So you've got your CS graduate which you recruit and pay $40/hr, slap a badge on them and rent them out for $120/hr. Once in a while you fall short and need to hire some freelancers for $60/hr. That's it.
As your gov agency is capped on paying it's own recruits $25/hr for the position, very few will end up as 'native' gov workers, and the once that do will get poached swiftly by the consultancies.
Now these juicy contracts are not sold piecemeal, but in huge bulk. Not 3 guys for 2 months for a project, but an umbrella contract for delivering 2.000 full time profiles over the next 2 years. Very few consultancies can credibly fulfill on such commitments making the market fairly small and not too competitive. The few that participate have no incentive to spoil the roost and derail the gravy train. No explicit collusion is required. It's an iterative prissoners dilemma situation where the few players all know each other and frequently switch sides.
Consulting - best though of projects, governance, and on-demand expertise. There are definitely junior resources in play, but the objective is to build on the IP of the consulting firm and to create a external channel for problem solving or delivery that is not dependent on or hampered by internal inertia.
Staff Augmentation - a lot of time this is just billed hourly, and you really are looking at paying a premium for a non-committed spend - if FTEs are "reserved instances" then staff aug contracts are the opposite. You pay a premium for the lack of long-term commitment and to make this look like variable OpEx. my opinion is that this model is over used in most businesses.
Managed Services - longer term commitments to deliver services. Generally the good advice is to contract on "what you want done" rather than the detailed "how you want it done", though that is more philosophical than practical. The expectation is that the service delivery will improve, and that those process improvements, automations, training, and provider IP/Tools will deliver decreasing unit prices for "resource units" over time.
Thinking of consultancies as pure brokers is certainly a mental model you can use, but is not the most nuanced model. I think it tends to be better to acknowledge that there are structural reasons why all of these models are present in organizations and rather to think about how they should be governed.
(disclaimer, my employer is an advisor on how to contract for these kinds of services. My work is not related to contracting, but research about this market)
“Contractors” has become the more common term over time.
We have two types of Statements of Work (SOWs) we get signed by the client. The first type and the only type I would ever get involved with are project based. The client has a business need but not the technical expertise. I come in right after sales and work with the business to tease out their requirements, get their sign off. We do the work and leave the project once the requirements are met.
With this type of SOW, we (I) lead the project technically, the project management etc and once the work is handed off, we move on. It’s outcome based.
The second type of contract is where the client has the technically expertise. But not the manpower. They then sign a contract with us to get $X number of people for $y hours with the expertise they need. The client controls what gets done and when. They handle the project management. This is your typical staff augmentation.
Furthermore, in the cleared space you're pretty much silo'd to places that grant clearances - so while you might build up some IP you can never actually leave that market because your credentials are too valuable.
This is also a lot of PE. College graduates want to live in a city and work for a “reputable” company. The founder of the Baton Rouge chemical plant, meanwhile, doesn’t recruit in New York and Los Angeles. So he hires Deloitte or gets taken over by Bain who hires some graduate and takes 40% of their pay in exchange for letting them commute from a city during the week and say they work in PE on Raya.
(Of course there are more reasons as well, but this is a popular one that some of my friends in government agencies complain about.)
From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.)
I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual software license budget higher than their employee budget asked for and was denied a single new spot.
Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn person, but it ends up being way more expensive.
My current employer is even stricter.
In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that I'll never know.
Not defense, but my government contract works the same way. I'm on company number two, but I know people who have worked for 4 different companies, all while doing the same job on evolutions of the same contract. There are people who have done full careers working onsite for my agency without ever converting to be a civil servant.
This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at whatever social media tells them to.
There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2017.
Look at the email server debacle, did the supporters understand what the crime was? Then Signalgate occurred and it’s crickets in the news now. Freedom of speech now means freedom to spread misinformation.
Haha, those yokels getting a laugh from all those richies losing money in the stock market, but jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds. And those coming tax cuts, who will be benefiting the most from those? Haha, the joke keeps getting funnier…
The other one was a private email server, set up on purpose.
Many of these people don't have meaningful retirement savings to lose. Or they're young enough that time in the market will expect to recover in 30 years.
But yeah, I was thinking of that as I wrote it. I can confidently say that what I said still applies to my job.
A friend knew a hiring manager and was a quiet shoo-in for a job. HR dragged their feet for half a year and then, suddenly, moved at absolute light speed to get the job posting up, closed, and the shoo-in to be approved as much as possible.
It was because the contract was ending soon. Laid off workers (including contractors), veterans, and people with disabilities are given priority during the hiring process (which makes some kind of sense), but these contractors had such a stink associated with them that the HR people who presumably didn't want to work with the manager suddenly did, just to avoid hiring the contractors.
The government got angsty about being bilked by monopolies and started trying to mandate that contracts be split and awarded to different contractors. The first time they did this, they took the contract away from Raytheon and gave it to Lockheed, who probably felt the way the average reader of Hacker News feels, that surely this was a weekend project that five guys could do for a hundredth the price. It was not. Their solution completed the process of turning raw downlink data into human-legible imagery hundreds of times slower than Raytheon's. The government caved and gave the contract back to Raytheon.
A decade later, they overhauled the entire geoint enterprise to try and modernize it, bringing it to the cloud and using Kubernetes for everything, and did the same thing again. They gave the orchestration contract to Raytheon and the processing algorithms contract to Lockheed, with a rule saying the contracts can't go to the same company. Lockheed in this case just subbed the actual work back to Raytheon. The only way they could really do what the government wants, and have Lockheed employees working on this, is if they hired all the people who currently work for Raytheon, not out of any kind of nefarious underhandedness, but because these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it.
Lol, is this a joke? Any good dev can do software development.
Most people aren't willing to work for peanuts, don't want to stop using drugs for a clearance, or are ideologically opposed to building weapons used to kill children or propagate genocide.
Sounds like Raytheon employees are all good on those fronts, rather than being good at their jobs. After all, if they were so effective, why wouldn't they work somewhere without all those caveats?
Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong.
ie. they are generally a political choice rather than technical.
The disparity is extremely but to be honest I liked the idea of working for the government. There was a lot of drive to solve for the mission and smart people. But the level risk mitigation made working extremely difficult. The government impressive getting people to work as hard as they do and I respect it, they were a good employer but political offices severely shackle it from doing even better work. In wages yes but even in allowing experimentation, political appointments waste a ton of energy and time to. Its like selecting the worst person for the Job in a non meritocratic way and expecting things to run smoothly is a poor idea.
maybe it's different at the federal level, but at the state level it's pretty hard to beat the benefits, unless you're strictly looking for hourly wages. Not everyone needs $500,000 a year, nor wants it.
The stated policy of the current admin is to "traumatize" federal employees so the number of these people is likely dwindling fast. Burnout was already a problem before the current admin - if your efforts hit a bureaucratic brick wall one too many times that private sector job starts to look a lot more appealing.
Although the large consulting firms are also not great if they are just shipping software requirements overseas for cheap software dev labor, that also can be very ineffective. So many never ending government projects are a result of this. On the surface everything is competently managed (grant charts forever, with perfect org charts), but at the strategic level of actually getting it to work and on-time is lacking (because there are a ton of cautious "professional managers" who don't know how to actually ship.)
I am so tired of people who have "experience" repeating this talking point.
1) If an employee is union and being a freerider a manager has to document their failing before being able to fire them. And, yes, the union is going to defend them and make you do your job and put those documents in writing. The problem is that most managers don't want to put things in writing because, lo and behold, most of the time you wind up with written documentation that the manager is the problem instead of the union employee.
2) Union employees often hate freeriders more than managers do. Someone freeriding is making your own job far more miserable and if you can get rid of them, your own life is going to improve.
3) I can count the number of the freeriders I have encountered in union positions on one hand. I have lost count of the number of those people in non-union positions.
They are probably not chasing the job security either.
Healthcare may be vouchers soon.
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 unsexy department. The people at that unsexy department do not want to work for him.
Put a consulting company in the middle and he has a job title that sounds cool and that organization gets their problem solved.
( This is how someone explained business consulting to me. )
Those happen be 2 different types of consulting categories.
Accenture/Deloitte are more "professional services" type of consulting. Things like IT technology integrations and business process reengineering with software. So installing a multi-million dollar ERP software package like Oracle Financials or SAP and helping the client company migrate to the new accounting system. Also a lot of "staff augmentation" type of work. E.g. a lot of USA Homeland Security contracts for Accenture were IT services related: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22homeland+security%22+awar...
McKinsey/BCG is "management consulting". E.g. the CEO is considering opening a new international subsidiary but needs some research on various "strategies". So McKinsey consultants taps their vast network of other companies in the industry, creates spreadsheets of scenarios, writes up reports, etc.
The "professional services" category may be on a lower tier of prestige than "management consulting" but in general, most college graduates who prioritize career advancement will still prefer the (typically higher salary) job offer from Accenture/Deloitte rather than a government office such Veterans Affairs. Where government jobs often win candidates is the "no travel lifestyle" if it's a local office. Consultants can get quickly burned out by commuting on airplanes every week.
It's not too bad
I had the impression that it was also easier to fire contractors. (Well, not to renew their contract.)
If a developer who works directly for the government is underperforming, their boss has to jump through many, many hoops to fire them.
So if they have a project that needs 100 people to do and is expected to take two years, they have two choices. Hire 100 people, hoping you can find something else for them to do in two years, or you can offer a two-year contract to a private company, letting them deal with the problem of figuring out what to do with the 100 people once the project is completed.
The contraints of the GS pay scale aren't real constraints. The federal government already has special bonuses paid to medical doctors to make their pay commensurate with rates in private industry, in spite of the fact that those rates are way the hell higher than anything on the GS scale. They could easily do the same for engineering labor. What they can't easily do is hire people for six months guaranteed with only conditional renewals after that, because very few people would agree to that unless you're paying them far more than they'd get in normal industry.
I did a coop with the navy in college, and would have gladly converted over to a full time GS employee on graduation, but:
1. Actual, honest to god GS dev positions were super rare outside of DC
2. The application process through the usaJobs website had a ridiculous amount of red tape
3. As you pointed out, the salaries were laughably low, even if you included benefits like the pension and healthcare.
I eventually gave up and went with the private sector. I had interviews in a week, an offer within days, and was paid more than someone with years of experience on the GS scale.
I was bummed about missing out on the opportunity for a pension, but the higher salary helped me hit FI by my mid 30's. When the ACA passed I effectively had access to health insurance on the private market for the first time in my life.
TLDR: I would have been a fool to go into GS as a dev. Giving up on that was the best thing I've ever done.
Pay scale for the DC area: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
I don’t think it’s the money, I think it’s the mindset. There’s more project managers than actual hands on engineers.
In my org (10000+), over the past 5+ years we’ve hired maybe 20-30 15s and 14s who are non-supervisory engineers. It’s not a ton but it’s more historically.
My point though is that people will take the jobs on government pay scale, but it’s organizationally very difficult to get the positions through HR.
1. Exactly zero companies, much less startups, are like the US Government.
2. He had 2 years at the NSA prior to his Google run.
3. I'm pretty sure he's one of the highest profile google engineers, you're not getting that for $500k.
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.
In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions.
"In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions." Not sure if you have taken a look at Britain lately but they absolutely don't care about what the citizens want.
With respect to the British Empire, you may want to review the concept of “no taxation without representation”.
I don’t mean to be graphic, but being forced into silence (“you could have stopped me”) is absolutely not consent. The Trump administration is full of people who will need to go to jail if were to keep our republic.
* - readers, please note that I said "most", not "all", so a couple counterexamples would not have any bearing on the statement.
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?
I bet on any particular issue you can find 3-4 major groups with conflicting opinions.
I mean, carpet bombing New York City would demonstrate "incredible efficiency" - as it would probably take much less time than demolishing a single building in the city following the laws.
The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company is heading towards oblivion one way or another.
Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets wind up as net job creators on a 5-10 year time horizons. That's despite the fact that they do usually start by divesting assets that don't make sense and laying off non-productive employees. But divested assets aren't generally killed – they are usually sold to somebody else who often does something better with it.
Also, companies conduct massive downsizing and rationalization all the time when in distress, and not only when they are taken over by a "corporate raider".
In the private markets, these actors are definitely distasteful. They do cleanup work that feels bad, and they often get rich doing it. But they also serve a necessary role in the markets.
Companies that are egregiously misusing capital and resources are a drag on the economy. It's a bad thing for there to be a bunch of zombie companies holding onto assets that could be used in better ways.
A more generous framing would be something like a home flipper. They buy properties that are a mess, clean it up real good, throw out the old stuff for recycling, install some modern appliances, and sell it to somebody else.
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.
I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.
A good metaphor here is apoptosis / programmed cell death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis)
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 administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.
LMAO, you're not defending the specific actions, but you know enough about the actions to know that they are "cutting stuff that is irrational". This is a defense of DOGE but with the "no, i'm NOT defending Musk" veneer that doesn't pass muster. You're giving this administration the benefit of the doubt and a large amount of good faith that they have not earned.
You say "No automatic force... whether (the agencies) are achieving any progress)". Don't we have oversight agencies and committees? I'm not following your 'grow and grow'; can you provide evidence that all agencies just 'grow and grow' without achieving progress? If not all agencies, then be specific.
Also, what evidence is there of "stuff" that is "irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission"? Which mission? What corruption? What evidence of this? Can you speak more specifically here?
Please provide evidence to claims so we can have an discussion around this.
He's not talking about consultants, he's just correcting the pop culture meme that "private equity is evil" which is what the parent comment implied. Everything he describes is correct.
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.
Perhaps, and in such a case, the american economy would not be cratering like it has been lately, and americans would be suffering less, and america would be stronger on the international stage. In fact, all things considered, more spending would have been better for america than the current state of things.
> the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget
There's always taxing the rich, but the plan by the american ruling elites in the republican party currently seems to be to increase the debt sky-high via tax cuts for rich americans, only partially paid for via increased taxes on non-rich americans, with the rest piled onto the american debt burden.
In fact, most solutions to troubles require spending time and/or money. Very few are resolved by "do less, and do it worse".
> At some point there need to be painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like.
Perhaps: america can start with increasing taxes on the rich, instead of decreasing taxes on the rich and increasing taxes on the non-rich. That should get america more money and hurt fewer people.
It seems as though republicans like to decrease both spending and taxes while democrats like to increase both spending and taxes. Both strategies are not helpful when it comes to national debt. Perhaps when democrats come to power again they will be wise and raise taxes without restoring all the spending/programs Trump cut.
learn how the global economy is, understand what fiat is, find out what your missing. (first hint, money is a construct - and follow the tbills)
you know what does make the US have to do "painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like. It's unpopular to do painful things, but it's necessary for survival" ??
Watch everything the current administration does because they dont understand modern economics and you'll see.
If you think I’m just being a partisan, take a look at the US Bond market for the last two weeks.
I can name a half dozen people who are in roles like this for F500 companies.
Hell, my wife was zoning SANs for $300/hr for like 6 years at a big bank. Another friend is essentially a pimp for a bunch of companies providing logistics staff. He takes a vig from the work of like 10k people.
I think these are both extremely stupid policies, but its just not correct to say that the Trump administration is increasing spending to benefit Musk.
So Trump is increasing spending already. One might also comment this is hardly surprising since he did the same in his previous term, when he overspent by 4.6 trillion (meaning he enacted policies that would cost the US that amount over 10 years), and that was because congress stopped him from doing more damage. Trump is responsible for 20-25% of the entire US public debt in 2025 (Biden at most 5%, and a lot of that was Trump policy, mainly the tax "reduction")
Does this benefit Musk? Well, the pentagon announced they're paying about 6 billion to SpaceX, so in one announcement about 3% of their Trump-announced budget increase is going to Musk. They're also buying from Tesla, against just about everyone's advice, but are unwilling to say how much. They're also paying a lot for Starlink and even Xai, but also not known how much.
Such bullshit. Our tax dollars were being stolen and thrown around the world covertly by a USAID slush fund. The entire organization was co-opted and projects were frivolous.
It's not a conspiracy. You can read about the spending online.
Anyone who thinks Trump's admin is any more detrimental than the previous one is either misinformed, uninformed or a bad actor.
I stopped taking these discussions seriously because the other side is so high on propaganda that the conversations aren't authentic. It's just talking to ActBlue robots.
I keep hearing about all this corruption, but nobody seems to be in jail about it.
The point of a slush fund is that the funds weren't allocated for specific programs by law, they were discretionary. So, while technically not illegal, they are frivolous and unethical. Not to mention, how would half the country and most of the world react if Trump's DOJ started arresting the people involved? They'd call him a tyrant and burn more Teslas.
So now, instead, we just have to take some rando's word for it that bad stuff was happening but nobody's going to jail over it because it was "technically not illegal"? And you call that accountability?
Congress decides how taxes are spent, not the Executive Branch, and certainly not the accountable to no-one DOGE.
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-funding-trump-musk-misinfor...
I work at a consulting firm, and, trust me, you want state employees doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary. Ideally, you just have enough people to administer the funds and then all work anyone cares about should be routed to private entities through a competitive process (market discipline for consultants is key here). My experience is that the people at the state are highly likable, but in terms of productivity are close to worthless or are a major obstacle to productive work. I work for a department of transportation where the leadership in the materials division does not actually know what density is or that it is measurable. I would expect someone with good grades in high school to understand this. Every single construction contract for highways has about a 15% overage on crushed rock. The weight to the material is determined by a “50% compaction factor“ and if you’re thinking “that sounds like a made up concept“ you would be correct. This has been happening for years and nobody is allowed to use the correct number because that would embarrass someone with a long tenure. The state Congress needs to liquidate the whole agency.
The consultants would actually cost more money overall, especially since they could be engaged longer than the average tenure of a full time engineer. But it wasn’t on the wage bill so it was fine.
In reality it was just really unfair to the full time engineers who, while they did get some benefits for being on board, did not get anything approaching equal compensation.
Even being outside IR35, which is the legislation that stops employees masquerading as contractors to lower their tax burden, they would fundamentally just be better-paid employees.
Of course, this is more on the individual level but even bringing in an agency… they could charge 1200 a day while the person on the job takes home about 400 of it if they’re lucky.
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 becoming less hostile to people with other values. And while there's a good chance I'm wrong, my generous assumption would be they are making a hostile environment for people who value process over outcome and making it less hostile to people who value outcome over process. (Replacing bureaucrats and risk-averse money wasters with problem solvers, innovators and cowboys)
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.
It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't been appropriately evolving, and now the US as a whole is between a rock and a hard place.
If I'm going to spend time thinking about these things (that I have virtually no control over), I would prefer to do it in a curious and mostly emotionally detached way.
The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not to remove the rails and aim directly for the cliff.
Unless you're an accelerationist. Accelerationists are people who view bad times as inevitable, and want them to come as quickly as possible so we can get through to the other side (where times are good again) as quickly as possible, instead of prolonging the collapse by doing it more slowly. Does that describe you?
If you are actually interested in what's going on, I think what they are talking about is a big important piece of the puzzle.
It's awfully convenient that "in economics you can say what's going to happen but not when." So you really don't know where the cliff is, how steep it is, what else is between us, etc etc. They even say at the end it's possible to outgrow the debt, but then just dismiss it.
I know you're trying to approach the whole thing in an abstract unemotional way and not defend Trump. But there is just no world in which what he's doing is somehow better in the long run... Well maybe being a pariah state solves the trade problem, but that's not "better" in my book.
The answer is for Congress to balance the budget and intelligently incentivize new industries. The fact that Congress has failed doesn't mean an incompetent strongman is the answer. The things he's doing to reorganize the executive and ship people to foreign gulags with no trial have nothing to do with improving the economy. And the legal argument he's using to claim tariff power is specious at best.
The structural reform we need in the US are things like: ranked choice voting, proportional representation, eliminate the electoral college and/or redraw state boundaries, and for the love of God get limitless corporate money out of politics.
I have also witnessed first hand how new terminology can have very different meanings to different people. Ask 100 product leaders to define what a "customer need" is and you will probably get dozens of different answers. Ask 100 CIOs to define what a "data mesh" is, and you will probably get dozens of different answers.
I think that when an environment is changing at an accelerating pace, its necessary for the organisms living in the environment to adapt at a similar pace in order to survive/thrive. I also believe that our environment is changing at an accelerating pace.
I suspect that you think I have reverse the metaphor because you have been paying more close attention to recent rage-baiting news, and I have spent a longer time paying closer attention to "boring" economic analysis. My model of the situation includes many historical examples of hyperinflation and what led to them, the consequences of Muammar Gaddafi dropping the petrodollar, the impact of citizens united on the military industrial complex, the exploding web of "NGOs" meddling in world affairs, how technology is an extremely deflationary force and how regulatory capture shifts economic benefits of new technology from the consumer to industry incumbents, how the Bretton-woods era started and ended, and how the neoliberal era started (and was ending regardless of political party), etc, etc.
Despite all this perspective I mentioned, I feel as though I know a tiny % of what is important to know in order to judge the situation accurately. The more I learn the more it seems like I don't know, and the more curious I get. Color me in the Dunning Kruger "valley of despair".
So no, I don't think the simplistic blanket decision making protocol you defined describes me.
Do you agree that these processes need to evolve over time?
And if so, what if they haven't been evolving as fast as the rest of the world and have fallen behind?
What is a leader to do, when many processes no longer are in anyone's best interest other than the people who maintain them and those have learned to exploit them?
The government doesn't seem like a machine to me, more like society's nervous system. It's a very scary idea that it has become so rigid and so outdated that a massive overhaul is necessary. It does seem like an opening for extremism (fascism, tyranny), which I'm sure we both fear. I just find it very hard to tell whether disrupting the system or letting it continue will lead to a better outcome for Americans.
This wouldn't be happening if everyone was happy with the status quo, if the US was in a golden era, but it wasn't. Many things clearly weren't working. Sometimes it's easier to tear something down and rebuild it than fix it (not always, but sometimes).
You may not put much stock in another billionaire's opinion, but personally I think he's been engaged with our system enough to have a good perspective on things.
That doesn't mean every government operations are 90% efficient, but I'd rather walk the side of slowness and bureaucracy than graft and corruption, let alone Trump's outright fascism.
And by the way, my father worked at a federal manufacturing plant so I've heard plenty of stories, good and bad.
I would doubt Gates's number because I have never been in a company that had 15% or less waste. e.g I don't think you could find a tech company out there that couldn't reduce its AWS bill by 15% without any service degradation, but it's just not a priority.
But the meaning of "waste" is highly subjective so some people wouldn't count that type of inefficiency as "waste". It may take a lot of resources to follow the process that the government mandates or use the ancient technology that it uses, and if the government efficiently follows the process with the existing tech, then it's not "wasteful." But I would call the process itself and the failure to upgrade the tech waste.
As for corruption vs bureaucratic inefficiency, why should I favor one over the other except by cost comparison? If the government pays $100 million to build a road that really costs $50 million because the contractor is owned by the governors cousin, that's a lot better for me than paying $200 million for the same road because the bureaucratic process to keep the governors cousin from unfairly getting the contract costs $150 million. And that's not even getting into the fact that the bureaucratic path also costs more in terms of time.
IMO the process is just as much graft as the nepotism. All those lawyers and consultants and government employees that consume the $150 million are just as much the recipients of ill gotten gains as the governor's cousin. I recognize that this can't be eliminated, so I simply would choose whichever one was cheaper. And in the US I think we are in a situation where the bureaucracy consumes much more than would be taken by corruption. China is quite corrupt and yet their government gets a lot more done for a lot less money, and in a lot less time than ours does.
If the governor's cousin cuts corners to save money, it puts lives at risk. Or the thing doesn't last as long and costs more money later. The cost difference is rarely just pure price gouging.
A cop planting evidence to make an expedient trial is also a form of cost cutting that I really don't want. But when people see corruption or legal corner cutting they will believe it's acceptable to do themselves. There is a broken windows or slippery slope situation.
Legible but inefficient systems can be corrected through sensible redesign. Corrupt systems are a cancer that spreads as good actors are pushed out.
I would be supportive of a DOGE style effort that actually looked carefully and critically at systems to rearchitect them. But accepting illegality will simply produce a low-trust society with many bigger problems.
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.
Reminds me the joke of how to become a millionaire that’s basically start with a billion and invest in xyz terrible idea. That’s basically twitter, a shell of its former revenue and status.
Instead they just cut everything uncritically, because the outcome they want is for nothing to work.
And the value they want in the remaining people is personal loyalty to Trump, not loyalty to the law or expertise in their job.
But too often, consultants are brought in to do work that existing staff could already handle or to maintain systems that should’ve been fixed years ago. It’s not always outright corruption, but it props up managers who rely on outside help to get by. And many of these consultants aren’t adding value — they’re just billing for work that could be automated or easily solved.
One example involved consultants paid to babysit an outdated system. It was generating massive reports, and instead of fixing the root issue, someone had to manually delete files every few hours. Thousands per week were spent when a simple script or hardware upgrade could have fixed it. It’s wasteful and completely unnecessary.
This isn’t rare. It’s everywhere. And while it’s not always illegal, it’s driven by self-interest, favoritism, and comfort. That’s where the real waste is, and that’s where the cuts should happen.
Consulting used to be about value. It was a profession grounded in skill, purpose, and a drive to contribute. Now, it’s often about milking the system. People leave the public service knowing they can return as consultants and get paid two or three times as much, just because of who they know.
We’ve replaced public service and merit with opportunism. Instead of building better systems and serving the country, we’re incentivizing people to exploit it. And the worst part is, it’s become normal. But it shouldn’t be. This is structural corruption — accepted, embedded, and everywhere.
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 from some else's work and charge public sector - tax payer handsomely.
You would think that such setup is ultimately corrupt.
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)
It's not about preventing companies from treating people like employees. In fact, post-IR35, it enabled exactly that - but with fewer rights. Now, individuals can still be engaged for long-term, full-time work, as long as they go through an umbrella company and give up both autonomy and the ability to run a business. The result is employment in all but name, with none of the legal protections, and often less pay due to umbrella fees and unreimbursed business costs.
You're also wrong to suggest that independents weren't competing with the likes of Accenture or Deloitte. In practice, they absolutely were - especially in the public sector. Individual consultants and small firms were frequently:
- Delivering the same work at lower cost and higher quality
- Auditing or overseeing work delivered by big firms
- Winning smaller-scale, high-trust engagements directly with departments that didn't need an army of suits and a 200-page PowerPoint.
This did threaten the margin-heavy model of large consultancies, and they did lobby for IR35 and the subsequent reforms to de-risk their position. What IR35 achieved was to push out small, agile operators by making them legally and commercially "difficult" to work with - not because they were "tax dodging", but because they lacked the compliance resources and political access to fight back.
Meanwhile, large firms were exempt from these concerns. They can place workers with clients indefinitely without IR35 scrutiny, because the worker is not the owner of the delivery company. That's the loophole. The exact same working pattern is treated as fine if the profit flows to Deloitte, and suspicious if it flows to a one-person or small, workers owned limited company.
This isn't about "6-month gigs needing umbrellas" - it's about eliminating small, independent service providers from public sector procurement pipelines. It's about monopolising access to taxpayer money. And calling that "ensuring proper employment classification" is naive at best, and disingenuous at worst.
IR35 didn't restore fairness. It restructured the market to favour large corporations and removed one of the few viable routes working professionals had to operate independently and build something of their own.
It's the only way of looking at it that makes sense. The enemies are in the gates and no one is fighting.
yet it happens.
The problem in any case is when the consultants/contractors/temp workers become entrenched.
It's really easy to do it - just put people who know less next to people who know more but are paid less. Then you can't keep your normal employees and have to keep hiring from outside.
It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.
Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing.
It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.
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 large enterprise. You haven't seen civil servant yet.
I cant remember which party it was but stopped the Pay Band usage and everyone is simply paid by the starting rate. UK civil servant has basically stopped most salary increase for a long time.
Because of that, instead of pay raise a lot of people got promoted which is basically everyone in every department has inflated grades. These promotion are also problematic, again, not based on merit. There are now more SCS1 than ever.
40% of work are irrelevant and made up by seniors to improve their chance of promotion. Another 50% of the work are getting around bureaucracy, only 10% of the work are actually useful.
And there is no way to fix it. Ministers dont want to fix it because they rely on cvil servant to get things done. Civil servant internally lack the interest to reform. And if anything the power of a department is measured by how many staff it has.
But none of these are new. We are now close to 50 years since Yes Minister first aired. And the documentary remains relevant, and everyone should watch it if they want to understand more. And as far as I can tell, this is not UK specific.
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.
It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.
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.
My original point was about achieving a balance to avoid hiring mercenaries. I think that is important in domains where ethics matter and ultimately leads to better long-term outcomes. When people defend the pay aspects being the best motivation, they are quietly telling us about their own (anti-social) value system.
One person once said the people at the NSA are much more like Marines than Silicon Valley types. They’re more interested in the mission than in getting rich. The fact that so many people look at a job as a money optimization problem says a lot about society.
This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive jobs. It's finding enough skilled people willing to accept the tradeoff.
Public schools haven't solved that problem. Healthcare hasn't seemed to solve that problem either. They're cautionary tales in that if you can't find enough people to accept the tradeoff, the remaining job openings are filled with significantly worse candidates because you pay below market rate.
I'm not sure the pay argument holds. For example, where I live, the average starting teacher salary is higher than the median overall salary. When you couple that with the fact they are on 4-day workweeks and get substantial time off (summers/holidays), the pro-rated pay is actually reasonably high for a starting salary. (Granted, I think it hits a ceiling relatively fast.) From talking to them, I suspect the driving force that make it hard to retain teachers is the lack of quality of life. I think it was Csikszentmihalyi who talks about the need for autonomy in one's career for it to be fulfilling, and the current system seems to limit that to an extreme. Just like u/lotsofpulp's comments about doctors, I think this means the job shifts much of the work from the purpose teachers chose the profession in the first place, and leads to burnout.
Yes, to an extent.
Looking at the costs of housing, especially in a market like DC, the motivation isn't "making lots of money" per se, but rather "maybe I can actually make enough to afford the mortgage on an 800k crapshack" and the acknowledgment that gov roles aren't likely to cover that.
People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay to avoid writing or saying all of that out).
You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and not expect a decent pay to quality of life at work ratio.
If you do not increase quality of life to make up for lower pay, you will end up with less driven or less capable people. Note that quality of life also includes security of income, which can reduce that type of stress.
If your stance is that the healthcare system needs improvement, I’d agree. If your point is that the best doctors are the people who have money as their top priority, I’d disagree. I’d extend the latter to say, we may not get a better healthcare system by just paying people more. Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system.
Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?
There are most likely decreasing returns on both ends of the scale.
>Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?
"A new system" is too nebulous, but step by step reform is the obvious way forward. From decreasing unnecessary requirements for new doctors (there must be a way to not have to completely sacrifice one's 20s and early 30s and still become a doctor), to tort reform that allows for sensible judgments, to increasing funding for residency and medical schools to allow for higher supply of doctors, etc.
Also, doctor pay (per hour or per patient) has been declining in real terms for many, many years now. Which is not bad in and of itself, but when you are simultaneously decreasing remuneration and quality of life at work, intelligent people will pick up on that signal to look elsewhere to sell their services.
A lot of US healthcare is performed by smart people from poorer countries who just want a chance for their kids to grow up in the USA. That the country relies on that arbitrage has always been ridiculous to me.
With all that said, it’s still a different argument than “pay = ability”. Put differently: the $ amount in TFA could be used to increase Congress member pay from $174k to $10MM each. Do you think that would result in better politicians?
Ignoring all the other non-salary pay they get, I'll buy that low pay can select for rich politicians because it means you can't rely on your Congressional salary to make ends meet. But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money. That is the presupposition that seems to frame your whole argument, and the one I have been pushing back on since the original comment. That sentiment undergirds the premise that pay is commensurate with ability. We can create systems that don't select for people with a primary motivation related to financial gain. $10MM salaries ain't it, though.
Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.
This just doesn't make sense in the context of what you've previously said. Based on your above post, you're saying low pay selects for corruption because they're in it for the money. But giving $10MM a year selects for people who are in it for the money, meaning you have the same problem. I fail to see how that selects for better people than are there currently if it gives the same incentives.
If you re-read my original comment, I advocate for a "reasonable" salary, but not one that selects for people who have money as their primary motivation. I think there's an argument that $174k/yr is not reasonable for Congress person. We could increase that (and there are proposals to do so*) while also having the guardrails in place that don't disproportionately select for people who care more about money than their constituents.
*I suspect there is more at play than just Congressional salary. E.g., the civil servant salary ceiling is pegged to Congressional pay, so there are second-order effects to consider.
Everyone has some motivation for money. So this introduces bias towards the corrupt at any level. That’s especially true for a pay level that really is not enough for the expenses the job requires.
You seem to be assuming that being in it for the money implies corruption. I don’t think that’s even remotely true. There are plenty of honest people who value high pay. As it currently stands, Congress attracts dishonest people who are in it for the money because there are plentiful opportunities to make money dishonestly in that job. It doesn’t attract honest people who are in it for the money, because the honest pay sucks. If you pay them really well then that second category will compete for positions. It won’t be corrupt people versus true believers, it’ll be corrupt people versus true believers and honest people who want a well paid job. This would be far better than what we have now.
With low pay, you’ll get true believers and people who are bad at their work.
With high pay, you’ll get true believers, people who are bad at their work, and people who are good at their work. You can fill more positions without taking the bad ones.
As for what this says about society, I think all it says is that money can be exchanged for goods and services. If I’m selling ~50% of my waking hours, you’d damn well better believe I’m going to try to get a good price for it.
1-A wealthy ruling class who can afford and feels entitled to be the government. See: the British Empire.
2-A wealthy ruling class who can afford to postpone profits while they accumulate power, to eventually trade that power for profit through grift. See: western democracy.
Pay people as well as possible for their work and ruthlessly go after theft, corruption and incompetence. That’s how you build a lastingly successful system. Shades of Singapore.
I don't think we can, yet, call Singapore a lastingly successful system, considering most of the time since its independence has been under a father or his son.
It’s just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to actually perform, and combined with environments such as WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking like a fairytale life paid for by other people.
This happens in the private sector as well, but tends to correct over time - hence big tech’s layoffs, especially of managers and nontechnical staff, after the excesses of 2021-2022.
I don’t think this is true of all state employees, but it seems to happen more with the educated professional class with more abstract work.
The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated most statistics like unemployment rate for the government. So lots of PII and therefore strict background checks.
All good except that they hired people before the checks were done. And the checks were slow so people were waiting months before getting access to systems.
That's pretty bad, but at the start at least we were in meetings. We couldn't do anything without system access but at least we could get up to speed on the project and provide general advice.
Someone somewhere got word of that and one day there were armed Federal agents outside the offices. No badge = no entry and thus ended our participation at all in the project.
But it did not end our getting paid. I was flying into DC costing $2kish in expenses per week and I think I was being billed out at nearly $8k a week (I got $2.5kish of that). If I tried to do any actual work for that money someone would have literally shot me.
That went on for months because the background checks took that long. There were dozens of us in that situation and several hundred thousand in government money was burned for literally no benefit.
I don't know exactly where that project ended up but it did not get used for the 2020 census.
Think about the teachers who buy classroom supplies out of their own meager paycheck because they want them for the lesson, and 'cost-cutting' means they don't have enough resources in the school.
Think of all the people at the CDC, or at NOAH, or similar.
In any large organization, and the Fed Government is > 2m employees, so it counts, you can easily find example of people who are driven and people who coast.
And actually, people are sacked in the fed if they don't make their numbers, or they are quietly sidelined.
Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated.
PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.
Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.
They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.
Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.
They don't have veto power over Congress, it's about allowing workers to dictate the terms they seem fair for themselves against the US government. If Congress and the executive branch can't agree with labor terms with workers at the table, that's bad.
Not having unionized federal workers is way way way worse.
One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?
> One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?
Not everyone fits into two political buckets. I am extremely anti for the reasons above as well as additional reasons particular to police unions. I also favor big tax hikes, banning guns, and higher spending on housing subsidy, snap, etc.
I just also think governments should be capable, student outcomes are important, the interest of voters are greater than that of govt employees, etc.
Presumably this also rules out any company or non-profit from negotiating a contract with the government, or suing the state.
both private companies and workers should not be allowed to band together to deny the government all contracts until they get the one they want.
In the same way that someone is allowed to not breath underwater.
A lot of people don't have the luxury of choosing.
Having an executive with contempt for the law and the concept of separation of powers and judicial review is a perversion of democracy.
The democratic rule of the people is driven by the law. What laws have the republicans passed authorizing these actions?
e: christ, why am I downvoted for earnestly asking a question
I agree it’s unreasonable that you’re being downvoted. I disagree strongly with your position, but you’re expressing it in a completely appropriate manner.
That makes it easy for people to leave the government.
The question you should be asking is: are there enough people who are sufficiently competent to take on the government roles?
Case study where the workers had less power than expected: Reagan vs. air traffic controllers.
Case studies where the government had less power than expected: Every coup ever, UK's Winter of Discontent (even if the long-term result was electorate going for Thatcher who gutted the unions), Polish Solidarity Movement.
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d...
Arbitrarily breaking contracts usually trigger clauses where you have to pay damages/penalties for doing that, so Accenture most likely isn't loosing any money here. All government contracts tend to have clauses like these, at least where I'm form.
Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that:
1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that bet on future innovation and 2. Grad students have very little power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better positioned to see new intersections emerge.
Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner that the expert can extract from simply by having them around
So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
I think that's the problem. They're not. I know some folks who went to consulting shops like this. They're invariably 2 types of people: people who got very high GPAs but cannot actually code a working program, and people who got pushed into the degree for various reasons but have zero passion. Note I'm not saying you need *passion* to be in this industry. But these people literally did not care if what they were doing was programming or washing dishes (beyond the pay delta and their parents (financier's) opinions).
And to some degree that's the point of these places. They take in the 40% of each CS class that can't fizzbuzz, put them through an internal bootcamp in their generic crud framework they fork every time they get a new customer, then unleash them on the world, either as "staff augmentation" or doing contract work.
I had a bunch of friends at uni who went into these roles, from a range of degrees.
They do not have that capacity, they know nothing about the real world, and they brought no insights.
And later in life, they will openly tell you that. That they knew nothing, we're a complete waste of everyone's time if involved in real work, but most often were being charged out at ridiculous figures to sit in a room and photocopy stuff that didn't need photocopying. Because that was chargeable.
This is generous. I have worked with these consultants. These aren't mom-and-pop startup consultancies. These guys charge extortionate rates and provide bottom-barrel talent. One agency, who will not be named, sweet talks you with product managers and then exports 90% of the technical labor overseas to the lowest bidder. You pay expert prices for this. Even their MBAs are tacit manipulators. I remember one project before we canned them - the PMs were constantly revising their "go to market strategy" conveniently around the time the contract would be up for negotiation.
> So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
Realistically, new-grads are willing to work 14x7 and shower and sleep in the office. That's why.
These consultancies are a malignant cancer on business and the health of their employees.
Nah
the secret sauce is "who you know"
it's a tale as old as time
No, fresh 22 year olds with bachelor degrees.
> effective institutional ecologies
More so, they act as liability sponges. Leadership can blame them for any problems, poor decisions etc.
Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).
1) Consultant is hired to solve a problem.
2) Consultant struggles to understand the nuances of the problem.
3) Consultant relies on government employees to hand-hold them through the solution, effectively subsidizing the consultant with free labor.
4) Consultant writes it up in a final report with their company logo on the title page and gets paid.
Maybe that's not necessarily bad if it eventually solves the problem, but it does seem pretty inefficient for the taxpayer.
Consultancies have never saved the government money.
US governments hire consultants because they have been obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about downstream effects.
The government is obligated to provide it's services, and that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job.
Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets. They pay well above market rates for the position too, which is insane.
E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.
Just increasing the salary band would do a lot to attract more talent, which is a good-not-perfect solution. Last time I checked going to work at a federal job would have cut my total compensation in half, but if it was just a 20% cut I would have looked deeper.
Also, the current pay-pool system is NOT effective bc MGT is NOT able and/or willing to fight for their employees who work to get a reasonable pay-bump and instead the game is always "can't pay my employees more than me or my MGT buddies".
The federal service culture insists on paying MGT positions more than technical higher-talent positions in over 80% of cases.
He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from people who are substantially lying about their experience and maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he wasn't from an approved source.
His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get herself hired as a consultant.
Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may have inaccuracies in this story.
I was able to work as an individual as a subcontractor for a subcontractor for a company on the list. Rates aren't as high, but with federal regulations (for now) mandating that subcontractors be paid as soon as the primary contract holder was paid meant that there was 0 chasing after invoices which is actually very nice.
Your friend could go through her firm then.
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 enough people that their bold move was a good thing and that the consequences will diffuse throughout the years on to other people.
This very well could become more expensive to cancel abruptly when you consider the second and third order effects.
That's the goal. The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it can complain about government inefficiencies.
What we are seeing is the end game of this idea - turn the government itself into an gigantic inefficient corporation designed to siphon as much money as possible from people.
In this specific situation, these expensive contractors will be replace with even more expensive "AI contractors" that work for companies founded by the Global Elite Tech Bros. So more money spent on on less outcomes. Destroying the system first ensures that there's no direct performance comparisons that can be made between the old expensive, but functional system and the new even more expensive, disfunctional one they created.
People say things like this, but then have trouble explaining California, where the left has had a supermajority for almost as long.
You can disagree with some services but that’s because the state does so much, for example I think there is too much wasted on the carceral and military side.
Also, I don't know if you can really credit the left's supermajority for the success of SV... CA's politics have pivoted over the years. Look at an election map of CA in 1980 and you'll see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia...
Destroying everything because you don't know how to fix it or work within the system is an amateur move. Weakness masquerading as tough guy strength.
I think this part is overestimated. It will get fixed.
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.
Computer problems are fixable, and they are secondary, and there are many people and services who can be hired to fix them.
> 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.
But that won't make the news in any meaningful way, and the destitute will often be too busy to make loud noises. And the populous at large will sigh and shake their head and say "what a shame", but the loss can be *enormous*.
I thought we were talking about firing IT consultants? Let me know when that happens.
> But that won't make the news
I think that would make the news immediately. The media is very interested in DOGE and its shortcomings.
I read this whole thread as being about the broader 'cutting' trend,
OOP: when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
Parent: Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences.
IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and funding for research institutions is doing great harm to progress in modern medicine.
Multiple things can be true at once.
The impulse to cheat is even exacerbated by thinner funding not fixed by it because you're pressed extremely hard to get results to justify the next grant, and your tenure board in 5 years, and there's basically no grant money for replication and no prestige at all.
Claudine Gay is still employed by Harvard. According to her Wikipedia page, she is the "Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University".
And she wasn't exposed by folks in academia, but by people outside that system.
A second topic which the Scientific Panel examined was Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s management and oversight of his scientific laboratories. Because multiple members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fallen short of accepted scientific practices, resulting in at least five publications in prominent journals now requiring retraction or correction, the culture of the labs in which this conduct occurred was considered. The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne created a laboratory culture with many positive attributes, but the unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices from different people, at different times, and in labs at different institutions, suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.There need to be checks against people in positions of great wealth, power, and influence because people cannot be trusted to self-regulate and Do the Right Thing when large sums of money are on the table. "Self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IaJwkqgPk
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-05/white-hou...
... 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).
The whole academic pipeline is actually quite delicate if we're talking massive disruptions, the current funding shake up is threatening to screw a whole class of graduates because PIs and Universities don't know if they'll be able to pay new graduate students so many are massively cutting back the number of admissions they're taking or skipping a year entirely. That has a knock on effect of screwing up new professors who're still setting up their labs because they can't get research started quickly to get new grants which can screw up their entire careers too. All that to find replace the word diversity or because a few high placed people faked some data?
China has been building nuclear successfully and worked out the kinks. The US basically paused all production and was trying to start over. You can't seriously blame it all on bureaucracy, when a lot of what was lost is institutional knowledge. Kind of like how your "burn it all down" approach would work for academia.
Despite how things could be structured better, in medicine and science we are making progress. Maybe we could do better, but I certainly think we could be doing much worse.
Maybe start with the part where you say "science and medicine are stagnant", therefore "we should burn it all down and start over". This is how misinterpretations and assumptions start and does not benefit mutual intellectual understanding.
This approach has an abysmal track record historically and I expect history will repeat itself here. Burning complex systems down is many orders of magnitude easier than building them up, and much less fun for the people who like burning things down. So the predictable effect is that blunt wide-scale destruction almost always makes things worse.
Yes Academia and government could be vastly more efficient. Almost everyone agrees on that and a lot of work has been put into improving things. But doing that in a way that's net good requires patience and competence, traits the current people running the government openly disdain.
You're going to need more that 2 examples (one of which has nothing to do with NIH) to substantiate this claim.
Have you been to the doctor recently? One of your loved ones?
See if you can find something important to your family in this chart: https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-spending#/
Take a look at what was funded recently.
Putting aside how you or your family has personally benefited from items on the list, please point out the "fake, useless research".
Of course, burning these institutions down and running them like businesses will work well. After all, we all know fraud doesn't happen in business, and if it did, the market would soon sort that out, right?
Yes, they would have resulted in disciplinary action for undergrads.
My professor friends are struggling to have meaningful discipline for entire essays copied from ChatGPT.
Can you please copy the ones you find most egregious here and point to similar examples leading to the outcomes you describe in other environments?
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.
I have enough friends who work in University systems and government roles (both similarly heavy in red tape) to know that many of these institutions would also spend an order of magnitude doing it in house.
It’s misleading to compare to an idealistic efficient organization with no red tape, because government jobs are very heavy on red tape. That’s where most of the inefficiency gets spent, whether it’s done in house or by consultants.
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...
If I had to break down how consulting contracts are actually priced, it'd be:
- 50% work
- 35% requirement ambiguity
- 15% customer management overheadBut I’m loath to defend the big firms. Generally, quality plus the ever push for expanding scope leaves a sensation of waste. The solution is just going to need more than simply tossing them out.
The general rule that employees good, contractors bad still holds. Even though people seem obsessed with the belief that firing public employees and replacing them with private contractors will make the government more “efficient”.
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.
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 all levels and on all places.
Would it be worth the extra hurdles required to actually catch that waste/fraud though? My bet is on probably not, it's like the many many attempts to drug test welfare recipients, they all wind up costing far more than they save because the actual rate is pretty low so catching those is far more expensive than what you save.
of course, if Trump is doing this all so he can pass his tax cuts as seems almost certain, he is no better. but frankly yes, the US needs deep cuts and concordant tax receipts increases to maintain a sustainable debt trajectory and price stability/productivity for the middle/working class.
The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies in the end too.
I agree that the problem with debt is not that there are foreign holders of US treasuries. But higher debt crowds out private investment & borrowing in the repo markets, which harms productivity, makes goods more expensive, hurts aggregate supply in the long run, and makes the poor even poorer.
It also means that the US has to pay increasingly high amounts of money on interest financing and the Fed has far less room to effectively maneuver to combat inflation and ensure sustainable employment levels, as we've been seeing in the last few years. Debt is absolutely not an imaginary number and anyone who is telling you that perhaps doesn't understand the economic weight.
The marginal dollar of US govt spending is generally not more welfare enhancing than the alternative of not having that debt, not crowding out private investment, etc. - particularly when we are in expansionary times (as we have up until very recently). With our current debt trajectory, we should be raising non-distortionary taxes and aggressively limiting spending that is not obviously growth enhancing or with strong social justice justification. We are starting to see real structural problems already emerging from our current debt trajectory.
I worry that we’re not that good at measuring these things. And I suspect the measurement of waste is often considered waste.
For me, I wouldn't have objected to Musk / DOGE going in and actually doing an audit of everything to look for waste, fraud and abuse. And if actual waste, fraud and abuse are found, where evidence and details are provided, I'd personally celebrate that.
It turns out that there is generally waste in all operations; it doesn't follow that all operations should be terminated.
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,
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.
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.
The discussion is moot however because the agencies aren't being gutted over concerns of efficiency, but because of an ideological commitment to free market shock therapy. It's like arguing if you should order the fish or chicken while the Titanic is sinking. Sure there's an argument to be had, it's just not relevant right now.
And we would like to see a measured approach to reducing waste, with some findings released to the people about what the plan is going forward and why the cuts make sense, rather than "just fire every probational employee" or "just 50% slash the SEC" or whatever else they are doing currently.
This is a subset - the one the media choose to highlight and that’s occupying your mindshare.
EDIT: Also, should anyone with a criminal background be in charge of what they're currently doing? I'd say no. That's just me
You could get an oncologist to admit that the patient had some cells that needed to be removed, due to the advanced cancer. But the layman chose to get rid of a couple of perfectly healthy, cancer-free limbs.
Coined by author Michael Crichton:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
I find skimming NYT’s and FOX’s headlines are perfectly satisfactory. If anything peaks my interest I do independent analysis, putting weight on primary sources. I often try to listen in on experts discussing the matter among themselves.
It’s small potatoes for time, most people spend way more on television and social media.
The actual “news” stopped being productive to read, watch, or listen to when the term “pregnant chads” was coined. Been downhill ever since.
I’m open to proposals about what to do about social security because it MUST change.
How about instead we have a forced savings account that you cannot withdraw from. And the government has some matching component.
Senior centers also seem to be a low cost community investment.
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.
> 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
Oh wow, we can't raise taxes on the rich? only significantly the middle class? Why not the rich?
"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??
I think you struggle with civil discourse and doubt this conversation will be productive, so have a nice day.
Your current fiscal situation is only right-wing talking points.
https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/taxes-and-mandatory-...
They also vary widely in their comments on what they agree with. Even if you think I’m uncharitably reading your words, you’re entirely misreading the poll and the site you posted. You’re putting your words in their mouths.
“Long run fiscal sustainability in the US will require some combination of cuts in currently promised Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits and/or tax increases that include higher taxes on households with incomes below $250,000.”
This poll question is biased and doesn’t include anything about whether taxes on those above $250k need to be increased. You’re, again, misreading the question that asked and adding in your own words about wealthy tax. There is nothing in that question that allows you to posit these polled economists don’t believe “that we can reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes on the wealthy.”
You keep saying this - it’s a form of ad hominem.
Also last I checked the Trump administration is not exactly full of free market healthcare advocates. You may be remembering Paul Ryan from 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." - President Eisenhower
Military Spending and Tax Cuts for the wealthy have some of the lowest economic multipliers of all government activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)
* Education spending: 2.4 (Federal Reserve research) Source: Federal Reserve
* Medicaid/healthcare: 2.0 Source: Congressional Budget Office Cbpp
* Food stamps (SNAP): 1.73-1.74 Sources: Mark Zandi/Moody's Analytics, Americanprogress, Manhattan Institute
* Unemployment insurance: 1.61-2.1 Sources: Blinder & Zandi; Urban Institute, Americanprogress
* Infrastructure spending: 1.0-2.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress
* Military spending: 1.5 (average) Source: Federal Reserve
* Middle-class tax cuts: 0.6-1.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress
* Upper-income tax cuts: 0.2-0.6 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Americanprogress
* Permanent extension of all Bush-era tax cuts: 0.35 Source: Moody's Analytics model, Cbpp
Dollar-for-dollar, social program spending consistently produces higher economic returns than military spending or tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy.
$1 billion spent on education or transit creates more than twice as many jobs (17,687-19,795) as the same amount spent on defense (8,555). -Cigionline
In fact, military spending can actually slow economic growth over time; a 1% military spending increase can reduce economic growth by 9% over 20 years.
Zandi's analysis of 2010 tax legislation found that 90% of economic growth and job creation came from unemployment insurance extensions and targeted tax credits, while high-end tax cuts had "only very small economic impacts." - Cbpp
Jack Ma was completely correct: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-...
I am saying that support for Ukraine is pretty different from the kinds of behaviors that make people say "the USA shouldn't be the world police!"
Then why are you arguing with me? I was pointing out the contradiction of people who do that. I feel like you think I'm saying the US shouldn't support Ukraine. I'm all on board with the US supporting Ukraine. I'm saying the US needs a powerful military if you want it to support Ukraine, which is at odds with people who are fully behind the quotes that come from Butler and Eisenhower's farewell address.
> I am saying that support for Ukraine is pretty different from the kinds of behaviors that make people say "the USA shouldn't be the world police!"
And yet, to even consider helping Ukraine in any meaningful way, the US needs an extremely strong, modern military.
The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house.
... which means more work in-house.
... done by the same teams they just cut the size of.
Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work itself well.
Eventual costs, well that's not really a concern and neither is national defense.
You'd have to be a GS-14 [0] to be north of $150k base salary.
That's tech team manager / senior manager, with a post-graduate degree, and 7+ years of experience in the field.
[0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
> and the working conditions are usually great
Really? Because private sector seems a lot more stable these days.
There’s a lot of things that are supposed to take an act of Congress to change.
Had. Not have.
But yes, the federal package is good, but not fantastic. It's on par with what a typical company provides. Salary is decent, too. Not FAANG, but not below industry average. More or less, just like a typical industry job.
State/city jobs tend to have much better benefit packages, but lower pay (often a lot lower). They also tend to be relatively chill workwise.
This feels like something that needed past tense.
Some rich asshole I don't know blasting out weekly check-in demands to the org-wide list doesn't sound very chill.
Context? The comment was about city/state jobs, not federal.
https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desan...
Govt gives benefits and job security, at least till the next opportunity rises.
I'd much rather have a "vibe" generated codebase as a deliverable over what these body shops churn out.
Speaking from experience with both.
Where are you getting that this is "actual" waste, because you read some mean things about consultants? Go easy on the kool aid.
And that's assuming the cuts don't have any fiscally counterproductive knock-on effects. Which they certainly will.
Their president also publicly stated water is not a human right, implying we should let people die if they can’t purchase water from capitalists.
Monsanto will sue you after their “patented” seeds float onto your field and germinate, basically leaving you no options besides using their seed after their local lobbying manipulated the courts to their side.
I’m sure there’s more and worse hidden away.
> $5.3 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts (the combination of $3.8 trillion of tax cuts assumed to be “costless” under a current policy baseline plus $1.5 trillion in additional deficits permitted), deficit increases of $521 billion on defense and immigration spending, a minimum of $4 billion in spending cuts, and an increase in the debt limit of up to $5 trillion.
So savings plus new borrowing will be funded to tax cuts, which will likely prioritize those already on higher incomes, and corporations.
Or you can keep living in a Disney reality where uncle Scrooges are the norm and not the exception.
I'd rather believe wanting power for power's sake than this cartoon idea of an old duck diving into a pool of well-polished coins.
Truth is that beyond a few truly neurotic exceptions, the obscenely rich do use their money. Just not all in supercars and yachts, but also to influence what they can.
When's the last time you heard a billionaire say, "I've got enough money I don't need to get any more" before they're very old and looking to burnish their image with charity work?! If they were the kind of person to be ok with more money than they could spend in 10 lifetimes they wouldn't be billionaires in the first place, at least not multibillionaires.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/03/13/elon-mu...
I don't know, I really don't know. To this day I can't imagine the day I become a president of a big country I tell my citizens "BUY MY COINS AND THOSE OF MY WIFE!". It's difficult to imagine on so many levels. But yet this guy is doing it. So no conspiracy theory is too weird to at this point.
https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal...
> Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
Further examples: https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-grok-ai-is-turning-agai...
> For instance, if you ask Grok: “Who is the biggest spreader of misinformation on X?” it replies that “Based on available reports and analyses, Elon Musk is frequently identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X."
AI goggles telling you who to kill is bad.
If they wind up implememented anyways, the program being cut very short via friendly-fire against the direct perpetrator of its implementation seems like the best bad-case scenario.
Like when Taliban bomb makers accidentally blow themselves up.
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
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.
It would simply take a government capable of recognizing the multifold benefits of EV transition: environmental, geopolitical oil independence, energy efficiency, associated alt energy rollout and grid adaptation, lower total costs and associated economic benefits, reduced cancer and air pollution death rates, reduced logistics costs.
That's just off the top of my head and I'm not even that smart
If you ignore the 1/5 (not exactly sure, but somewhere in that ballpark) labor cost, sure. And that's one example.
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.
Or any of hundreds of other national space programs and companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to pay 10X the US Govt's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's current position of utter global dominance.
Because even despite many of the companies failing, the govt made a profit on TARP.
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e... | https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonp...
https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-t...
“Who is John Galt?” /s He is Schrödinger's Entrepreneur: a self made man when the ego and cult calls for it, but a scrappy startup founder just trying to save the world and get to Mars when desperate for government or Capital market support and intervention.
How are you going to use that against a company that nevada agreed to give them X amount of tax incentives over a year if they build a giga factory there?
Using that as a justification that "tesla only lives because of tax payer money" is ridiculous.
Also, poking around the SpaceX data just seems entirely false too. The biggest 'loan' of $98M to spaceX for "Missle technology development". And when you follow the authorizations it was just a firm fixed price contract.
"but his ventures would not have survived without the government support he’s received."
Including firm fixed price contracts the company has won from the government for providing essential services is not a good argument. SpaceX's main customer is governments... thats how rocket companies work.
Comparing Tesla’s support to other industries reveals a double standard. The fossil fuel industry has received trillions in subsidies globally over decades (e.g., IMF estimates $5.9T in 2020 alone for fossil fuel subsidies). General Motors and Chrysler received $80B in bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis.
consumer tax credits benefit buyers, not Tesla directly, though they boost demand. Subsidies for infrastructure like Gigafactories are standard for large-scale industrial projects and not unique to Tesla.
It seems i can't be the one to talk you out of your mental model of hating elon.
> The premium you pay a non SpaceX launch provider is so that the rug isn’t pulled on you. Cheaper is not always better.
Again, when one of them manages to land an orbital class rocket, call me. Competition would be great.
https://electrek.co/2025/04/10/cracks-are-forming-in-elon-mu...
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-how-elon-musk-is-spreading-...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.
The more mundane problem is things like "drive that truck over there… drive another one back" often result in the exact location of an asset being unclear fairly frequently.
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.
We sure could.
Will we?
Or given to billionaires
I bet the median skill of a Deloitte consultant is higher than that of the average government office worker.
It’s not about who bends and who doesn’t. They all will. Even Tim Cook who famously wears his politics on his sleeve has completely bent the knee to Trump.
Money talks.
Van der Leyen was famous for squandering german defense budget to mc kinsey and co - who poached heads from the german rearmament office. National Defense related industries should be in general forbidden to hire consultants.
There are exceptions but few.
The skill balance (actual, tangible IT/software skill) was heavily in favor of the "younger" (as above).
Most of the managers/those in supervisory roles were busy "showing impact" and "aligning cross-functional teams".
Just ask them.
Where do people get these crazy ideas about government employees? There are some wonderful people in public service, but it's not some Wonkaland of saints who toil just to help others and do the right thing.
sorta like dining in a michelin restaraunt and deciding that cafeteria workers are really good at cooking
Deloitte consultants have a much wider variance. They too are capped on how much they can be paid, but they do not get the benefits of government service (e.g. pensions.) They are shuffled from subcontractor to subcontractor and the project managers are more obsessed with extracting more money from the department than finishing the project. The incentives are so misaligned as to be comical.
"higher bar to entry" -> true civil service style testing for jobs is basically illegal in the feds and they have to give massive preferences to various interest groups.
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.
Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land, sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in government spending that's needed to pay for those higher salaries.
It's classic cognitive dissonance in full effect leading to a tragedy of the commons. It goes to show that tech folks are no different from regular (DEI, MAGA, other) people.
The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They should be used as little as possible.
USAID is a corrupt wasteful sinkhole, good riddance to it.
Running Twitter bots can't compete with the deep reach and influence that was built up there over many decades.
You should always measure the impact of the things you do and the money you spend, you should never just say "we're trying to do this and so the money should always flow". If you and trying to feed children you should be able to estimate the number of meals you provide and if that number is too low you should stop getting money.
I'm not commenting on USAID cuts in particular here, but your comment struck me as being rather strange.
> USAid
Incorrect. It stood for US Agency for International Development. There was some aid in there, but they also did things like international propaganda.
Have you ever tried to figure out where did these money go? People like you keep parroting "feeding children", but when I read actual list of orgs funded by USAID, it's all nice words and stock pictures with very little actual data.
Yes, I look for metrics like for that N million dollars M thousand kids were fed. Without that it looks like corrupt sink hole, that it actually is.
Learn empathy, send me $100 monthly, I promise to spend them for good.
"This latest announcement follows a March 20 declaration from Hegseth, where he detailed $580 million in cuts to various programmes, contracts, and grants. The overall reduction now amounts to nearly $6 billion as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, which aims to streamline Pentagon expenditures and focus resources on warfighting capabilities."
>> The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration to implement Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies. [0]
[0] https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-it-serv...
or: > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/doge-p...
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.
IMHO firing Accenture is probably a good move in this case. I bet they were extracting money at every opportunity just so the gov't could nominally avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
I think Deloitte makes about half of their US revenue from various consulting projects.
> The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth said in the memo released late on Thursday.
I obviously don't know the details of these specific contracts, but the general sentiment that qualified federal employees can do better than overpriced private contractors is something I agree with, at least in broad brushstrokes.
But, that said, this would appear to be in direct opposition to DOGE and the Project 2025 playbook - here is a recent article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-pr....
This is why I hate what DOGE is doing. I could definitely get behind a coherent effort to streamline the federal government and save money - BTW, this was done rather successfully by Clinton and Gore in the 90s, who eliminated a huge portion of the federal workforce, they just didn't go on stage with chainsaws to promote it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv.... But now it's just "throwing bombs", and the overt corruption of the administration leaves me little faith that government will actually become more efficient with this current kakistocracy.
For example: if a bureaucrat does not use up their budget, it is (often) reduced proportionately in the next iteration. So these people have an incentive to use up the entire budget, if they want to have any hope of getting their requests next year. As a result, they will often do wasteful spending. I know this from experience, because in my previous life as code monkey in a small-ish government contractor, my boss had made it an art form to figure out who had extra money left over near the end of the fiscal year and pitch them ideas. A few 100K here, a few 100K there and the company was making decent money just mooching off of the leftovers from Federal budgets.
If you want to fix the Federal government, you have to incentivize the officials to be rewarded for saving money.
The '25 budget has not yet been approved, but the request is $8 billion more last year, not $100 billion.
People are reacting to https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04...
This would be for the 2026 budget.
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.
That's like asking what an ocean is but preferably in more detail than just water.
But to answer the question, we really can't give more detail. Congress passes a budget and delegates out to subcommittees to figure out how to spend the money (not revenue) that they were allotted.
So a subcommittee has been authorized to find 4.5T of tax cuts over the next ten years and we won't know what they are until a later date.
There's a whole report you can read here: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy202...
But as a summary, you can probably look at Table 1. The values given are over 10 years, so divide every by 10 to get a sense of per year. As written it looks like:
* Overall decrease 170 billion per year in spending (overall Federal spending is about 7 trillion per year). There are cuts across the board except in DoD, DHS, and DoJ.
* Tax cuts decreasing revenue by ~450 billion per year. There is a section in the report identifying all of the different tax cuts. This decrease in tax revenue includes the effect of locking in Trump's first term tax cuts which are currently set to expire.
The GOP only cares about it when the POTUS is a Democrat.
The marketing BS on their websites say alot of generic, motivational crack.
Could someone help me break down the real bread & butter of these firms and why people give them money?
Actually, the friction of hiring and placing made it relatively hard to let contractors go other than through downsizing. People showed up drunk or stoned, and hung on for a month or two.
I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly.
Accenture and Deloitte pay a lot of money to lobbyists for these Pentagon contracts. After the dust has settled, they'll still get juicy contracts. We will all forget that any of this happened.
Excellent point.
Single, no child, no subsidized savings...around $1,000.
1 Child...negative several thousands dollars.
That's assuming all income is being reported.
Here's another valid perspective: the Federal money that went to subsidize the Law student's degree... it could have gone to infrastructure in a way that could have materially improved the waitress's life. Or it could have increased her child credit. Or it could have been used to incentivize her (in various ways) to seek an educational or skills upgrade.
Who would need to be on board with changes in the Pentagon to strip away protections there? I'd assume it's quite a bit more insular than other parts of the federal government.
However, I suspect that in this case, the contracts were overpriced and faced an endless series of delays and extensions.
Of course, the next set of contracts will probably have the same issue. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
That being said, I think these specific cuts have a real possibility of being genuine. I believe this because:
* They actually do align with long-term thinking. In general, the DoD (and the federal government... and really all North American government as a whole) has been on a multi-decade slide of out sourcing more and more capabilities to consultancies. This HAS made us all worse at governing. Hegseth (for better and worse) has the cover to make this type of cut while riding out whatever bumps might come out of this.
* Hegseth also needs to create cover. He's probably about to get a giant budget increase (~900billion to an even trillion). Actions like this allow him to backup his claim that yes - America is spending more on defense, but we're doing so better.
That said, who knows how this specific case will end up.
Trump, Hegseth reveal whopping figure they want for the next Pentagon budget $1T budget would be a 12% boost over current levels
I understand the sentiment that quality of consultants ia very low.
Although I think neither that or waste is the reason for termination.
The US government has been moving to privatized contractors in most of it's work for some time, across many administrations and both parties.
Based on what I know of Trump, I'd have expected that to continue. Maybe it is everywhere except for special treatment for DoD? Or maybe this is just a fake and it won't be this way for DoD either. I don't have much idea what is going on.
I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field to login.
That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run by medicore people at this point
Remind me their valuation again to produce a junk product and ride on the coattails of an otherwise simple and reliable website that they’d rather not exist again?
Ideally, there would be a Digital Services government department, staffed with properly compensated people (to attract good quality talent) that the other government agencies would "contract" to build their services, rather than paying through the nose to Deloitte (who then offshores most of the work anyway). Then maintaining the services could be done by the contracting gov agency once completed (with support from DSA).
Oh wait, we had a Digital Services, the USDS, and they built some pretty good stuff too. Could have been a model for other work. Except that they just got gutted and taken over by DOGE goons. Wonderful.
But hey, I suppose sometimes we just deem projects too big and messy to comprehend, so we just toss it all and start over. It rarely turns out as nice or easy as we thought it would be.