This right here tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money. Which companies pay the most in lobbying/trips and Venn diagram that with those who got cut and you won't find much overlap. I'm not sure why reporters aren't tapping into these stories that write themselves. Also Thiel is in tight with this administration
A correlary to the Gelman effect, with govt spending , it all sounds important and reasonably priced unless the spending is in your circle of expertise
Well... unless it's for temporary projects, government should just create the capacity in-house. Having to bring in consulting for everything because there is no know-how left is pointless.
Is there a reciprocal Gelman where ignorant outsiders assume things are unreasonable and wasteful but anyone with expertise knows better? (Examples come to mind of Sarah Palin ridiculing fruit fly genetics work or DOGE’s press conferences about children receiving social security when they were just receiving survivors benefits)
It's hard to track, because it's all nice websites with generic messages like "we make life better" and pictures with obligatory diversity faces. E.g. $4.5 billion here chemonics.com. Or $3 billion here devalt.org. Where did these money go? How can we measure the ROI?
USAID is a corrupt wasteful sinkhole, good riddance to it.
USAID looking for an ROI???? THat's NOT the purpose of aiding other countries. You don't need to look for a return on an investment. USAid was feeding children in places. You're looking for an ROI on saving human lives. Learn empathy.
Empathy seems to be in rare supply these days. I've made the mistake of talking to these people about the human collateral of these decisions and it's waved off like I'm bringing up an unpleasant experience in a checkout line.
It's surprising to me that not more of them object to Radio Liberty and its siblings getting ratfucked, since those channels are both rather cheap and obviously in the interest of whatever regime has the White House.
Running Twitter bots can't compete with the deep reach and influence that was built up there over many decades.
Isn't saving lives and feeding children ROI? I think the parent comment was stating that these things were not measured and therefore the ROI should absolutely be known.
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.
Oh interesting, look it's our empathy beacon right here.
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.
That was DOGE's job to tell us why and what, and they did none of that. Why is cutting millions to starving people in 3rd world countries a good thing? Why is cutting AIDs funding for similar situations a good thing? save millions now, pay billions later as these situations destabilize and make new terrorists and wars.
How many of these "millions" that are cut, is actual food for starving people in 3rd world? If it's that good, how much did they closer neighbors contribute?
Is this like in Eastern Europe/Balkans, like when someone new comes to power they terminate the contracts(aka the grifts) signed by the previous regime, so they can give them to their own friends instead, then rinse and repeat at the next election cycle?
I mean, there's certainly some of that happening right now (and has probably always happened to some degree even in America).
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.
"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]
I doubt of DOGE had anything to do with this, these companies simply weren't paying enough kickbacks in the form of lobbying and gifts to not earn the ire of Trump and his sycophants
On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.
Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers
AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.
"September 10th, 2001 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to the American public that Pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk
They use auditors with clearance. I'd imagine certain programs require very specific auditors to supervise them, like how the FISA court works with specific vetted lawyers at times.
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.
Those subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on those contracts.
This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government.
Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.
> Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or ArianeSpace ...
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.
“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.
Most of those subs linked are from direct negotations from the state, and they are in the form of tax incentives, not cash in account.
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.
I am not here to talk you out of your mental model around the cult of Elon. His companies have received almost $40B in various forms of government support, those are the facts. He is a skilled operator, able to whip teams of engineers to success and distort reality persuasively to customers and investors alike, but his ventures would not have survived without the government support he’s received.
Phone me when someone else lands an orbital class rocket or offers a cheaper ton to LEO. Until then you're complaining about the lowest bidder. And you're going to have a hard time convincing me that the lowest bidder is doing anything but saving their customers money on a service they were already intent on purchasing, and had previously been spending 2x - 10x for: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/753q6s/economic_comp...
I don’t have to convince you. The only people who matter are government decisionmakers who are unwilling to be held hostage by him. It doesn’t matter how good you are if you can’t be trusted. The premium you pay a non SpaceX launch provider is so that the rug isn’t pulled on you. Do you want to go to space when you want? Or only when he says you can? Cheaper is not always better.
Friend, when your argument evaporates in the presence of the financial numbers and you revert to character assassination, you might be identifying yourself among the untrustworthy. Bad faith arguments really undermine any trust I could build for you through this media.
> 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.
He assassinated his own character, my statements are simply observations of how he did it and what’s left of it. My apologies we see character and who you can trust differently.
Let's not forget he SUED to get SpaceX contracts from the big defense contractors. The GAO was the one who upheld the protest due to the vast price disperities.
"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.
If an interest free loan at a time when Tesla couldn’t get a bank to loan them breakfast is not a subsidy then you also agree that none of the banks received any sort of government support either right?
Because even despite many of the companies failing, the govt made a profit on TARP.
I expect the next administration will switch SpaceX to cost-plus. Musk may be banking on reaping huge profit margins on those fixed price deals. Well that ain't gonna happen. Elections have consequences.
I'm not a huge fan of Elmo but Telsa get's subsidies that all car manufacturers are eligible for. The fact that those manufacturers have to purchase credits from Tesla is their decision. If they can't delivery a quality ZEV the public wants to buy they have no one else to blame.
It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.
In Tesla because of the brilliant behavior of its precious CEO, will likely be specifically targeted for exclusion from subsidies in the EU, and inevitably at home when this administration passes by
> It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.
This is a bad take. Nobody can compete with BYD. This isn't a Tesla vs BYD issue, this is a Everyone vs Cheap labor and deregulation issue.
Byd is a product of CCP subsidies, of course they can be competed with
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
Why does this matter? Government either gives loans and demands they are paid back, or pays for deliverables. If you have to keep your fingers in the books to feel good about what's happening, it was a badly structured contract.
Because it's my money and I want to know how it's being spent, whether it's the government or a private company spending it. I had no choice in where that money went, so I need transparency on how it's being spent.
That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.
They're not, they're saying that GP imagines genuine waste-saving will happen, when in fact it's more likely to be fabricated "waste" conjured up by Elmo and his army of teenagers.
Nestle deliberately poisoned baby formula with fake protein to fool third world countries testing it. Malnourishing infants and causing deaths on what shouldn’t have to be a regulated industry in a sane world.
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 don't totally trust this DOGE crew and think we should keep a hawks eye on them but the whole "they are cutting waste so they can funnel the money to themselves!" conspiracy theories making the rounds are pretty bizarre... And to what end, aren't many of these people already extremely wealthy? I sure hope I'm wrong.
> $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.
If you have to explain your conspiracy theory with "the majority of these people suffers from the same special kind of neuroticism", I suggest you get back to your whiteboard.
Or you can keep living in a Disney reality where uncle Scrooges are the norm and not the exception.
I think you might be misunderstanding op's comment. "Because the amoral drive for extreme wealth doesn't stop at a certain level of wealth" is a statement that I read on its face. One does not need to reach for "conspiracy" as a way to explain the behavior of people faced with an opportunity to acquire more money: just look at the 5-6 posts making the same point in this very sub-thread. Did you miss those or did you mean to post this reply somewhere else? Money is a huge motivator for many people.
Nothing misunderstood here. Only someone seriously naïve or disingenuous would arrive at the conclusion that money is the main drive of such people who have already so much that they don't know what to do with it. Especially without proofs, as a "this can only be it!" position.
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.
> And to what end, aren't many of these people already extremely wealthy?
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.
> And to what end, aren't many of these people already extremely wealthy?
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.
Won't even have to wait that long. Elon will be stepping down at the end of his special employee tenure in a month or two in which he expects to save $1T.
How would you know it is actual waste? This government has a track record of cutting things regardless of their importance, so you can't rely on the fact they did it alone, so what is your source?
We don't know if they're actually cutting waste here. DOGE has already had to do a massive climb-down from saving $1000B to saving $105B, but most of that $105B has not been shown to be true. Actual cuts may only amount to a few billion.
Do we even have a way of estimating the billions it will cost to resecuritize our infrastructure? What about the cost in lost soft power? The total knock on effect in loss to the economy for not subsidizing basic research, that led to the U.S. being a major power in medicine & pharma? This is the very definition of penny-wise–pound-foolish.
Pay isn’t everything. Government civilian GS employees have an extremely generous benefits package and usually excellent job security. Contractors frequently take pay cuts to work directly as a government employee for these reasons.
That ship has sailed now, though. The benefits and job security can no longer be counted on. Government is gonna have to compete more on salary, or accept worse candidates.
A silver lining in all this upheaval is the reduction of price obfuscation (hopefully) by getting rid of deferred compensation schemes that make it difficult for labor sellers to evaluate the market.
I said usually for job security because I am familiar with the current administration’s actions, and the benefits have not been touched and would take an act of Congress to change. Trust me, there are still lots of talented individuals who are eager to join the government workforce, even now.
For poverty wages? In my city government workers with families almost universally qualify for subsidized housing. People in my experience get half my salary, and then half of that goes to housing. Maybe some C tier talent goes to government but not without wfh, pension or other benefits.
Federal IT workers are hardly working for poverty wages. In addition to their base salaries, they receive additional locality pay, generous benefits like paid time off, retirement benefits, inexpensive health insurance and life insurance, training and advancement opportunities, and the opportunity to receive monetary and time off awards. It’s not FAANG salaries, but they are very well compensated and the working conditions are usually great.
Yeah, I was referring to the job security aspect, given all the layoffs.
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.
Doubt it, many mid/low tier industries still struggle to hire because they pay engineering salaries not tech money. Government salaries are easily 30-50% lower
I was on a 6-month project with some body shop consultants. We were a small, boutique consultancy that outsourced work to a much larger body shop. They barely did any work, and what little work they did was some of the worst quality stuff I've seen in my life. They told us they had completed "phase 1" of a project. It didn't work at all. And we still paid them.
Oh, it's fine. They can hire help from Russia to secure our infrastructure for a very low price. With the tariffs it doesn't really make sense for China to bid, or they'd be paying US!
Eventual costs, well that's not really a concern and neither is national defense.
> 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.
I thought that was pretty clear; I mean that Grok's "unbiased" training seems to align it with anti-Musk positions pretty regularly. As such, I'm not super fearful of it being picked to run the US government right now.
> 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."
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.
With this administration is about destruction of all government spending in order to maximize tax cuts for the top 1% who pay for access to The Hill, it really is about that, and not about efficiency. Also please point me at all the "fraud" they've found and yet for some reason the DOJ isn't charging anyone with "fraud". It's all BS. There are well thought out cuts, and there is what DOGE and Dump are doing.
All fine and dandy until one realizes that the pentagon's budget is measured in the trillions, and this sort of deal probably doesn't even deal with mission critical stuff.
That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt our national security readiness.
It might be a small percentage of the pentagon’s budget. But it’s still $5.1bn of taxpayer money being reigned in here. It’s $13 per person in the country. You could do an awful lot of good with that kind of money - from space programs to science funding.
Department of Veteran's affairs budget was $328.1 billion and should probably be counted along with DoD since it's commitments made for former DoD recruits.
The trend for decades has been shrinking the public workforce and replacing them with contractors, because Republicans have said that the private sector is more efficient. So the average government office worker is not a tech, they are a contract officer. The government does not have these skills internally at the level necessary, if they want this work done they have to contract it out. And if these contracts get cancelled that money will get spent with another contractor, and given how this administration has been acting it will a contractor that bends the knee and not one that the president has publicly voiced animosity for.
Yes but do you really believe Deloitte isn’t showering them with bribes and bending the knee to keep these contracts?
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.
Yes, the president has made it clear through his actions that $1m will make him reconsider who's an enemy and who's a friend and any corporation that hasn't made a donation yet is probably calculating what the ROI would be and how big a donation to make.
The size of the federal workforce has been remarkably stable for decades[1]. It hasn't dipped below 2.7 million since 1967 ad only recently cracked 3 million again.
Usually, they recruit government office workers into this? They acquire domain knowledge in endless drudgery, then get a pay upgrade and get rehired as consultant? The whole machinery becomes a whole level more inefficient.
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.
no, in the US consultants are mostly just a backdoor for governments to hire actually competent people at payscales that are illegal for the government to use and with competitive interview processes that are also illegal for the government to use.
Based on my personal experience and that of many others I know, that's about as wrong as one can get. A great many government workers are there to collect a paycheck and go home (just like many other people working for many other employers). Their commitment to 'the mission' hovers near zero.
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.
Personally, I get this from my interactions with the reviewers at the FDA. Absolutely buried in work, always make the best effort to improve your submission, etc.
fda reviewers are extremely out of distribution relative to almost every government worker except those at, say, the Fed. i would caution against trying to generalize that because it is mostly people taking a short term stint out of their profssional/academic career.
sorta like dining in a michelin restaraunt and deciding that cafeteria workers are really good at cooking
Yeah, it's not binary. I personally know government tech workers, true civil servants, that care and are clearly there to serve. These are the type of people you want in government. Yes, the opposite cliche that goes home right at 5 after barely doing anything also exists. I briefly worked with an ex-government "product manager" type that was clueless AF. I'm not sure how they even held on to their former job.
Generally I have been found "experience" to be highly overrated and companies that lean harder on it to be typically legacy/declining/european companies.
I would take that bet. First, government office workers have a higher bar to entry. While I've heard criticism of them being myopic, it was rarely that they were lacking intelligence.
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.
As someone who has worked in the federal government, alongside other federal workers and deloitte consultants, you would lose this bet undoubtedly.
"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.
You are absolutely right. As someone who has worked in government, the replies to you seem hopelessly optimistic about the average government worker.. it seems like many really cannot comprehend? the gulf in capability.
The peak of this was probably flying pallets of dollar bills into Baghdad and "losing track of them".
Honorable mention to running air conditioners in Afghanistan using gasoline that had to be trucked several thousand miles through loosely-held territory at the cost of several service member's lives over the years.
It's one of those situations where the roles have been briefly reversed, the left complaining about military spending and the right promoting it. Except the new budget is apparently going to spend MORE on the military, which is almost certainly going to be wasted since there's no clear justification or plan for it.
Since Eisenhower and before everyone has known that a lot of military spending was pork-barrel jobs programs for various states, plus a certain amount of overt corruption (see "Fat Leonard"). But the media environment and right-wing prevented any serious questioning of military spending.
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.
There isn't a single Republican budget yet - the house and senate have their own versions of the budget they need to reconcile. That said, the house budget (which just passed yesterday) I believe hews more closely to the Whitehouses' proposal.
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.
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.
Pretty frustrating to be nearly 50 and this is literally the exact playbook over the last half century. Reagan / Bush / Trump - 20 years of absolute shit policy (and results) when it comes to the deficit that everyone cares about.
My thought exactly. I would bet good money on it. The administration that's making a big show of "cutting spending" is also raising the budget deficit by trillions.
Good riddance, and hopefully they won't be missed. Here in Canada these consultants are just leeches who suck up all the tax dollars which could actually be used for something useful.
Same here in Australia. Over the last decade we’ve systematically reduced the number of civil servants and increased the number of consultants in government by many times. The result is we’ve ended up paying through the nose for worse government.
The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They should be used as little as possible.
A good portion of Federal Government is just a bunch of leeches whose KPI is literally how much money they waste. SO works there, in a team of great dedicated people, and they are all good and professional, but the whole department can be wiped out and nobody will notice.
You guys are way too optimistic, they’re just going to pass these contracts to trump, musk and Peter theil buddies. Charge more money and also introduce some nepharious bullshit like AI data scraping
Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
I think part of it's probably that the military is the largest discretionary spending in the US, and it's not especially popular, unlike say NASA or the NPS.
Yes, the scale is a huge part of it. If some program has a $1mil budget and you were to tell me that 25% of it was wasted. Well who cares? $250k in the US budget is a rounding error on a rounding error.
But if you were to tell me that 25% of the Pentagon's budget was waste? That's a big deal.
Yet somehow a certain segment of our population tends to focus on the small fries.
25% waste on single million is not bad. 25% waste on all millions spend is very bad... And that 25% is likely under estimated in many cases. Or at least some more from 75% is inefficiently used.
I admit probably not 25% of all millions is wasted. But even if that is half that would be 12.5% wasted... Or fourth 6.25%. Fixing of which would still be huge long term effect.
So my take is that this needs to be fixed on all levels and on all places.
Sure. But the point is that the people who advocate cutting the waste never propose going after the big wins first. Instead we cut all the little things that actually helps people and use arguments to the effect that the waste was adding up in the aggregate. OR, we could just not spend a trillion dollars on the military.
And/or they decide on cuts by ^F "diversity" or "transition" cutting of programs like the US seed vault which stores a lot of different crop seed varieties so we can restart our agriculture if there's a blight that knocks out our massive monocultures but it's getting axed now because it protects crop _diversity_... and that's suddenly a kill word for funding because we're being run by ideologues and idiots.
There's ways to do that that aren't the mindless slash and burn that's happening right now. If it were done thoughtfully I'm sure there's places that some fat could be trimmed. (And if you're looking for places to do that look at the Pentagon who hasn't passed an audit in living memory...)
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.
i think we are approximately 30T beyond "slow and thoughtful approach to cutting". if you want your program to be considered carefully, pass it with the necessary tax increases to fund it. don't just punt the tax receipts problem to the next guy.
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.
You have to absolutely think about what you're actually cutting loads of programs and spending end up with positive net effects. If you just demand across the board cuts you're killing those positive EV programs which leave you worse off than before.
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.
> 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.
Having observed and been part of contracts involving these companies, it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should.
It’s not usually the type of work, it’s the specific commercial model and mode of engagement with them that’s generally at fault, often aided and abetted by procurement processes.
they're a order of magnitude higher for some reasons though. I work in consulting, and occasionally larger enterprises approach our firm. We almost always decline because their requirements from vendor screening, to change review boards, to just the amount of sheer meetings it takes to enact a change to a title change on the website home page - its not worth it.
A couple times we made the mistake of giving a 'go away' number and they took it, and then i had to deal with the insanity of F500 business...
Basically, but with big companies with on hand lawyer litigation is much more likely. They want things like contingency plans, licensing information, even asking what our own financials look like. We just walk and focus on clients who don't have so much risk
Yep, the procurement process (and related) requires a lot be baked into pricing. I’d also be curious what the fully burdened rate of in-house staff is compared to consultants. I’ve seen situations in the gov (not DoD) where despite high consulting rates, the full cost of hiring was even higher per hour.
But 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.
> it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should.
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.
well we need to find a way to make these programs sustainable then. frankly, medicare is extremely friggin expensive because it encourages overutilization - which raises costs a ton for everyone.
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.
You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Medicare is EXTREMELY CHEAP compared to private insurance. You're comparing Medicare in a vaccuum when you should look at private insurance.
> 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 extremely expensive from the perspective of the government/taxpayer. That it is extremely cheap and allows people to bid up the price of care on the consumer side is part of the problem, there is no triage or disincentive from overutilization because of how little cost share there is.
Lol so yeah, you're not comparing it to private insurance which is what TAXPAYERS actually pay themselves. You're just a right-wing hack.
"Medicare is BAD because it costs money and is cheaper than private insurance. Private insurance is GOOD because it costs even more money than we'd pay with Medicare!!"
Your position is "medicare is too expensive" but expensive compared to what??
Cool. Go back to thinking we can only raise taxes on the middle class to pay for medicare and ignoring any taxes on the wealthy like you said in your first post. ( we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation
)
Your current fiscal situation is only right-wing talking points.
the vast majority of economists agree that there is simply not enough income among the wealthy that we can reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes on the wealthy. i favor raising taxes on the wealthy significantly, but there are also hard truths about tax receipts and current spending.
You just posted a poll. From 2015 Of not even 50 economists. That’s not “the vast majority” of economists in any sense. They did no statistical analysis of who said what, so this isn’t even statistically valid poll. It’s just raw numbers, with self-selection bias.
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.”
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.
I get that there's a discussion here over the minutae to be had in good faith. I am not qualified enough for that discussion. My point is that funding a genocidal empire is inherently bad whereas public health funding can have inefficiencies but is overall a net good.
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.
It is unfortunate but most users here are just partizans fueled with propaganda. I do not remember this place being such an echo chamber 10 years ago...
The opinion here isn't homogenous. You'll find a wide range of opinion. It will shift based on which posters are active at a given time, or even from minor nuances in the story.
I, too, find it bothersome when people refer to an opinion written in a post and generalizes as if it were the opinion of an entire community. HN is not one person and it's incorrect to refer to it as if it is.
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." - Major General 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
* 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
I know a lot of people who love to quote Smedley and Eisenhower's farewell address, and to a person they support military intervention in Ukraine. Also, people who unironically were saying "The USA shouldn't be the world police!" 10 years ago.
It's almost like supporting an ally whose sovereign territory is being violated is some kind of different situation than the US unilaterally performing military actions in a variety of locations. Amazing!
Probably not, since most of what we sent over was existing stock. The money had already been turned into weapons of war years ago. You can't really turn a gun or rocket into a loaf of bread.
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.
I have experience in technology and biomedical research.
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.
There is so much fake, useless research produced with NIH dollars. Academia, in general, is shot through with rot. To wit:
1) Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford's president, was fired in 2023 for having published research containing manipulated data.
2) Claudine Gay, Harvard's president until 2024, was found to have committed plagiarism that would have resulted in the censure or expulsion of most undergrads in her anemic body of publications.
If these are the people who preside over our elite institutions, what are we to think is going on among the rank and file?
And they got caught by the system already... You can't just snap your fingers, destroy the entire apparatus of academia and get it back again on a whim. It'd be a century or more to rebuild fully if you really did try to start over again.
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.
What do you mean 'they were caught by the system already'?
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.
Tessier-Lavigne only resigned from Stanford’s presidency and remained on the faculty. His case was far worse in my opinion. His research consumed millions of dollars and resulted in the misdirection of further millions downstream. Everyone knew Gay’s work was useless BS, it just also turned out to contain plagiarism.
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.
They were both caught by "outsiders" in spite of holding extremely high titles at both institutions, which would ostensibly entail rigorous vetting. Gay is even still a professor at Harvard.
They are merely exemplars chosen because they were the leaders of their institutions. The list is very, very long. I invite you to look into the issue further if you think I'm wrong.
Haven't you seen the documentary Inside Job covering the 2008 financial crisis? "Burning it all down and starting over" is a very immature and myopic perspective and cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution. The solution is to implement regulation that, very broadly here, enacts mechanisms to make private gain for public loss something incredibly difficult to do.
There need to be checks against people in 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."
> cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution
... in your opinion. More regulation will just lead to more and more ineffectual bureaucracy. "More regulation" as an answer is why nothing gets built in California. "More regulation" is why the Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia took 20 years to permit and complete, whereas the same can be done in under 5 years in China. "More regulation" is why it takes 10 years and $3 billion dollars to bring a pharmaceutical to market in the U.S.
More regulation simply empowers the parasitical lawyers to gum up the works even further. It doesn't produce better outcomes, it produces far fewer outcomes.
Burn it down. Send Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Bharat Aggarwal, Ching-Shih Chen, Carlo M. Croce, Andrew Jess Dannenberg, John Darsee, etc etc etc to prison. Start over again clean.
People who resist this idea act as if we're realizing incredible progress and all that would be lost. We aren't. Science and medicine are very, very stagnant, sclerotic, and riddled with fraud. The liberal arts are almost entirely useless (from a taxpayer's perspective).
So what is your actual meaning when you say burn it down? Fire some university president heads who've been caught or what? You're language is vague but grandiose.
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.
It would help further a good-faith discussion if you were first more precise in defining what you mean. Please be specific with your premise and what you would do to fix the flaws you see.
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.
Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into predictable outcomes that cannot be considered science because it is trodding well worn paths knowing it will produce yet another paper. Meanwhile funding agencies, job rules and laws, etc. all incentivize hiring PhDs over all other kinds of positions because it’s usually rather impossible to create lots of forever tenure track professor and research scientist positions since no one has funding for the next 40 years of a persons career. It was wrong that they cheated and they should be removed but i understand why they did it.
I do hate the game. That’s why I wrote, “burn it down and start over again clean”. It is a broken, sclerotic system who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues you’ve just described).
That is certainly one viewpoint. Personally I try to make changes in the place that i work and with the people i work with to push the culture in a different direction.
Claudine Gay was Harvard's president. Harvard receives >$2B from the federal government each year, including $100Ms in NIH funding. What does it say about an organization when the choose a charlatan and plagiarist to lead it? Why should taxpayer's give that organization a single dime?
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.
"Academia is all rotten! Here are my 2 cherry-picked examples!"
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?
“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 read the news to judge what the propagandist want me to know, not to actually learn things.
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 maybe consumes 1-3 hours a week to skim headlines. More research as needed, and mostly focused on matters I have a direct interest in (interest as in money on the line) so it counts as work.
It’s small potatoes for time, most people spend way more on television and social media.
Seems pretty consistent to me. People were also upset when IT employees got fired.
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”.
This is a misframing of the sentiment. No one believes there isn't waste in government. We just don't believe 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, others whose only qualification is Elon Musk likes them, are good at identifying what's waste and what's important.
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.
What's occupying my mindshare is that we are firing hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately veterans, while at the same time raising prices of everything artificially. Welcome to stagflation.
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
The internet comment section “pick a side and deride the other” doesn’t work on these situations.
Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences.
Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince 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.
Underfunding and breaking of, for example, unemployment benefits systems causes real harm, real loss of medication, real loss of house, etc.
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
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.
Breaking critical systems like SNAP, Medicare/Medicaid, weather forecasting and many many many other systems that people literally depend on for their being alive *kills* people.
Programmers that work on critical systems are actively trained to take into consideration every contingency to not increase the death rate of their systems, to the best of their abilities.
Aggressive, comprehensive and non-robust axing of systems when literal lives are on the line - especially when it's government systems and those lines maintain any semblance of some people's ability to literally be alive - touch and impact more lives than any single Boeing plane or NASA space shuttle's crash. They are even more critical than those systems - though not as flashy when they fail.
What are you on about? The systems I'm referring to are human systems with lots of humans doing human things. Cutting funding, removing departments, those are removing the humans doing human things to solve human problems.
> 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.
> The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it can complain about government inefficiencies.
People say things like this, but then have trouble explaining California, where the left has had a supermajority for almost as long.
Then why is everyone fleeing to escape the high taxes and crime? California is losing house seats at the present.
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...
Yea. California’s government delivers a lot of services that protect ecosystems, a healthy economy and quality of life. All three of those examples are mutually beneficial.
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.
To be fair, no one wants their job to go away. The government contracting gravy train is massive and has been seemingly never ending for a very long time.
I don't think the majority view is so much there is no waste in the other areas. With most people I talk to, the objection is mostly with the methods employed and the lack of accountability.
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.
Yep, the image portrayed of every other government department is scientists in white coats looking at cancer cells in a microscope, or doctors bandaging soldiers coming off the battle field.
Yes, I agree. The consultants are certainly wasteful, but I am personally aware of many employees for the government who literally have to do nothing and are actually not allowed to do any real work. We need to clean up the waste everywhere.
Amusing that a newly minted federal department of tech-bro adjacent yahoos declares that there is waste but clearly does not have any of the expertise—which would probably need to be wide-ranging—to be able to actually get rid of the waste itself and not just cut indescriminately.
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.
Yep. The budget for the Department of War has been too bloated for too long and needs to be more efficient. Let’s not privilege a series of pet projects for a bunch of bureaucrats over the reset of government.
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.
At least one contract appears to be for the air force's effort to move secure workloads to a multi-cloud environment. Based on publicly available slides, I think Accenture is acting as a middleman to avoid dependence on Azure or AWS technical support creating lock in to their clouds.
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.
with the current pattern by DOGE, I would say that it's likely they monitor grift and do audits of various departments. DOGE and Trump has been gutting many government oversight groups that are set up to prevent grift and fraud. I suspect 10 years down the road we'll find tons of grift under this administration after it's no longer in control
Great, but it doesn’t matter too much as they’ll still vote in an increased budget that adds more debt. How about we raise taxes a bit and stop spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have each year.
Not to be a cynic, but I bet all this means is that Republican campaign contributions from Deloitte and Accenture will be down and Democratic contributions will go up and new contracts will be awarded in the future so that the wealth class (won't someone think of the poor shareholders) can continue to steal your money.
Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.
I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense!
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.
Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be an additional political roadblock.
> The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs.
They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.
unions should not be able to negotiate against the collective will of the people and seniority based leveling has been a disaster for the government in the US, at least.
You cannot ultimately chain people to their desks. What you either get is a "soft" withdrawal of labour (people refuse to take the job if they have any other choice available, as we're discussing upthread, so you get dregs), or the whole thing explodes into "illegal" strikes. Which are harder to resolve, because you made sure there's no one organisation to negotiate with.
the US has at-will employment, save it with the hyperbole. There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have.
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.
No you see only capital is allowed to bargain with the government, labor is not allowed to for "reasons" that somehow always seem to benefit capital at their expense.
It's way easier to understand when they just want to attack labor and absolve capital, it really is that simple for 99% of the discourse you read online.
The protections offered to unions goes far beyond standard freedom of association. Generally I think that is okay, but not in the case of public unions.
I think you may be misunderstanding. The right to join a union is the right to association. Right to association is not something provided by a union. In other words, you have a right to collectively bargain for certain working conditions and that is guaranteed by the 1st amendment.
Poppycock. Being able to collectively bargain against the government is more than legal, it should be encouraged.
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?
If you just want to talk about outcomes, there are a number of studies showing the negative impact public sector unions have on outcomes - for instance there is clear research causally linking union penetration in school districts to decline in student outcomes in Wisconsin. [0]
> 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.
> There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have.
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.
Many of the administrative actions, through the purging of 200k employees, are preventing activities that are required to be done by law from being done.
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.
Nothing says freedom like banning the right to strike. Which might work in the short term, but makes the strikes much, much more vicious when they do come.
the problem is there is literally no incentive to make sure you are hiring the right people in government. nobody is sacked if you dont make your numbers, xyz.
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.
Do you think the best doctors are the ones who go into the most lucrative paths, like cosmetic surgery in Beverly Hills? You're deliberately strawmanning. The equivalent statement on the other side would be: We should 10x doctor pay so we only get those people who are in it for the money. That's a disingenuous stance as well. Let's not pretend that "slightly below market rate" for specialized fields leaves people in the poorhouse.
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.
Inevitably, that way of setting up an organization leads to one of two end-games:
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.
Singapore has been independent since 1959, while the USA got its own in 1776, and Britain has been around for more than a thousand years.
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.
Re: 1. Cause and effect are backward. Imperial service was actually more meritocratic than the domestic British government of that time. Look how many names of colonialists are Scottish or Irish. The former were tossed out of their land during the Highland clearances or lost influence when the Union shifted power to London. The latter were barred from high office due to their Catholic religion. But if you had talent and ambition you could go to Africa or India (and then become wealthy and ultimately join the ruling class)
It shouldn't be market rate because you get job safety. Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea.
Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability. Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure and hierarchy.
People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a thing in 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.
>Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea.
The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.
The tenure is for the job or overall in the government?
Here in France it's quite common for government employees to jump through agencies during their career, so the average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite big.
Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is about the UK.
For the government. The stats are based on employer, so even if you switch roles or organization, you are still counted in the same “federal employment” bin.
I can't speak to the UK at all, but I've met less than five people who started their government jobs right out of high school or college. They'll be able to retire on their pension 33 years later at about 3/4 of their max salary -- so, at roughly 51 or 55. (The pensions are funded by employee contributions.)
It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.
I dont know about US. But in the UK there is a different between Public Servants and Civil Servants. And to the public or at least the discussion of the topic they are largely one and the same. However jumping through these jobs would technically put them out of Government employment.
Again, this assumes the main motivation is money. Ie if they could get a better paying job, they would. You can select for highly skilled people who also aren’t putting money as the top priority. The point I’m getting at is that pay can be a noisy proxy for skill and we should probably not assume they are tightly correlated in all domains.
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.
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.
I agree and I think that supports the idea that salary alone is a bad metric for skills. Many people will take a lower pay to support a mission they are passionate about. To claim that makes them lower skilled or that they couldn’t get a higher paying job elsewhere is an overly simplified mental model. Sometimes the job itself is what leads to the higher quality of life.
No one is passionate about taking care of too many patients and making sure they document everything to the T to prioritize not being sued for millions of dollars.
This is a different argument. And there are plenty of people who put up with the bad parts of a job because the good parts are rewarding. Nobody should be so naive to think every job is all rainbows and puppy breath.
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?
>Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system.
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.
I agree with basically all of this. The one distinction I would make is that the pay reduction is real terms is across all kinds of domains so I don’t think it’s particularly unique of physicians, but part of a larger issue. Same with the cost of education/training etc. In other words, I think the healthcare issues you highlight may be emblematic of bigger systemic problems.
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?
I do think substantially increasing Congress’s pay would result in better politicians. Dishonest people who are only in it for the money can find plenty of ways to profit from the office. As it stands, $174k is not a whole lot of money for a job that requires a ton of travel to the extent of basically requiring you to own two houses. This low pay means that non-wealthy members of Congress have a hard time of it. Non-wealthy people who would be good in Congress but don’t want to have that much hardship will bow out, or work around it with corruption. Low pay selects for rich and corrupt politicians. 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.
>Low pay selects for rich and corrupt 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.
> But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money.
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.
>You seem to be assuming that being in it for the money implies corruption.
No. There are plenty of other ways of selling your constituents out for money that aren't corruption. I am assuming that people who value money over most everything else will tend towards decisions that optimize money at the expense of other values. It is a self-evidential claim.
Yes, there is a balance. My point is I don't wish for people where the balance is biased towards favoring money as a primary motivation for the above reason. I would much rather have someone willing to forgo excess money to help their constituents when they are in conflict.
Consider a sports analogy. There are baseball players who will put their team winning at jeopardy to pad their stats. They may refuse a sacrifice fly because it hurts their batting average. That doesn't mean they'll cheat (the equivalent of your corruption claim). But it does mean I don't want them on my team; I'd much prefer someone with winning as their primary motivation, not maximizing their personal stats.
It assumes that money is a motivation, which is generally true.
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.
I guess the problem I see is that I can think of a lot of careers (teachers, basically all of healthcare, certain kinds of engineers, etc.) where "below market pay" is translating to shortages and the need to push under or unqualified workers into roles they're not suited for.
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 think u/lotsofpulp addresses this in a comment below. I agree with that position: the reason it is becoming harder to fill those jobs has more to do with the lowered quality of the job than the pay.
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.
A serious problem with teaching is that the quality of the job is lower the better you are as a teacher. Good teachers spend a tremendous amount of time outside of school hours on grading and preparation. They also have effectively lower pay as they’re buying classroom supplies with their own money. But if you don’t care much about teaching and just do what it takes to keep the job, you can skip most of that.
> The fact that so many people look at a job as a money optimization problem says a lot about society.
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.
Agreed. Many people I know who work in state government are always on or planning their next vacation, or in the middle of another home renovation, and lightly joke about their “work from home.”
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.
It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it how absurd government work can be. I was briefly on the 2020 census project as a sub-sub-sub-contractor.
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.
Not sure where you get your information. Many civil servants are motivated to do what is right for their country, civil service tends to draw mission-oriented people. People who are typically willing to go above and beyond to make things work.
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.
> 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.
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.
Salary banding doesn’t attract the talent you need. Maybe, good enough?
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.
You can solve this by either having wide bands or by preferentially promoting those that make extra contributions.
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.
Certainly within the NHS, except for exceptional circumstances you start at the bottom of the band, irrepective of talent/experience - moving up throught the band purely on time-served. Depressing
The federal service DOES have a pay-banding system (AcqDemo) that CAN support the extra compensation but it's currently NOT being adequately implemented. If the system actually implemented the next pay-band to be cover roughly pay-grade that covers the $100k to $250k income level that wasn't MGT focused and instead technical "do the work in a team setting" focused (NOT tech director - useless position - should be eliminated).
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.
This site has this weird streak where you have people talking about making things for the sake of making them, people talking about hustling and making money—and these events are discrete. Then you have the third event where people on behalf of some group step in and say that people who make whatever and “go above and beyond” would never, ever do what they are doing if something even slightly more egalitarian than whatever the status quo represents would have been implemented.
One of the great things about arbitrarily breaking contracts is that you save money in the short term, and signal future contractors that they need to charge even more exorbitant rates in future government contracts because you can never be sure if/when you will get paid.
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.
This is nonsense. The consultants charge above market rates, regardless of their own costs.
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.
> for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about
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
> 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
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.
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.
Yeah sadly I have a similar experience from my school. People going into consultancy were either people that just did software engineering to quickly move into a management position and make more money, or people that were not passionate about the domain or the students that under performed. We’d have consultancy agencies come advertise basically saying “don’t worry we have LOTS of positions open”.
It's pretty clear you've never met any of these graduates.
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 unlikely, because previous Tory government created even stronger bond by changing IR35, to basically remove small independent companies from the market and created virtual monopoly for these corporations.
Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).
Yeah. Also might be a bias from my school, but for the software engineering specialty, in average the worse a student was performing the more likely they’d end up working for a consulting company after graduation. A few exceptions (student with a goal of moving into management positions) but none of the students that were either very good or passionate are working in the consulting world now. I am sure there are some skilled consultants, and these companies have their use, but I am always shocked to see how much governments spend on them.
In addition they use their government work to increase private sector profits, either implicitly "we work with your government" or explicitly (PWC offering briefings on tax policy they were helping with to the targets of the tax policy)
These guys are massive scammers, I worked with them over multiple projects and the only thing I remember is by the end of each one, everyone was memeing on them for how poorly made everything they did was.
We know damn well all these stories will do is trigger "muh Trump" and "muh Elon" responses. Especially from non-Americans who have no idea how their own government works or what it's doing.
I used to work at Avanade (a sister company of Accenture and Microsoft). They hired new grads and pushed them onto client projects. They live on big companies incompetence.
I thought the interesting thing was this quote from Hegseth:
> 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.
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.
The Government _can't_ be streamlined because the right incentives are not in place, and human beings respond to incentives.
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 big 3 get hired to protect managers. Hire a smaller consulting firm and the project goes sideways you both get fired. Hire a big firm and it goes sideways they get fired - until the next project.
Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near DC for 50k/yr.
I know some solid gov (some ex-gov now) tech folks in DC. These are experienced, staff+ engineer types who want meaningful work. The pay isn't that low. Is it FAANG level? No. But they're still making solid six figure salaries.
So, realistically speaking, we've seen lots of corruption protections stripped away in parts of the federal government - SEC to stop prosecuting things, Inspector Generals fired, loyalty pledges, etc.
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.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 396 ms ] threadUSAID 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.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
https://elonmusk.today/
"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.
Because even despite many of the companies failing, the govt made a profit on TARP.
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.
That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.
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.
Where are you getting that this is "actual" waste, because you read some mean things about consultants? Go easy on the kool aid.
> $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.
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.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/03/13/elon-mu...
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.
And that's assuming the cuts don't have any fiscally counterproductive knock-on effects. Which they certainly will.
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.
If you don't count mass firings, sure.
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.
Eventual costs, well that's not really a concern and neither is national defense.
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.
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.
... which have also been randomly cut.
That's assuming that all those consultants were not providing any value and that they don't need to be replaced by hiring more staff.
Or given to billionaires
We sure could.
Will we?
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.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
The GOP only cares about it when the POTUS is a Democrat.
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.
The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They should be used as little as possible.
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.
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.
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:
But 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1) Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford's president, was fired in 2023 for having published research containing manipulated data.
2) Claudine Gay, Harvard's president until 2024, was found to have committed plagiarism that would have resulted in the censure or expulsion of most undergrads in her anemic body of publications.
If these are the people who preside over our elite institutions, what are we to think is going on among the rank and file?
Burn it all down and start over again clean.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
The actual “news” stopped being productive to read, watch, or listen to when the term “pregnant chads” was coined. Been downhill ever since.
It’s small potatoes for time, most people spend way more on television and social media.
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”.
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
It turns out that there is generally waste in all operations; it doesn't follow that all operations should be terminated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform
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.
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...
Are you sure about that?
https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-population/
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think Deloitte makes about half of their US revenue from various consulting projects.
https://www.projectworks.com/blog/2024-the-big-4s-revenue
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every sector of the economy is looking for more workers.
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.
0: https://morganfoy.github.io/papers/Foy_JMP.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.
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.
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.
No. There are plenty of other ways of selling your constituents out for money that aren't corruption. I am assuming that people who value money over most everything else will tend towards decisions that optimize money at the expense of other values. It is a self-evidential claim.
Yes, there is a balance. My point is I don't wish for people where the balance is biased towards favoring money as a primary motivation for the above reason. I would much rather have someone willing to forgo excess money to help their constituents when they are in conflict.
Consider a sports analogy. There are baseball players who will put their team winning at jeopardy to pad their stats. They may refuse a sacrifice fly because it hurts their batting average. That doesn't mean they'll cheat (the equivalent of your corruption claim). But it does mean I don't want them on my team; I'd much prefer someone with winning as their primary motivation, not maximizing their personal stats.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just FYI: everyone who contributes to OSS makes the same!
https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
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.
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.
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
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.
Nah
the secret sauce is "who you know"
it's a tale as old as time
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.
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.
Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d...
Trump, Hegseth reveal whopping figure they want for the next Pentagon budget $1T budget would be a 12% boost over current levels
> 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.
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.