191–200 of 684 posts
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.
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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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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...
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So you are comparing existing, actual waste with your "imaginary" waste that might or might not happen... Go easy on the kool aid.
Remind me in 6 months.
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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.
> You could do an awful lot of good with that kind of money Or given to billionaires
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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")
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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…
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