Earlier quoted context omitted.
The '24 budget was $842 billion.
0.61% with just a few contracts
Were these one-year contracts?
Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
31–40 of 684 posts
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#32they will probably announce a new $5B contract with Palantir next week
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.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#33What 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.
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.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#34Finally they actually cut something that should be cut.
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
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.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#35Not 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.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#36Finally they actually cut something that should be cut.
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
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)
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#37Great, 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.
I think taxes on imports just got raised a bit.
I thought that got paused by tweet yesterday.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#38On 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.
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
The Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#39Kinda 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 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.
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.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The '24 budget was $842 billion.
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.