Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

Indeed, you can easily insert any idea not actually mentioned post hoc. It's especially easy to insert unsupported but widely believed justifications. For that matter, you could extrapolate that dietary habits or music taste somehow result in less time eating and more team unity if you're absolutely set on justifying a weak assumption or policy.

But particularly one would think the fact they they are not all actually young would be somehow taken into account before justifying they claim that it's the premier attribute to enumerate.

There's definitely quite a bit of PostgreSQL in use in government, so this does not need to be a blocker. As someone noted, PAM auth is a good solution; and I think if you use CentOS or RHEL (Use the latest release please!) you'll end up with a FIPS OpenSSL which PostgreSQL is linked against.

More generally, the VA TRM is not a permanent thing, it's precisely the type of existing process which can be improved with the feedback of on the ground software engineers. If this is a blocker for you, I'm sure folks at DSVA would be happy to help!

The most useful thing I worked on was a program for calculating air-sea carbon flux: I did the OS X GUI and helped with the core logic (computing air-sea carbon flux is nontrivial). At the time I was appalled that we spent $10k on what could have just been an R package around a wrapper for the C++ core. But since then the program has become a very common tool for ocean acidification research, with ~175 citations, many of these have since been cited in all sorts of climate change policy documents. It's admittedly hard to assess value, but it's definitely more than 10k. And definitely a public good that the market cannot be counted on to deliver.

I also found out at some point that the contractor I was working for (a Fortune 500 engineering and defense company) billed the USGS more than twice what I received (I got no real benefits). The federal employees I worked with detested the contracting company because they knew how much it was skimming from the contract employees, many of whom were full-time and had been there for years. When I figured this all out, I quit, started my own company, and was hired directly as an independent contractor. Unfortunately, this was not an option for most people, as this wouldn't have worked for a full-time, year-round position.

I absolutely agree that the interface that most citizens use to government can be better. President Obama agrees with you (from his sxsw remarks):

"I could change the politics of America faster than just about anything if I could just take control of all the DMVs in the country."

"If their primary interaction with government is the IRS, you just don’t have a good association with government when you’re writing that check."

USDS has been working with the IRS to help them get their Transcript service back online with better identity proofing though admittedly just a small step in a better online experience. (irs.gov/transcript)

A number of state and local governments have been making improvements as well (much harder to see if your state or your local government has not been). I'd encourage you to search them out or even start it.

They probably could have given the same resources and authority to the existing staff and they might have turned things around too. It really annoys me that in so many cases the existing guys know what's wrong but are not allowed by management to do anything about it. Then management hires new people, gives them authority, and suddenly these guys are heroes and the existing people look like idiots.

There seems to be this tendency to think that existent workers are all idiots and the only way to do better is to hire new people (preferably young and from ivy league schools). In reality it's a leadership problem because they have set up dysfunctional environments that don't allow people to perform.