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

reuters.com

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

#351

Post by next_xibalba »

reciprocity wrote: post #192
next_xibalba wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Haven't you seen the documentary Inside Job covering the 2008 financial crisis? "Burning it all down and starting over" is a very immature and myopic perspective and cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution. The solution is to implement regulation that, very broadly here, enacts mechanisms to make private gain for public loss something incredibly difficult to do. There need to be checks against people in posi…

> cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution

... in your opinion. More regulation will just lead to more and more ineffectual bureaucracy. "More regulation" as an answer is why nothing gets built in California. "More regulation" is why the Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia took 20 years to permit and complete, whereas the same can be done in under 5 years in China. "More regulation" is why it takes 10 years and $3 billion dollars to bring a pharmaceutical to market in the U.S.

More regulation simply empowers the parasitical lawyers to gum up the works even further. It doesn't produce better outcomes, it produces far fewer outcomes.

Burn it down. Send Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Bharat Aggarwal, Ching-Shih Chen, Carlo M. Croce, Andrew Jess Dannenberg, John Darsee, etc etc etc to prison. Start over again clean.

People who resist this idea act as if we're realizing incredible progress and all that would be lost. We aren't. Science and medicine are very, very stagnant, sclerotic, and riddled with fraud. The liberal arts are almost entirely useless (from a taxpayer's perspective).

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

#352

Post by xorcist »

umvi wrote: post #272
tw04 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing. Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.

Maybe the federal government needs a reset/dismantling/pruning/whatever you want to call it. With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal government would likely be expanding spending and gov't programs right now even though the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget, which itself exceeds the next 9 defense budgets in the world combined.

No need for the scare quotes. The current federal budget is expanding, under the current administration.

Had they the slighest wish to shrink the debt, or at least not expand it further, tax cuts would have been out of the question until the budget allows for it.

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

#353

Post by miltonlost »

whimsicalism wrote: post #344
miltonlost wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol so yeah, you're not comparing it to private insurance which is what TAXPAYERS actually pay themselves. You're just a right-wing hack. "Medicare is BAD because it costs money and is cheaper than private insurance. Private insurance is GOOD because it costs even more money than we'd pay with Medicare!!" Your position is "medicare is too expensive" but expensive compared to what??

None of what you said is what I'm saying and you're making all sorts of presumptions about what you think I believe. I think you struggle with civil discourse and doubt this conversation will be productive, so have a nice day.

Cool. Go back to thinking we can only raise taxes on the middle class to pay for medicare and ignoring any taxes on the wealthy like you said in your first post. ( we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation )

Your current fiscal situation is only right-wing talking points.

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

#354

Post by Vegenoid »

FloorEgg wrote: post #340
heisenbit wrote: post #217

Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the…

I'm not paying close attention to all the noise, so forgive me if I am way off base. But aren't they effectively doing a values purge/refinement/reset? Similar to what Elon did with twitter and what few companies have managed to do to transform themselves? My point is (in an effort to maintain a most respectful interpretation) that I imagine the environment is becoming more hostile to people with certain values while…

Even if this is the case, “process” is immensely more important in government and military than in companies because government has the authority, the prerogative even, to use violence, ruin lives, and kill people. The onerous processes are in place to protect civilians.

When you shoot from the hip at a tech company, the bad outcome is that a lot of money gets wasted and people lose their jobs. When the federal government shoots from the hip, trust in the institution erodes and people die.

Not that there is no room for streamlining and reducing bureaucratic and IT bloat, but it is very important to remember that the government is not a business, and in many ways should be run very differently from a business.

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

#355

Post by eru »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #329
leguminous wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't even available because there is some rule about how people can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for consultants and all of their overhead. (Of course there…

Theoretically, there's some sort of arbitrage happening. There is some department in the government that's very unsexy and has a very real problem that could be solved by a smart finance MBA student diligently working on it. But there's no way that diligent young employee would want that job. Nor no way if he had it that anyone would take him seriously and put his changes in place. He doesn't want to work for that un…

The story for private equity is similar. How else do you get some high flying MBA to care about running a plumbing business?

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

#356

Post by fckgw »

rdsubhas wrote: post #324
Aurornis wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet comment section “pick a side and deride the other” doesn’t work on these situations. Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences. Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince enoug…

From the article: > The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform

The source is the person doing the cutting. Of course they're not going to say "We're cutting essential staff for no reason"

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

#357

Post by monero-xmr »

Spooky23 wrote: post #339
wonderwonder wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you support it or not, for government, that's really some incredible efficiency. almost 1/3 complete in 100 days

It’s amazing that people so committed to constitutional principles were able to enact the largest tax increase in history without the advice and consent of congress. Impressive even for tax and spend republicans. In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions.

Huh? Trump won the popular vote. Maybe make better arguments in the next election if you don't like the current leader, rather than a violent revolution to overturn a democratically elected leader

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

#358

Post by next_xibalba »

kouru225 wrote: post #139
next_xibalba wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So two people lied and you wanna get rid of the system that caught them?

They are merely exemplars chosen because they were the leaders of their institutions. The list is very, very long. I invite you to look into the issue further if you think I'm wrong.

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

#359

Post by notahacker »

varispeed wrote: post #242
heisenbit wrote: post #217

Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the…

"unhealthy" it's simple profiteering. In the UK that's got especially interesting. When more consultants started quitting these big firms to go independent (offering cheaper services to public sector and often better quality), these corporations lobbied for something called IR35 - basically means if company is worker owned, then it cannot make profit. Now big consultancies have very much a monopoly on making profit f…

That's nonsense. IR35 basically makes it more difficult for companies to treat an individual like an employee whilst paying them as a "consultant" (saving themselves various obligations and allowing the "consultant" much more flexibility in avoiding tax). Accenture actually used to hire a lot of people that way themselves...

Individual consultants never were competing particularly closely with Accenture or Deloitte or McKinsey and their mass of bodies, brand and board level access, and IR35 really doesn't change their competitive position, or affect small boutique consultancies composed of people who quit Big Consultancy to do better at all. (sure, if you want to spend your next 6 months contracting as an individual on site for one employer you might now need to enlist the support of a specialist umbrella company to assure IR35 compliance, but if you're in that position you're not really competing with expensive big consultants selling massive projects at C level on brand rather than their own capabilities to departments based on individual skillset)

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

#360

Post by [deleted] »

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.

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