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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

#421

Post by wiether »

bumby wrote: post #374
ksec wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be market rate because you get job safety. Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea. Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability. Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure and hierarchy. People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a thing in l…

> Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea. The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.

The tenure is for the job or overall in the government?

Here in France it's quite common for government employees to jump through agencies during their career, so the average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite big.

Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is about the UK.

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

#422

Post by wormlord »

grandempire wrote: post #325
wormlord wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public health research is good. Bombing civilians in the third world is bad. Do you get it now?

> Public health research is good. This is basically a tautology. The question is what’s actually being funded in the name of public health. Wasting money in pursuit of public health which doesn’t help the public is bad actually,

> Wasting money in pursuit of public health

How do you define waste? If research isn't harmful, but doesn't produce results, is that waste? Are inconclusive results wasteful? What ratio of public utility to cost would you consider non-wasteful spending? What about the benefits of effectively subsidizing your biotech sector by keeping biologists in-demand?

There is more upside (globally) to public health spending than maintaining a global empire that deals death and destruction. Trying to nitpick is missing the point entirely.

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

#423

Post by bangaladore »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #103
yardie wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

This is a bad take. Nobody can compete with BYD. This isn't a Tesla vs BYD issue, this is a Everyone vs Cheap labor and deregulation issue.

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

#424

Post by EasyMark »

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.

With this administration is about destruction of all government spending in order to maximize tax cuts for the top 1% who pay for access to The Hill, it really is about that, and not about efficiency. Also please point me at all the "fraud" they've found and yet for some reason the DOJ isn't charging anyone with "fraud". It's all BS. There are well thought out cuts, and there is what DOGE and Dump are doing.

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

#425

Post by albedoa »

mattfca wrote: post #328
miltonlost wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission. There was. It's the GAO and the inspectors general of the agencies, both of which have been gutted by this administration. > I'm not defending the specific actions of this admini…

you cant call out a bias when you are doing the exact same thing.

You absolutely can. What on earth are you talking about.

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

#426

Post by grandempire »

wormlord wrote: post #422
grandempire wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public health research is good. This is basically a tautology. The question is what’s actually being funded in the name of public health. Wasting money in pursuit of public health which doesn’t help the public is bad actually,

> Wasting money in pursuit of public health How do you define waste? If research isn't harmful, but doesn't produce results, is that waste? Are inconclusive results wasteful? What ratio of public utility to cost would you consider non-wasteful spending? What about the benefits of effectively subsidizing your biotech sector by keeping biologists in-demand? There is more upside (globally) to public health spending than…

> If research isn't harmful, but doesn't produce results, is that waste?

It’s certainly worse that research that does produce results. We should try to optimize for research that works.

And yes, in the extreme example of spending a lot of money and never getting anything of public utility, that would be a waste.

> What ratio of public utility to cost would you consider non-wasteful spending?

I wouldn’t use abstractions like “public health” and “public utility”. Which specific projects are funding or losing funding and what’s the impact?

> There is more upside (globally) to public health spending

Look inside the abstraction.

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

#427

Post by t-writescode »

grandempire wrote: post #323
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…

> Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences. I think this part is overestimated. It will get fixed.

Breaking critical systems like SNAP, Medicare/Medicaid, weather forecasting and many many many other systems that people literally depend on for their being alive *kills* people.

Programmers that work on critical systems are actively trained to take into consideration every contingency to not increase the death rate of their systems, to the best of their abilities.

Aggressive, comprehensive and non-robust axing of systems when literal lives are on the line - especially when it's government systems and those lines maintain any semblance of some people's ability to literally be alive - touch and impact more lives than any single Boeing plane or NASA space shuttle's crash. They are even more critical than those systems - though not as flashy when they fail.

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

#428

Post by karaterobot »

wonderwonder wrote: post #260
QuantumGood wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

96 of 301 projects complete, 58 in progress • https://www.project2025.observer/

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

I'll join you in getting downvoted for absolutely no reason. It's a shitty thing they're doing, but your observation is correct. My job working on NIH-funded research projects is directly in their path, so I wish they weren't stomping a mudhole across science and technology. But they are, and, as you note, they're doing it very effectively and with incredible speed.

If it's outside our capability as a community to even acknowledge that they're moving fast, how can we note that they're moving way too fast to be doing it right?

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

#430

Post by mint2 »

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…

> Similar to what Elon did with twitter

Wait who thinks what Elon did with Twitter was a success?

While it hasn’t fully collapsed like some predicted, it seems like a total unmitigated failure in any standard economic or business terms. It’s been a success only in terms of providing a bigger mouthpiece to Elon and those he favors, not a typical metric of corporate success.

In that regards, yes what is happening at the federal government mimics Twitter - making the government worse in terms of any usual metric of government performance but making it better in terms of carrying out arbitrary whims of a leader.

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