Defense contractors simply couldn't stop accidentally electricuting people in warzones[0, 1]. They have had a major negative impact on readiness while benefitting from massive contracts[2] and . There also appears to be a situation where DoD leadership has been captured by the defense industry[4].
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32334682 [1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/another-mysterious... [2] https://www.icij.org/investigations/windfalls-war/us-contrac... [3] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/pressroom/articles/2023/0... [4] https://quincyinst.org/research/subsidizing-the-military-ind...
That explains why you wouldn’t start there. Assuming what DOGE is doing can work at all, it’s easier to start in an easier place.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
What really needs to be cut is spending on old people, but that will never happen.
Getting a large contract in place can be a miserable slog and take a huge amount of time and effort to sort out, particularly with the cumbersome government contracting rules and laws. Good contract documents are also really challenging to write. Often times the results will be non-optimal, terms will be interpreted in ways you didn't intend, or you with you had put some more info in there. In many cases I believe the timeline to get a good contract in place can be comparable to the work that we want to perform. That's just silly.
Use of contracts for tech development creates large disconnects and significantly reduces our control and responsiveness to changing needs and ideas. If NASA employees are doing the work we can easily pivot when circumstances change and re-prioritize labor and much more quickly drop bad ideas as we learn new things. We can start investigating something without completely knowing what we're doing and figure it out as we go along. That sort of thing is harder to do with a contract. If the work is being done by a contractor, changing anything is vastly more difficult and complicated, and often not even worth the effort.
If we have a device or something developed by a contractor they often manage to contaminate it with some kind of proprietary info making it much more difficult to use and communicate the data. The tools and devices we develop internally don't have that problem and we're free to use, adapt, and communicate technical info about them as much as we want. Also, if we develop something ourselves, we inherently more deeply understand it and can more quickly make modifications or test out new ideas. That's less often the case when work is done on contract. IMO many of our most valuable developments are done internally due to the enhanced flexibility.
Not that all contracts are bad. There are plenty of cases where using contracts makes great sense and works out terrifically. However, you often just have to hope the right sort of company has decided to exist because doing it ourselves is often not an option. I have absolutely been told about a contractor: "I know they're not the best, but they're the only one interested in doing this work. If don't fund them for too long they may lose interest and then we'll have nothing".
There are plenty of other problems unrelated to contractors as well. But over-reliance on contracting is a big one.
I worked for several years on a few amazing contracts where we had the freedom to pivot and respond to changing needs. My most recent one however is terrible, but I believe it's due to a much more complex set of issues.
The organization is embroiled in decades long internal turf wars, leading to a culture of independent silos. The government must be perfect, therefore, each silo must be well-managed. So you end up with bureaucratic management processes duplicated across these silos. Regulatory obligations are growing more complex all of the time, so the processes become too entropic for the small silos to handle, and then leadership deteriorates. In a place like this, 50% of a contractor's job is to be the bureaucrat's human shield for when SHTF.
Just like the adage "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" there seem to be places in government where nobody ever got fired for making things too complicated. A recalibration is long overdue, probably not for NASA, but definitely other places where the overhead really isn't worth the result.
"That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine—including yours truly (see most recently “Memo to AOC: Only You Can Save the Government,” July/August 2021)—have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."
I think the point is that they’ll cut the services and contractors too. I’ve worked with government quite a bit at various levels and the level of messing around, pointless ideas and internal politics is astounding, as well as the lack of accountability and oversight in general.
The opinion I walked away with is that just like twitter, chunks of it could be cut away or properly digitised without affecting what people on the outside perceive or care about at all.
they 100% will not cut services. this is how you lose subsequent elections (which they are well on their way already…)
