Finally they actually cut something that should be cut.
Plenty of USAID wasteful spending was already cut as well
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Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
61–70 of 684 posts
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#62All fine and dandy until one realizes that the pentagon's budget is measured in the trillions, and this sort of deal probably doesn't even deal with mission critical stuff. That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt our national security readiness.
The peak of this was probably flying pallets of dollar bills into Baghdad and "losing track of them".
Honorable mention to running air conditioners in Afghanistan using gasoline that had to be trucked several thousand miles through loosely-held territory at the cost of several service member's lives over the years.
It's one of those situations where the roles have been briefly reversed, the left complaining about military spending and the right promoting it. Except the new budget is apparently going to spend MORE on the military, which is almost certainly going to be wasted since there's no clear justification or plan for it.
Since Eisenhower and before everyone has known that a lot of military spending was pork-barrel jobs programs for various states, plus a certain amount of overt corruption (see "Fat Leonard"). But the media environment and right-wing prevented any serious questioning of military spending.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
25% waste on single million is not bad. 25% waste on all millions spend is very bad... And that 25% is likely under estimated in many cases. Or at least some more from 75% is inefficiently used. I admit probably not 25% of all millions is wasted. But even if that is half that would be 12.5% wasted... Or fourth 6.25%. Fixing of which would still be huge long term effect. So my take is that this needs to be fixed on al…
Sure. But the point is that the people who advocate cutting the waste never propose going after the big wins first. Instead we cut all the little things that actually helps people and use arguments to the effect that the waste was adding up in the aggregate. OR, we could just not spend a trillion dollars on the military.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#64Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#65Earlier 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.
> from space programs to science funding.
... which have also been randomly cut.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Your public tax dollars picked Tesla and SpaceX as winners vs losers, through billions of dollars of subsidies.
Those subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on those contracts.
This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government. Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#67On 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.
So you are comparing existing, actual waste with your "imaginary" waste that might or might not happen... Go easy on the kool aid.
I don't totally trust this DOGE crew and think we should keep a hawks eye on them but the whole "they are cutting waste so they can funnel the money to themselves!" conspiracy theories making the rounds are pretty bizarre... And to what end, aren't many of these people already extremely wealthy? I sure hope I'm wrong.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#68Kinda 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.
Having observed and been part of contracts involving these companies, it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should. It’s not usually the type of work, it’s the specific commercial model and mode of engagement with them that’s generally at fault, often aided and abetted by procurement processes.
they're a order of magnitude higher for some reasons though. I work in consulting, and occasionally larger enterprises approach our firm. We almost always decline because their requirements from vendor screening, to change review boards, to just the amount of sheer meetings it takes to enact a change to a title change on the website home page - its not worth it.
A couple times we made the mistake of giving a 'go away' number and they took it, and then i had to deal with the insanity of F500 business...
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#69they 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 the unenlightened soul, where is lion's share of that money being spent? (preferably in more detail than just "tax cuts")
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Didn’t they at one point fail to account for Trillions of dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for me is unimaginable.