Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte • Hacker News Board

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#101

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #84

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e... | https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonp... https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-t... “Who is John Galt?” /s He is Schrödinger's Entrepreneur: a self made man when the ego and cult calls for…

Most of those subs linked are from direct negotations from the state, and they are in the form of tax incentives, not cash in account.

How are you going to use that against a company that nevada agreed to give them X amount of tax incentives over a year if they build a giga factory there?

Using that as a justification that "tesla only lives because of tax payer money" is ridiculous.

Also, poking around the SpaceX data just seems entirely false too. The biggest 'loan' of $98M to spaceX for "Missle technology development". And when you follow the authorizations it was just a firm fixed price contract.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#102

Post by ethbr1 » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

mythz wrote: post #6

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.

>> 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.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#103

Post by AtlasBarfed » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

yardie wrote: post #99

toomuchtodo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your public tax dollars picked Tesla and SpaceX as winners vs losers, through billions of dollars of subsidies.

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.

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

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#104

Post by kcatskcolbdi » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

mythz wrote: post #6

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.

Yeah can't wait until our Nation's Finest are having to use Grok Spectacles to identify enemy combatants.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#105

Post by callamdelaney » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

sepalous wrote: post #98

callamdelaney wrote: post #64

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.

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…

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.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#106

Post by icegreentea2 » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:14 PM UTC

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #69

splitrocket wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the unenlightened soul, where is lion's share of that money being spent? (preferably in more detail than just "tax cuts")

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://budgetmodel.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.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#107

Post by dagw » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:14 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #40

PaywallBuster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.61% with just a few contracts

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.

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.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#108

Post by next_xibalba » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

mikeocool wrote: post #75

ibejoeb wrote: post #21

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.

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.

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Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#109

Post by dwater » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #93

dwater wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

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.

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.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#110

Post by ebiester » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #57

NickC25 wrote: post #8

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.

> 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.

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.