stuff" that is
| "irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission"? Which
| mission? What corruption? What evidence of this? Can you
| speak more specifically here?
|
| Please provide evidence to claims so we can have an
| discussion around this.
| xvector wrote:
| > How does your post relate to consultants specifically?
|
| He's not talking about consultants, he's just correcting
| the pop culture meme that "private equity is evil" which
| is what the parent comment implied. Everything he
| describes is correct.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| > One of my laments is that there is no automatic
| equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow,
| projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether
| they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the
| agency's mission.
|
| A good metaphor here is apoptosis / programmed cell death
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis)
| umvi wrote:
| Maybe the federal government needs a
| reset/dismantling/pruning/whatever you want to call it. With
| any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal
| government would likely be _expanding_ spending and gov 't
| programs right now even though the debt is so huge that
| interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget,
| which itself exceeds the next 9 defense budgets in the world
| combined.
| tomrod wrote:
| Current budget is set to expand deficit spending due to tax
| cuts and certain spending increases, in spite of project
| cuts to social safety nets and entitlements.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris),
| the federal government would likely be expanding spending
| and gov't programs right now_
|
| Perhaps, and in such a case, the american economy would not
| be cratering like it has been lately, and americans would
| be suffering less, and america would be stronger on the
| international stage. In fact, all things considered, more
| spending would have been better for america than the
| current state of things.
|
| _> the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt
| now eclipse the defense budget_
|
| There's always taxing the rich, but the plan by the
| american ruling elites in the republican party currently
| seems to be to increase the debt sky-high via tax _cuts_
| for rich americans, only _partially_ paid for via
| _increased_ taxes on _non-rich_ americans, with the rest
| piled onto the american debt burden.
| umvi wrote:
| You can't just spend your troubles away forever. It might
| temporarily alleviate things, but long term it will
| collapse the entire system. At some point there need to
| be painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased
| taxes, and the like. It's unpopular to do painful things,
| but it's necessary for survival.
| tinyplanets wrote:
| But you also can't just cut taxes forever. The tax cuts
| being proposed by the current Republican budget are
| projected to add even more to the deficit.
| umvi wrote:
| I don't disagree with you - I'm in favor of both slashing
| spending _and_ increasing taxes.
|
| It seems as though republicans like to decrease both
| spending and taxes while democrats like to increase both
| spending and taxes. Both strategies are not helpful when
| it comes to national debt. Perhaps when democrats come to
| power again they will be wise and raise taxes _without_
| restoring all the spending /programs Trump cut.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| You can't just cut your troubles away: Poor educational
| system; low education; high income inequality; low real
| income growth rate; high rates of drug addition; low
| social mobility; housing shortages; poor public transit;
| decreased access to healthy food; private equity buying
| everything and jacking up the prices; etc.
|
| In fact, most solutions to troubles require spending time
| and/or money. Very few are resolved by "do less, and do
| it worse".
|
| _> At some point there need to be painful austerity
| measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like._
|
| Perhaps: america can start with increasing taxes on the
| rich, instead of decreasing taxes on the rich and
| increasing taxes on the non-rich. That should get america
| more money and hurt fewer people.
| mattfca wrote:
| you have a fundamental misunderstanding of govermental
| debt and the US.the US CAN 100%, its not a guess its a
| fact, spend away their troubles forever.
|
| learn how the global economy is, understand what fiat is,
| find out what your missing. (first hint, money is a
| construct - and follow the tbills)
|
| you know what does make the US have to do "painful
| austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and
| the like. It's unpopular to do painful things, but it's
| necessary for survival" ??
|
| Watch everything the current administration does because
| they dont understand modern economics and you'll see.
| 7speter wrote:
| Yes, the US can spend away their troubles, as long as it
| maintains treaties it signed on to, can, at least, to
| some degree, demonstrate some maintenance of its debt,
| and doesn't alienate its trade parters, much less the
| whole world.
|
| If you think I'm just being a partisan, take a look at
| the US Bond market for the last two weeks.
| xorcist wrote:
| No need for the scare quotes. The current federal budget is
| expanding, under the current administration.
|
| Had they the slighest wish to shrink the debt, or at least
| not expand it further, tax cuts would have been out of the
| question until the budget allows for it.
| jcims wrote:
| This is also true for 'big bets' that a company makes that
| gain enough momentum to stick around but haven't fully been
| realized or financially reconciled with the corporate
| strategy. Source: cloud engineering lead at a large
| financial.
| saelthavron wrote:
| Sorry, but it does occur in the private. I recently worked at
| a company which pretty much did this. They fired all of the
| contractors and a bunch of employees because they decided
| change their focus. It is far from dying.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Uh, no.
|
| I can name a half dozen people who are in roles like this for
| F500 companies.
|
| Hell, my wife was zoning SANs for $300/hr for like 6 years at
| a big bank. Another friend is essentially a pimp for a bunch
| of companies providing logistics staff. He takes a vig from
| the work of like 10k people.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Why should I care? It has no effect on me. That's between
| the shareholders and management. Government bloat comes out
| of my paycheck.
| rayiner wrote:
| > filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average
| US citizen.
|
| 90% of federal government jobs are filled with party
| loyalists who think half the country is "deplorable." The
| administration's mandate is to make the federal bureaucracy
| that everyone pays for less biased and one-sided.
| notahacker wrote:
| tbf, unlike the US government employees selected on the
| basis of being sufficiently immune to reality to assert
| that Trump won the 2020 election in their "fidelity to the
| Dear Leader" tests, those who think that endorsement of
| such views is "deplorable" might have a point...
| rayiner wrote:
| No, they're ideologically captured and can't separate
| their emotional views about immigration, race, etc., from
| their jobs. If you're an intelligent person you should be
| able to utilize your talents for mass deportations in the
| same way you would for finding ways to forgive student
| loans.
| dvdhnt wrote:
| > at the expense of the average US citizen.
|
| Such bullshit. Our tax dollars were being stolen and thrown
| around the world covertly by a USAID slush fund. The entire
| organization was co-opted and projects were frivolous.
|
| It's not a conspiracy. You can read about the spending
| online.
|
| Anyone who thinks Trump's admin is any more detrimental than
| the previous one is either misinformed, uninformed or a bad
| actor.
|
| I stopped taking these discussions seriously because the
| other side is so high on propaganda that the conversations
| aren't authentic. It's just talking to ActBlue robots.
| stonogo wrote:
| Why has nobody been prosecuted, then? Why was USAID's
| detailed budget website removed by the current
| administration? If crimes were being committed, why has
| there been no accountability?
|
| I keep hearing about all this corruption, but nobody seems
| to be in jail about it.
| dvdhnt wrote:
| Accountability is shutting down the agency and shuttering
| the programs. They did that.
|
| The point of a slush fund is that the funds weren't
| allocated for specific programs by law, they were
| discretionary. So, while technically not illegal, they
| are frivolous and unethical. Not to mention, how would
| half the country and most of the world react if Trump's
| DOJ started arresting the people involved? They'd call
| him a tyrant and burn more Teslas.
| varispeed wrote:
| "unhealthy" it's simple profiteering.
|
| In the UK that's got especially interesting. When more
| consultants started quitting these big firms to go independent
| (offering cheaper services to public sector and often better
| quality), these corporations lobbied for something called IR35
| - basically means if company is worker owned, then it cannot
| make profit. Now big consultancies have very much a monopoly on
| making profit from some else's work and charge public sector -
| tax payer handsomely.
|
| You would think that such setup is ultimately corrupt.
| notahacker wrote:
| That's nonsense. IR35 basically makes it more difficult for
| companies to treat an individual like an employee whilst
| paying them as a "consultant" (saving themselves various
| obligations and allowing the "consultant" much more
| flexibility in avoiding tax). Accenture actually used to hire
| a lot of people that way themselves...
|
| Individual consultants never were competing particularly
| closely with Accenture or Deloitte or McKinsey and their mass
| of bodies, brand and board level access, and IR35 really
| doesn't change their competitive position, or affect small
| boutique consultancies composed of people who quit Big
| Consultancy to do better _at all_. (sure, if you want to
| spend your next 6 months contracting as an individual on site
| for one employer you might now need to enlist the support of
| a specialist umbrella company to assure IR35 compliance, but
| if you 're in that position you're not really competing with
| expensive big consultants selling massive projects at C level
| on brand rather than their own capabilities to departments
| based on individual skillset)
| leguminous wrote:
| Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants
| is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior
| developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS
| pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't
| even available because there is some rule about how people
| can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for
| consultants and all of their overhead.
|
| (Of course there are more reasons as well, but this is a
| popular one that some of my friends in government agencies
| complain about.)
| mellosouls wrote:
| They still don't generally _need_ to use consultants. Even at
| the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are
| still some decent technical staff who don 't just chase the
| dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market,
| not FAANG/SV.
|
| Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say
| "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong.
|
| ie. they are generally a political choice rather than
| technical.
| cgannett wrote:
| And that is one of the more charitable political reasons
| that exist. I'm guessing Dolette and the like didnt drop
| enough campaign contributions. Betting in a couple months
| Tesla is gonna get a big fat contract.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > there are still some decent technical staff who don't
| just chase the dollar
|
| They are probably not chasing the job security either.
| mjevans wrote:
| I heard that __used__ to be the appeal, now that goodwill
| and soft power has been completely nuked.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Working for the Federal government used to provide a
| solid pension, solid healthcare for life, and rock solid
| job security. The first has been mostly eroded away over
| the last decade. The last of course has completely
| evaporated over the past 3 months. AFAIK you still get
| healthcare for life if you manage to retire. All in all,
| I can absolutely see why someone would take the US civil
| service deal 20 years ago. Not so much 5-10 years ago.
| Den_VR wrote:
| https://www.nteu.org/blog/2025/04/08/Senate%20Passes%20Bu
| dge...
|
| Healthcare may be vouchers soon.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Healthcare has also been eroded away as it is frequently
| needed to pay extra for concierge or direct primary care
| to be able to see a doctor, otherwise you are being seen
| by a physician assistant or nurse practitioner first.
| projectazorian wrote:
| > They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even
| at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there
| are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase
| the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal
| market, not FAANG/SV.
|
| The stated policy of the current admin is to "traumatize"
| federal employees so the number of these people is likely
| dwindling fast. Burnout was already a problem before the
| current admin - if your efforts hit a bureaucratic brick
| wall one too many times that private sector job starts to
| look a lot more appealing.
| xphos wrote:
| As a computer scientist who worked as a research scientist
| i was paid more as a Federal Surfguard (beach lifeguard)
| than i was doing TS cleared work with the government. The
| GS scale is fundamental a broken wager. When I gradated
| college the government was willing to pay 75K for
| employment. I had offers from private industry as
| internships making more than that per hour. They were
| easily 15K off my next offer and that was only because I
| thought I would like defense in general where the pay is
| pulled lower because they do so much government
| contracting. After exiting the defense industry I was
| making what I was predicated to make in 20 years at the
| government in 3 years in private industry. Not counting
| stock options etc.
|
| The disparity is extremely but to be honest I liked the
| idea of working for the government. There was a lot of
| drive to solve for the mission and smart people. But the
| level risk mitigation made working extremely difficult. The
| government impressive getting people to work as hard as
| they do and I respect it, they were a good employer but
| political offices severely shackle it from doing even
| better work. In wages yes but even in allowing
| experimentation, political appointments waste a ton of
| energy and time to. Its like selecting the worst person for
| the Job in a non meritocratic way and expecting things to
| run smoothly is a poor idea.
| bhouston wrote:
| Another reason why consultants are good in government is
| because of unions. I am generally pro-union, but a side
| effect of unions, at least in my experience, is that you
| will have a proportion of incompetent people who can not
| complete anything and you can not effectively get rid of
| them. Consultants who are clearly incompetent or even just
| not a good fit are much easier to get rid of.
|
| Although the large consulting firms are also not great if
| they are just shipping software requirements overseas for
| cheap software dev labor, that also can be very
| ineffective. So many never ending government projects are a
| result of this. On the surface everything is competently
| managed (grant charts forever, with perfect org charts),
| but at the strategic level of actually getting it to work
| and on-time is lacking (because there are a ton of cautious
| "professional managers" who don't know how to actually
| ship.)
| RajT88 wrote:
| Not just that political reason - you can scale a workforce
| up and down much more quickly with them.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers
| directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales.
|
| I did a coop with the navy in college, and would have gladly
| converted over to a full time GS employee on graduation, but:
|
| 1. Actual, honest to god GS dev positions were _super_ rare
| outside of DC
|
| 2. The application process through the usaJobs website had a
| ridiculous amount of red tape
|
| 3. As you pointed out, the salaries were laughably low, even
| if you included benefits like the pension and healthcare.
|
| I eventually gave up and went with the private sector. I had
| interviews in a week, an offer within days, and was paid more
| than someone with years of experience on the GS scale.
|
| I was bummed about missing out on the opportunity for a
| pension, but the higher salary helped me hit FI by my mid
| 30's. When the ACA passed I effectively had access to health
| insurance on the private market for the first time in my
| life.
|
| TLDR: I would have been a _fool_ to go into GS as a dev.
| Giving up on that was the best thing I 've ever done.
| pureagave wrote:
| It has been this way a long time. I interviewed and got a job
| offer with the Naval Research Lab in the late 1990's. It was
| a very cool job working on chips for space defense systems
| and I was told they could match any private offer and as a
| bonus I would retire with a full pension when I was 41 (I was
| 21 at the time). It sounded good and I loved the idea of
| making things that went into space. Then I started to get
| offers from companies in Silicon Valley. They were 50% higher
| and had free apartments for a few months plus a sign on
| bonus. I asked the NRL to match and they said there was no
| way they could. I moved to the valley...
| franktankbank wrote:
| When did you retire?
| red_admiral wrote:
| That was Edward Snowden's explanation as well, for why he was
| technically employed by Booz Allen Hamilton while doing
| sysadmin work for his former employer, the NSA.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Theoretically, there's some sort of arbitrage happening.
|
| There is some department in the government that's very unsexy
| and has a very real problem that could be solved by a smart
| finance MBA student diligently working on it. But there's no
| way that diligent young employee would want that job. Nor no
| way if he had it that anyone would take him seriously and put
| his changes in place.
|
| He doesn't want to work for that unsexy department. The
| people at that unsexy department do not want to work for him.
|
| Put a consulting company in the middle and he has a job title
| that sounds cool and that organization gets their problem
| solved.
|
| ( This is how someone explained business consulting to me. )
| reaperman wrote:
| Only place this falls apart is that Accenture / Deloitte
| are really not sexy. Like being a federal employee at a
| similar pay scale would actually be more sexy. McKinsey/BCG
| maybe this makes sense.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Well, they are a lot more appealing than government jobs
| at least, and have a very strong system for recruiting
| and hiring people right out of college.
| projectazorian wrote:
| Consulting employees make more money and are not subject
| to the absurd federal hiring process. Plus they can jump
| between projects more readily.
| raverbashing wrote:
| You would be surprised at how new grads see these
| companies, especially those coming from
| business/accounting degrees, etc
|
| It's not too bad
| franktankbank wrote:
| It absolutely has been a great jumping off point. My
| finance brother makes bank now outside of the big 4.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Accenture / Deloitte are really not sexy. [...]
| McKinsey/BCG maybe this makes sense._
|
| Those happen be 2 different types of consulting
| categories.
|
| Accenture/Deloitte are more "professional services" type
| of consulting. Things like IT technology integrations and
| business process reengineering with software. So
| installing a multi-million dollar ERP software package
| like Oracle Financials or SAP and helping the client
| company migrate to the new accounting system. Also a lot
| of "staff augmentation" type of work. E.g. a lot of USA
| Homeland Security contracts for Accenture were IT
| services related: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22home
| land+security%22+awar...
|
| McKinsey/BCG is "management consulting". E.g. the CEO is
| considering opening a new international subsidiary but
| needs some research on various "strategies". So McKinsey
| consultants taps their vast network of other companies in
| the industry, creates spreadsheets of scenarios, writes
| up reports, etc.
|
| The "professional services" category may be on a lower
| tier of prestige than "management consulting" but in
| general, most college graduates who prioritize career
| advancement will still prefer the (typically higher
| salary) job offer from Accenture/Deloitte rather than a
| government office such Veterans Affairs. Where government
| jobs often win candidates is the "no travel lifestyle" if
| it's a local office. Consultants can get quickly burned
| out by commuting on airplanes every week.
| eru wrote:
| The story for private equity is similar. How else do you
| get some high flying MBA to care about running a plumbing
| business?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Being paid better is quite sexy.
| giantg2 wrote:
| GS pay scales can support senior devs just fine. Maybe not
| the $500k Googlers, but normal ones.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yes, but sometimes you do actually want the $500k Googlers.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I promise you never want that.
| criddell wrote:
| Matt Cutts went from Google to the US Digital Service and
| did some amazing work. Maybe he's an outlier, but I don't
| think so. There are a lot of supremely talented people
| willing to take a massive pay cut to do good, meaningful
| work.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Three things:
|
| 1. Exactly zero companies, much less startups, are like
| the US Government.
|
| 2. He had 2 years at the NSA prior to his Google run.
|
| 3. I'm pretty sure he's one of the highest profile google
| engineers, you're not getting that for $500k.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| What "grade" would a senior dev be at?
|
| Pay scale for the DC area: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-
| oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
| prepend wrote:
| Senior devs are usually gs-15, step 10 which is about
| $195k in DC
|
| I don't think it's the money, I think it's the mindset.
| There's more project managers than actual hands on
| engineers.
| Den_VR wrote:
| Where have you seen gs-15 senior devs? That oddball org
| that turned into DOGE? Seniors developers top out GS-13
| without supervisory responsibilities.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| > _they can 't actually pay enough to hire senior developers
| directly_
|
| I had the impression that it was also easier to fire
| contractors. (Well, not to renew their contract.)
|
| If a developer who works directly for the government is
| underperforming, their boss has to jump through many, many
| hoops to fire them.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is close to what I wrote myself, but the problem here
| isn't being able to fire people because they
| underperformed. The problem is what to do about temporary
| jobs that finish. They performed exactly as expected, maybe
| even exceeded expectations, but when the work is finished,
| you still need to get rid of the position, and they can't
| do that with permanent civil servants.
| fallingknife wrote:
| We need to get rid of this insane idea that a job exists
| for any reason other than the value your work provides to
| the organization.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| A major incentive for hiring work out to the private sector
| is the impossibility of firing GS-series employees.
| Ultimately, whomever the elites are who happen to be taking a
| lap through government today are interesting in maintaining a
| responsive chattel workforce capable of reaping and sowing
| the crops of the day. They depend on their slave drivers, I
| mean senior HR staff, to keep them informed about how their
| current staff mix affects their ability to react to the
| crises of the day. If you have tons of highly trained
| agroconomists in GS billets, what are you going to do with
| them?
| NegativeK wrote:
| Pay is a common one from the employee's side.
|
| From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking
| god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the
| number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really
| don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call
| elected officials if you're in an appointed government
| position (i.e., an at-will employee.)
|
| I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a
| pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking
| for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly
| 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was
| understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual
| software license budget higher than their employee budget
| asked for and was denied a single new spot.
|
| Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for
| contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can
| absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is
| gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a
| multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn
| person, but it ends up being way more expensive.
|
| My current employer is even stricter.
|
| In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush
| hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the
| facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are
| unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the
| bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current
| positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay
| scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that
| I'll never know.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I know someone who wanted to move from government
| contractor to government employee. He was already a
| veteran, had a degree, few years of experience as a
| contractor, etc. it took an entire year from "okay we can
| give you a job" to him starting.
| NegativeK wrote:
| More anecdote: a bunch of contractors were being fired
| (or whatever it should be called) because the project
| they were working on was a horrible shit show. I don't
| know what went wrong, but it was a lot of money that
| produced nothing and was publicly canceled.
|
| A friend knew a hiring manager and was a quiet shoo-in
| for a job. HR dragged their feet for half a year and
| then, suddenly, moved at absolute light speed to get the
| job posting up, closed, and the shoo-in to be approved as
| much as possible.
|
| It was because the contract was ending soon. Laid off
| workers (including contractors), veterans, and people
| with disabilities are given priority during the hiring
| process (which makes some kind of sense), but these
| contractors had such a stink associated with them that
| the HR people who presumably didn't want to work with the
| manager suddenly did, just to avoid hiring the
| contractors.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| >In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush
| hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at
| the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees
| are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor
| wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their
| current positions.
|
| Not defense, but my government contract works the same way.
| I'm on company number two, but I know people who have
| worked for 4 different companies, all while doing the same
| job on evolutions of the same contract. There are people
| who have done full careers working onsite for my agency
| without ever converting to be a civil servant.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I worked at Raytheon in geointelligence services a long
| time ago and saw this happen and it wasn't a particular
| mystery why. Raytheon had acquired a smaller company
| decades back that handled all the ground processing for US
| spy satellite collections. This was a small group of like
| 50 people who'd been working in an extremely niche domain
| that was also classified and they'd been doing it for 20+
| years each.
|
| The government got angsty about being bilked by monopolies
| and started trying to mandate that contracts be split and
| awarded to different contractors. The first time they did
| this, they took the contract away from Raytheon and gave it
| to Lockheed, who probably felt the way the average reader
| of Hacker News feels, that surely this was a weekend
| project that five guys could do for a hundredth the price.
| It was not. Their solution completed the process of turning
| raw downlink data into human-legible imagery hundreds of
| times slower than Raytheon's. The government caved and gave
| the contract back to Raytheon.
|
| A decade later, they overhauled the entire geoint
| enterprise to try and modernize it, bringing it to the
| cloud and using Kubernetes for everything, and did the same
| thing again. They gave the orchestration contract to
| Raytheon and the processing algorithms contract to
| Lockheed, with a rule saying the contracts can't go to the
| same company. Lockheed in this case just subbed the actual
| work back to Raytheon. The only way they could really do
| what the government wants, and have Lockheed employees
| working on this, is if they hired all the people who
| currently work for Raytheon, not out of any kind of
| nefarious underhandedness, but because these are
| legitimately the only people in the world who can do what
| they do at the level they do it.
| kjreact wrote:
| > Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and
| they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one
| to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if
| you're in an appointed government position.
|
| This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading
| infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I
| no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They're
| conditioned to feel outrage at whatever social media tells
| them to.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care
| deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're
| directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if
| the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to
| watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn
| suicidal en masse.
|
| There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any
| sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the
| resistance since 2017.
| radpanda wrote:
| Another reason in favor of reliance on contractors, at least
| in a couple of federal agencies I've worked with, is to
| improve diversity metrics. For agencies that require lots of
| technical workers, the reality is that means a heavily male
| workforce. But agencies (up until a few months ago) liked to
| tout that they were "model employers" with very diverse
| workplaces, and near gender equity. Then you actually show up
| and notice the building is full of the usual (for tech)
| contingent of white and Asian dudes but they don't count as
| employees for diversity statistics.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The greatest reason they need to use contractors in general,
| not just "consultants," is that hiring a civil servant is
| opening a position forever. The federal government certainly
| _can_ downsize, as we 're seeing now, but they rarely do, and
| they don't hire people for six-month contracts. They hire
| them permanently, and would then need to go through a layoff
| process to reduce staff.
|
| So if they have a project that needs 100 people to do and is
| expected to take two years, they have two choices. Hire 100
| people, hoping you can find something else for them to do in
| two years, or you can offer a two-year contract to a private
| company, letting them deal with the problem of figuring out
| what to do with the 100 people once the project is completed.
|
| The contraints of the GS pay scale aren't real constraints.
| The federal government already has special bonuses paid to
| medical doctors to make their pay commensurate with rates in
| private industry, in spite of the fact that those rates are
| way the hell higher than anything on the GS scale. They could
| easily do the same for engineering labor. What they can't
| easily do is hire people for six months guaranteed with only
| conditional renewals after that, because very few people
| would agree to that unless you're paying them far _more_ than
| they 'd get in normal industry.
| netbioserror wrote:
| I hope senior government staff face hostility exactly
| proportionate to the salaries and budgets they've extracted
| from the US populace through taxation and inflation, alongside
| the foreign influence far too many of them are responsible for
| peddling. The government is not a jobs program, and they owe
| the people, not the other way around.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I'm not paying close attention to all the noise, so forgive me
| if I am way off base. But aren't they effectively doing a
| values purge/refinement/reset? Similar to what Elon did with
| twitter and what few companies have managed to do to transform
| themselves?
|
| My point is (in an effort to maintain a most respectful
| interpretation) that I imagine the environment is becoming more
| hostile to people with certain values while becoming less
| hostile to people with other values. And while there's a good
| chance I'm wrong, my generous assumption would be they are
| making a hostile environment for people who value process over
| outcome and making it less hostile to people who value outcome
| over process. (Replacing bureaucrats and risk-averse money
| wasters with problem solvers, innovators and cowboys)
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Even if this is the case, "process" is immensely more
| important in government and military than in companies
| because government has the authority, the prerogative even,
| to use violence, ruin lives, and kill people. The onerous
| processes are in place to protect civilians.
|
| When you shoot from the hip at a tech company, the bad
| outcome is that a lot of money gets wasted and people lose
| their jobs. When the federal government shoots from the hip,
| trust in the institution erodes and people die.
|
| Not that there is no room for streamlining and reducing
| bureaucratic and IT bloat, but it is very important to
| remember that the government is not a business, and in many
| ways should be run very differently from a business.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Plus, many of the laws government has to follow are exactly
| about the _process_ by which things are done. That is what
| helps ensure it is fair, effective, transparent, etc.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I agree, but what was fair and effective in 1970 might
| not be anymore, right?
|
| Do you agree that these processes need to evolve over
| time?
|
| And if so, what if they haven't been evolving as fast as
| the rest of the world and have fallen behind?
|
| What is a leader to do, when many processes no longer are
| in anyone's best interest other than the people who
| maintain them and those have learned to exploit them?
|
| The government doesn't seem like a machine to me, more
| like society's nervous system. It's a very scary idea
| that it has become so rigid and so outdated that a
| massive overhaul is necessary. It does seem like an
| opening for extremism (fascism, tyranny), which I'm sure
| we both fear. I just find it very hard to tell whether
| disrupting the system or letting it continue will lead to
| a better outcome for Americans.
| kmijyiyxfbklao wrote:
| Yeah, structural changes don't happen slowly and by the
| rules. What people don't like is what they think the new
| system is going to look like. But we don't know what that
| is going to be because Trump seems to be better at
| destroying than at building. It will depend on his
| successor(s) being good at building institutions. Or it
| may fail and the old system regenerates.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| This seems accurate to me. They are destroying many US
| institutions, and what replaces them may be better or may
| be worse. I am not sure anyone can tell right now.
|
| This wouldn't be happening if everyone was happy with the
| status quo, if the US was in a golden era, but it wasn't.
| Many things clearly weren't working. Sometimes it's
| easier to tear something down and rebuild it than fix it
| (not always, but sometimes).
| fallingknife wrote:
| Fair and transparent are arguable. I have never met
| someone who deals with the government on a regular basis
| that has ever described it as effective, and at this
| point I am willing to sacrifice some fairness and
| transparency for effectiveness.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| That's all true. Process and bureaucracy are guard rails,
| and guard rails limit change. So when the whole system is
| barrelling towards a cliff (default, hyperinflation,
| kinetic war), what should the leaders try and do?
|
| It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I
| genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm
| not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like
| many US institutions haven't been appropriately evolving,
| and now the US as a whole is between a rock and a hard
| place.
|
| If I'm going to spend time thinking about these things
| (that I have virtually no control over), I would prefer to
| do it in a curious and mostly emotionally detached way.
| immibis wrote:
| I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed
| it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff
| because of the current administration, who took away the
| guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a
| cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff.
|
| The old system could well have been, like, scraping
| against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over
| time. The solution to that is not to remove the rails and
| aim directly for the cliff.
|
| Unless you're an accelerationist. Accelerationists are
| people who view bad times as inevitable, and want them to
| come as quickly as possible so we can get through to the
| other side (where times are good again) as quickly as
| possible, instead of prolonging the collapse by doing it
| more slowly. Does that describe you?
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I think that the most appropriate strategy depends on the
| specifics of the situation. For some types of problems
| the best course of action is to do nothing, some times
| the best course of action is to make small adjustments,
| sometimes do less, sometimes do more, sometimes slow
| down, sometimes speed up, and sometimes the best course
| of action is to make radical changes. I don't over-
| generalize and prescribe the same ideological answer to
| everything.
|
| I have also witnessed first hand how new terminology can
| have very different meanings to different people. Ask 100
| product leaders to define what a "customer need" is and
| you will probably get dozens of different answers. Ask
| 100 CIOs to define what a "data mesh" is, and you will
| probably get dozens of different answers.
|
| I think that when an environment is changing at an
| accelerating pace, its necessary for the organisms living
| in the environment to adapt at a similar pace in order to
| survive/thrive. I also believe that our environment is
| changing at an accelerating pace.
|
| I suspect that you think I have reverse the metaphor
| because you have been paying more close attention to
| recent rage-baiting news, and I have spent a longer time
| paying closer attention to "boring" economic analysis. My
| model of the situation includes many historical examples
| of hyperinflation and what led to them, the consequences
| of Muammar Gaddafi dropping the petrodollar, the impact
| of citizens united on the military industrial complex,
| the exploding web of "NGOs" meddling in world affairs,
| how technology is an extremely deflationary force and how
| regulatory capture shifts economic benefits of new
| technology from the consumer to industry incumbents, how
| the Bretton-woods era started and ended, and how the
| neoliberal era started (and was ending regardless of
| political party), etc, etc.
|
| Despite all this perspective I mentioned, I feel as
| though I know a tiny % of what is important to know in
| order to judge the situation accurately. The more I learn
| the more it seems like I don't know, and the more curious
| I get. Color me in the Dunning Kruger "valley of
| despair".
|
| So no, I don't think the simplistic blanket decision
| making protocol you defined describes me.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| In this video Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger talk about
| how the US system is heading towards a cliff, and the
| video was recorded in 2005. They articulate it well,
| although the video has a couple glitches in it.
|
| If you are actually interested in what's going on, I
| think what they are talking about is a big important
| piece of the puzzle.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCgHj1_GBuY
| anon84873628 wrote:
| You're being way too generous about the values they're trying
| to set. If it were about "people who value outcome over
| process", they would have done cuts in a way that keep those
| type of people, and programs that already have good outcomes.
|
| Instead they just cut everything uncritically, because the
| _outcome_ they want is for nothing to work.
|
| And the value they want in the remaining people is personal
| loyalty to Trump, not loyalty to the law or expertise in
| their job.
| mint2 wrote:
| > Similar to what Elon did with twitter
|
| Wait who thinks what Elon did with Twitter was a success?
|
| While it hasn't fully collapsed like some predicted, it seems
| like a total unmitigated failure in any standard economic or
| business terms. It's been a success only in terms of
| providing a bigger mouthpiece to Elon and those he favors,
| not a typical metric of corporate success.
|
| In that regards, yes what is happening at the federal
| government mimics Twitter - making the government worse in
| terms of any usual metric of government performance but
| making it better in terms of carrying out arbitrary whims of
| a leader.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Are you basing your opinion on your own personal experience
| using twitter, or on what you've read or heard about it on
| other media platforms?
| airforce1 wrote:
| Well, years later the website is still operational and the
| company still seems functional after Musk cut 80+% of the
| staff, which to me is pretty mind blowing. I'd call that
| pretty successful. If I, as the end user, can't tell the
| difference between pre-80% and post-80% cut twitter then
| what value was that 80% bringing to the organization,
| exactly?
| dughnut wrote:
| I feel the appeal of your argument, but people just aren't
| fungible, and the incentives in a public in private identity
| are completely different.
|
| I work at a consulting firm, and, trust me, you want state
| employees doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary.
| Ideally, you just have enough people to administer the funds
| and then all work anyone cares about should be routed to
| private entities through a competitive process (market
| discipline for consultants is key here). My experience is that
| the people at the state are highly likable, but in terms of
| productivity are close to worthless or are a major obstacle to
| productive work. I work for a department of transportation
| where the leadership in the materials division does not
| actually know what density is or that it is measurable. I would
| expect someone with good grades in high school to understand
| this. Every single construction contract for highways has about
| a 15% overage on crushed rock. The weight to the material is
| determined by a "50% compaction factor" and if you're thinking
| "that sounds like a made up concept" you would be correct. This
| has been happening for years and nobody is allowed to use the
| correct number because that would embarrass someone with a long
| tenure. The state Congress needs to liquidate the whole agency.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| You have to understand consultancies in IT are just brokers.
| They buy in "inventory" of "profiles" at as low a cost as
| possible, and sell that inventory to their customers for as
| much as possible.
|
| So you've got your CS graduate which you recruit and pay
| $40/hr, slap a badge on them and rent them out for $120/hr.
| Once in a while you fall short and need to hire some
| freelancers for $60/hr. That's it.
|
| As your gov agency is capped on paying it's own recruits $25/hr
| for the position, very few will end up as 'native' gov workers,
| and the once that do will get poached swiftly by the
| consultancies.
|
| Now these juicy contracts are not sold piecemeal, but in huge
| bulk. Not 3 guys for 2 months for a project, but an umbrella
| contract for delivering 2.000 full time profiles over the next
| 2 years. Very few consultancies can credibly fulfill on such
| commitments making the market fairly small and not too
| competitive. The few that participate have no incentive to
| spoil the roost and derail the gravy train. No explicit
| collusion is required. It's an iterative prissoners dilemma
| situation where the few players all know each other and
| frequently switch sides.
| abakker wrote:
| I think it is important to distinguish between Consulting,
| Staff Augmentation, and Managed Services. Many of the large
| integrators/consultancies do all of these options, but the
| objectives, contract sizes, and durations of the contracts
| are all expected to be different.
|
| Consulting - best though of projects, governance, and on-
| demand expertise. There are definitely junior resources in
| play, but the objective is to build on the IP of the
| consulting firm and to create a external channel for problem
| solving or delivery that is not dependent on or hampered by
| internal inertia.
|
| Staff Augmentation - a lot of time this is just billed
| hourly, and you really are looking at paying a premium for a
| non-committed spend - if FTEs are "reserved instances" then
| staff aug contracts are the opposite. You pay a premium for
| the lack of long-term commitment and to make this look like
| variable OpEx. my opinion is that this model is over used in
| most businesses.
|
| Managed Services - longer term commitments to deliver
| services. Generally the good advice is to contract on "what
| you want done" rather than the detailed "how you want it
| done", though that is more philosophical than practical. The
| expectation is that the service delivery will improve, and
| that those process improvements, automations, training, and
| provider IP/Tools will deliver decreasing unit prices for
| "resource units" over time.
|
| Thinking of consultancies as pure brokers is certainly a
| mental model you can use, but is not the most nuanced model.
| I think it tends to be better to acknowledge that there are
| structural reasons why all of these models are present in
| organizations and rather to think about how they should be
| governed.
|
| (disclaimer, my employer is an advisor on how to contract for
| these kinds of services. My work is not related to
| contracting, but research about this market)
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| The people who care about these distinctions are mostly
| within those three groups. For the customers it's
| 'consulting'.
| plasma_beam wrote:
| I disagree - no one is calling large scale gov
| contractors such as Northrop Grumman, GDIT, CGI, CACI,
| many more etc. consultants - yet a lot of the IT work
| they do overlaps with the consultancies.
|
| "Contractors" has become the more common term over time.
| sailfast wrote:
| I would say that "Consulting" model as defined above is
| employed moreso (but not entirely) by Deloitte, but
| Accenture and Booz Allen have a higher percentage of on-
| site folks not at all engaged with internal IP building,
| sales, etc that amount to staff augmentation. As Booz Allen
| and Deloitte went after service contracts typically held by
| folks like Lockheed, GD, CSC, etc it was a race to the
| bottom for fees to grab as much land as possible, so there
| wasn't really any head room for people that could do both
| in the rate they pass through to the customer.
|
| Furthermore, in the cleared space you're pretty much silo'd
| to places that grant clearances - so while you might build
| up some IP you can never actually leave that market because
| your credentials are too valuable.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _consultancies in IT are just brokers_
|
| This is also a lot of PE. College graduates want to live in a
| city and work for a "reputable" company. The founder of the
| Baton Rouge chemical plant, meanwhile, doesn't recruit in New
| York and Los Angeles. So he hires Deloitte or gets taken over
| by Bain who hires some graduate and takes 40% of their pay in
| exchange for letting them commute from a city during the week
| and say they work in PE on Raya.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Sounds like the richest and most powerful organization on
| Earth should start paying market salaries for its engineers.
| Not sure why that is so difficult.
| econ wrote:
| Just work as hard as the pay Merritts. Works for me. Around
| 5 you get presence, at 100 you get superhuman performance.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| It's the perfect brewing soup for kickbacks.
| ljm wrote:
| In the UK, the preference for consultants and contractors was
| always because it's accounted for differently on the balance
| sheet.
|
| The consultants would actually cost more money overall,
| especially since they could be engaged longer than the average
| tenure of a full time engineer. But it wasn't on the wage bill
| so it was fine.
|
| In reality it was just really unfair to the full time engineers
| who, while they did get some benefits for being on board, did
| not get anything approaching equal compensation.
|
| Even being outside IR35, which is the legislation that stops
| employees masquerading as contractors to lower their tax
| burden, they would fundamentally just be better-paid employees.
|
| Of course, this is more on the individual level but even
| bringing in an agency... they could charge 1200 a day while the
| person on the job takes home about 400 of it if they're lucky.
| frogperson wrote:
| Their actions are actively hostile to the US government and its
| citizens. You'll never convince me otherwise. Republicans act
| as if US citizens are the enemy and they want to destroy the
| country.
|
| It's the only way of looking at it that makes sense. The
| enemies are in the gates and no one is fighting.
| m463 wrote:
| > in the private sector
|
| yet it happens.
|
| The problem in any case is when the
| consultants/contractors/temp workers become entrenched.
|
| It's really easy to do it - just put people who know less next
| to people who know more but are paid less. Then you can't keep
| your normal employees and have to keep hiring from outside.
| gsky wrote:
| I signed up for linkedin with my Mobile number.
|
| I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to
| validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field
| to login.
|
| That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run
| by medicore people at this point
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Yep. Mobile version of reddit is basically unusable on my se2.
| Page hangs and doesn't finish loading, only shows like 1 or 2
| comments and no child replies vs the whole thread.
| Old.reddit.com loads instantly of course, except if I am coming
| from a mobile reddit link then it will hang and require a
| browser restart as closing the tab and using a new one isn't
| even enough.
|
| Remind me their valuation again to produce a junk product and
| ride on the coattails of an otherwise simple and reliable
| website that they'd rather not exist again?
| aaurelions wrote:
| Gemini 2.5 DeepResearch new Pentagon consultant.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| This is going to devastate the DC area. Most of my friends work
| for one of the big IT contractors. It's a great gig if you can
| get it, very nice compensation and not a lot of responsibility.
| The first rule of government contracting has always been why buy
| something when you can buy it for three times the price. As a
| result these firms have become quite massive in their size and
| billings. This is going to cause a major overturn in people
| living in the DC region, and overall incomes. I would say
| perhaps, perhaps, it's the equivalent of a very large company
| leaving Silicon Valley.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I'm in favor of getting consulting firms out of government, but I
| suspect they'll end up having to pay out these contracts while no
| longer getting what they were paying for, so this is likely a net
| lose for tax payers.
| johnbellone wrote:
| This is where I would expect there to be a lot of waste in
| government budgets. Unfortunately, there are very little
| incentives for the work coming out of these types of contracts to
| build process/technology to automate themselves out of billions
| of dollars. We are stuck between limitations of government
| civilian workforce (pay/politics) and overpaying companies for
| work that generally can be a lot cheaper with a career employee.
| glitchc wrote:
| It's interesting reading conversations in this thread. Everyone
| wants government to hire competent individuals. Yet, when it
| comes to a personal choice, the very same individuals decline the
| lower compensation.
|
| Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the
| private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land,
| sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in
| government spending that's needed to pay for those higher
| salaries.
|
| It's classic cognitive dissonance in full effect leading to a
| tragedy of the commons. It goes to show that tech folks are no
| different from regular (DEI, MAGA, other) people.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| The narrative around fed jobs has changed recently too. A fed
| job used to be a lower salary, but much stronger job security.
| Now with the new administration government job security is
| gone, so federal jobs overall are simply not as attractive
| anymore.
| glitchc wrote:
| I don't think this applies. According to the stories here,
| folks were choosing out of Fed jobs even when gold-plated
| pensions were the norm.
| l2silver wrote:
| Government organizations aren't very good at accounting for
| true inflation, so right now the salary + golden handcuffs
| combination is way lower than industry compensation, if
| you're competent. If you're not competent, and you're not
| doing anything, then you might as well stay.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| It's been almost 3 months. Just maybe there haven't been any
| new fundamental long-term trends established in that time
| bluecalm wrote:
| The argument "cutters" are making is that there is enough money
| but also too much waste. Case in point are consulting firms
| discussed here: they charge you 3x rate of their employees. You
| could have been paying 2x to get better employees and savings
| at the same time.
| raincom wrote:
| A lot of these jobs require clearance. Who can get such
| clearances? People with less history. So, young college
| graduates, young army folks, etc. There are tons of people who
| just have security clearances without competence. There is a huge
| demand for people who hold clearances. I have no problem with
| "make work" programs; however, these large companies are grifting
| 100% on top of what these people get paid.
| erichocean wrote:
| This is a big loss for India, it's like 15:1 India- vs. US-based
| "consultants."
| languagehacker wrote:
| I always like to recommend the book When McKinsey Comes to Town
| in any post about Management Consulting
| zusammen wrote:
| Well, there goes the whole economy.
| Arubis wrote:
| Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It's kind of amazing
| to me how much USGov business Accenture continued to soak up
| after the misfired start of healthcare.gov. Their core competency
| is pretty clearly acquiring contracts, not fulfilling them.
| zzzbra wrote:
| Finally a budget cut I can actually celebrate.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| In some departments (say Social Security) they want to switch
| from in-house staff to contractors, and in others they want to
| switch from contractors to in-house staff?
|
| The US government has been moving to privatized contractors in
| _most_ of it 's work for some time, across many administrations
| and both parties.
|
| Based on what I know of Trump, I'd have expected that to
| continue. Maybe it is everywhere except for special treatment for
| DoD? Or maybe this is just a fake and it won't be this way for
| DoD either. I don't have much idea what is going on.
| idrios wrote:
| Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of
| transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA
| to replace some people who've recently left.
|
| He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the
| role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to
| vet candidates through approved sources and so his department
| uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from
| people who are substantially lying about their experience and
| maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew
| who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and
| he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he
| wasn't from an approved source.
|
| His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well
| enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get
| herself hired as a consultant.
|
| Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may
| have inaccuracies in this story.
| exe34 wrote:
| he should just hire some high school script kiddies, they
| already have access to the highest level of government!
| gscott wrote:
| Put in that persons first name as 'Big' last name 'Balls'. No
| one will question the hire, change the persons name later to
| their actual name.
| 98codes wrote:
| Getting onto the allowed vendor list for the US Government is a
| dire process even for the largest of global service companies,
| by design by the folks already on the list.
|
| I was able to work as an individual as a subcontractor for a
| subcontractor for a company on the list. Rates aren't as high,
| but with federal regulations (for now) mandating that
| subcontractors be paid as soon as the primary contract holder
| was paid meant that there was 0 chasing after invoices which is
| actually very nice.
| devrandoom wrote:
| Waste or not, I don't think two companies should have $5.1B
| government contracts.
|
| Although I think neither that or waste is the reason for
| termination.
| silexia wrote:
| Fantastic! This is great news. Clean up the waste!
| passwordoops wrote:
| I'm happy with this, but cynical enough to expect $5.1B to turn
| into $10.2B for Palantir, X
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| This might be the only smart "waste cutting" that the government
| has done so far.
|
| Ideally, there would be a Digital Services government department,
| staffed with properly compensated people (to attract good quality
| talent) that the other government agencies would "contract" to
| build their services, rather than paying through the nose to
| Deloitte (who then offshores most of the work anyway). Then
| maintaining the services could be done by the contracting gov
| agency once completed (with support from DSA).
|
| Oh wait, we had a Digital Services, the USDS, and they built some
| pretty good stuff too. Could have been a model for other work.
| Except that they just got gutted and taken over by DOGE goons.
| Wonderful.
| fracus wrote:
| How can you just terminate a contract? What clause are they
| invoking to terminate it?
| b8 wrote:
| Good. Government contractors usually overcharge the government
| and then the contractors don't do much all day. It'd be cheaper
| to hire internally or pick cheaper contractors. Lot's of
| documented fraud, waste and abuse with government contractors.
| michaelteter wrote:
| While there's almost certainly a good amount of waste in these
| consulting contracts, there's also a strong possibility that
| these cuts were done without a clear sense of what would be lost
| without them.
|
| But hey, I suppose sometimes we just deem projects too big and
| messy to comprehend, so we just toss it all and start over. It
| rarely turns out as nice or easy as we thought it would be.
| cafard wrote:
| Having worked for a government contractor, I decided that the
| government was using the Charlie Sheen principle: not paying them
| to come around, but paying them to go away. I have no idea what
| they billed us for to the government, but I doubt we were getting
| paychecks equivalent to what the government folk we dealt with
| got. (To say nothing of benefits.) But I assume that it was far
| easier to let contractors go.
|
| Actually, the friction of hiring and placing made it relatively
| hard to let contractors go other than through downsizing. People
| showed up drunk or stoned, and hung on for a month or two.
| max_ wrote:
| What exactly do these two people do.
|
| The marketing BS on their websites say alot of generic,
| motivational crack.
|
| Could someone help me break down the real bread & butter of these
| firms and why people give them money?
| Havoc wrote:
| They provide some analysis. Which may or may not be helpful. It
| also acts as CYA - if a venture goes wrong and the CEO can say
| the consultants supported it then that can take some of the
| heat off
| mrkramer wrote:
| Elon is taking over!
| https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/5e0e6ea/2147483647/str...
| rvba wrote:
| I wonder how many of them was doing important stuff (defending vs
| Russian ans other foreign actors).
|
| I understand the sentiment that quality of consultants ia very
| low.
| profsummergig wrote:
| I was sitting with a D.C. lobbyist at a function dinner. Lawyer
| at a prominent lobbying law firm. Random seat assignments. He
| gets a call on his cellphone. After the call he has a shit-eating
| grin on his face. Tells me Biden just signed student loan
| forgiveness. He had lobbied on behalf of the banks that had given
| the loans to the students (and students weren't paying them
| back).
|
| I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour
| to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He
| changed the subject deftly.
|
| Accenture and Deloitte pay a lot of money to lobbyists for these
| Pentagon contracts. After the dust has settled, they'll still get
| juicy contracts. We will all forget that any of this happened.
| selfhoster wrote:
| "I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per
| hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He
| changed the subject deftly."
|
| Excellent point.
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