31–40 of 145 posts
Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse. Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement. Procurement put it out for bid,…
Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse. Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement. Procurement put it out for bid,…
Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence. Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.
Except this happens anyway. Much like patents, people just become better at drafting. What is currently done is not an effective mechanism for stopping cronyism and corruption at all. In fact makes it easier in a lot of cases, because it provides plausible deniability (It's not that we gave it to our friend, it's that you didn't meet the requirements!)
Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse. Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement. Procurement put it out for bid,…
Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence. Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.
Former federal IT contractor here.
The procurement rules were designed for that, yes. But in real world scenarios, those rules effectively do exactly the opposite. Since there are so many hoops for potential vendors to jump through, only the most established players get to bid on most contracts. And in my experience corruption and cronyism is still alive and well in federal IT contracting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence. Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.
The irony is that they don't really do that. It's common in both procurement and hiring in the federal government to see bizarrely-specific requirements whose fairly transparent intention is to limit the potential bidder or applicant pool to a single company or individual.
Hey, there's a theoretically infinite number of company names which meet this requirement...
I would also add that the project had too many cooks in the kitchen, by some accounts. I have heard there were upwards of 50 distinct companies subcontracting on this project. I work on projects that are probably on par in terms of complexity. We typically only involve a handful of firms. And even then, coordinating them all is a challenge. I can't fathom making the process work with 50+ firms. Maybe that number was…
This is just the way government contracting works. The "Prime Contractor" is often explicitly required to subcontract out a "meaningful" portion of the work to sub-contractors for a variety of reasons. Mostly because, as touched on in the article, the DoD/lobbyist revolving door has legislated a huge system of what is effectively corporate welfare in the form of contracting. The government throws money and a few "sen…
Obviously when you have so many targets, you don't hit a lot. Maybe the obamacare website was perfect in some secondary objectives.
But it also arises from perfectly true premise, that big spending is a force on the society and that it as secondary effects, and that maybe we can twist those effects in a political manner. The whole Silicon Valley is living on federal actions.
Any market based solution website has to be very agile and responsive [edit: to succeed at it's goal] but the government can't be super responsive and in many ways shouldn't be super responsive. The state spends all of our money and enforces mandatory decisions concerning our lives. The state shouldn't have the agile qualities needed to produce the beautifully flexible websites created by the private sector.
In general, I'd claim the state should certainly be smaller but that it shouldn't be less bureaucratic, shouldn't be more like a corporation. Civil service is boring and bureaucratic by design, specifically it was created to combat the "spoils system" that plagued the early American state [1] (though the prize of modern state eclipse what Tammany Hall etc could have imagined). Modern corporations are agile by having a command structure which lets them quickly maximize profits - which is great if we believe the market system benefits everyone when operating properly. But states with the ability to trample the fences of ordinary market shouldn't not be also given the ability to move quickly and agilely to do this. Corporations have no internal limits to their "greed" but we citizens of democratic market capitalism are assuming that's OK, indeed desirable, as long as the corporation face the strong external limit of markets and individual choice.
The current fashion for what could be called "state-enforced private consumption" is sold as giving us the best of all possible worlds but in reality gives us the worst (IE. the reality is the wealth of this society is indeed being vacuum-out by a kind of private-public rent seeker limited by neither the traditional bounds of the democratic state or traditional bounds of the market).
Note: I'm not a conservative rooting against Obamacare. It seems like it was a terrible approach for achieving affordable healthcare but I still would prefer it succeeded that failed because, well, I and many friends need it.
Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse. Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement. Procurement put it out for bid,…
Has anyone noted that the government perhaps just shouldn't be in this kind of business to begin with? Any market based solution website has to be very agile and responsive [edit: to succeed at it's goal] but the government can't be super responsive and in many ways shouldn't be super responsive. The state spends all of our money and enforces mandatory decisions concerning our lives. The state shouldn't have the agil…
This is provably false by visiting any number of old, large company websites, esp in healthcare or banking. In addition the government isn't in this kind of business, it outsources almost everything to "free market" companies, who extract as much margin as they and their lobbyists can get away with.
Complexity has much more to do with size of and number of evolved entities than whether they are profit motivated or not.