So you've got your CS graduate which you recruit and pay $40/hr, slap a badge on them and rent them out for $120/hr. Once in a while you fall short and need to hire some freelancers for $60/hr. That's it.
As your gov agency is capped on paying it's own recruits $25/hr for the position, very few will end up as 'native' gov workers, and the once that do will get poached swiftly by the consultancies.
Now these juicy contracts are not sold piecemeal, but in huge bulk. Not 3 guys for 2 months for a project, but an umbrella contract for delivering 2.000 full time profiles over the next 2 years. Very few consultancies can credibly fulfill on such commitments making the market fairly small and not too competitive. The few that participate have no incentive to spoil the roost and derail the gravy train. No explicit collusion is required. It's an iterative prissoners dilemma situation where the few players all know each other and frequently switch sides.
Consulting - best though of projects, governance, and on-demand expertise. There are definitely junior resources in play, but the objective is to build on the IP of the consulting firm and to create a external channel for problem solving or delivery that is not dependent on or hampered by internal inertia.
Staff Augmentation - a lot of time this is just billed hourly, and you really are looking at paying a premium for a non-committed spend - if FTEs are "reserved instances" then staff aug contracts are the opposite. You pay a premium for the lack of long-term commitment and to make this look like variable OpEx. my opinion is that this model is over used in most businesses.
Managed Services - longer term commitments to deliver services. Generally the good advice is to contract on "what you want done" rather than the detailed "how you want it done", though that is more philosophical than practical. The expectation is that the service delivery will improve, and that those process improvements, automations, training, and provider IP/Tools will deliver decreasing unit prices for "resource units" over time.
Thinking of consultancies as pure brokers is certainly a mental model you can use, but is not the most nuanced model. I think it tends to be better to acknowledge that there are structural reasons why all of these models are present in organizations and rather to think about how they should be governed.
(disclaimer, my employer is an advisor on how to contract for these kinds of services. My work is not related to contracting, but research about this market)
This is also a lot of PE. College graduates want to live in a city and work for a “reputable” company. The founder of the Baton Rouge chemical plant, meanwhile, doesn’t recruit in New York and Los Angeles. So he hires Deloitte or gets taken over by Bain who hires some graduate and takes 40% of their pay in exchange for letting them commute from a city during the week and say they work in PE on Raya.
(Of course there are more reasons as well, but this is a popular one that some of my friends in government agencies complain about.)
From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.)
I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual software license budget higher than their employee budget asked for and was denied a single new spot.
Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn person, but it ends up being way more expensive.
My current employer is even stricter.
In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that I'll never know.
Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong.
ie. they are generally a political choice rather than technical.
There is some department in the government that's very unsexy and has a very real problem that could be solved by a smart finance MBA student diligently working on it. But there's no way that diligent young employee would want that job. Nor no way if he had it that anyone would take him seriously and put his changes in place.
He doesn't want to work for that unsexy department. The people at that unsexy department do not want to work for him.
Put a consulting company in the middle and he has a job title that sounds cool and that organization gets their problem solved.
( This is how someone explained business consulting to me. )
I had the impression that it was also easier to fire contractors. (Well, not to renew their contract.)
If a developer who works directly for the government is underperforming, their boss has to jump through many, many hoops to fire them.
So if they have a project that needs 100 people to do and is expected to take two years, they have two choices. Hire 100 people, hoping you can find something else for them to do in two years, or you can offer a two-year contract to a private company, letting them deal with the problem of figuring out what to do with the 100 people once the project is completed.
The contraints of the GS pay scale aren't real constraints. The federal government already has special bonuses paid to medical doctors to make their pay commensurate with rates in private industry, in spite of the fact that those rates are way the hell higher than anything on the GS scale. They could easily do the same for engineering labor. What they can't easily do is hire people for six months guaranteed with only conditional renewals after that, because very few people would agree to that unless you're paying them far more than they'd get in normal industry.
I did a coop with the navy in college, and would have gladly converted over to a full time GS employee on graduation, but:
1. Actual, honest to god GS dev positions were super rare outside of DC
2. The application process through the usaJobs website had a ridiculous amount of red tape
3. As you pointed out, the salaries were laughably low, even if you included benefits like the pension and healthcare.
I eventually gave up and went with the private sector. I had interviews in a week, an offer within days, and was paid more than someone with years of experience on the GS scale.
I was bummed about missing out on the opportunity for a pension, but the higher salary helped me hit FI by my mid 30's. When the ACA passed I effectively had access to health insurance on the private market for the first time in my life.
TLDR: I would have been a fool to go into GS as a dev. Giving up on that was the best thing I've ever done.
Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.
The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company is heading towards oblivion one way or another.
Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets wind up as net job creators on a 5-10 year time horizons. That's despite the fact that they do usually start by divesting assets that don't make sense and laying off non-productive employees. But divested assets aren't generally killed – they are usually sold to somebody else who often does something better with it.
Also, companies conduct massive downsizing and rationalization all the time when in distress, and not only when they are taken over by a "corporate raider".
In the private markets, these actors are definitely distasteful. They do cleanup work that feels bad, and they often get rich doing it. But they also serve a necessary role in the markets.
Companies that are egregiously misusing capital and resources are a drag on the economy. It's a bad thing for there to be a bunch of zombie companies holding onto assets that could be used in better ways.
A more generous framing would be something like a home flipper. They buy properties that are a mess, clean it up real good, throw out the old stuff for recycling, install some modern appliances, and sell it to somebody else.
One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission.
I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.
I can name a half dozen people who are in roles like this for F500 companies.
Hell, my wife was zoning SANs for $300/hr for like 6 years at a big bank. Another friend is essentially a pimp for a bunch of companies providing logistics staff. He takes a vig from the work of like 10k people.
I work at a consulting firm, and, trust me, you want state employees doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary. Ideally, you just have enough people to administer the funds and then all work anyone cares about should be routed to private entities through a competitive process (market discipline for consultants is key here). My experience is that the people at the state are highly likable, but in terms of productivity are close to worthless or are a major obstacle to productive work. I work for a department of transportation where the leadership in the materials division does not actually know what density is or that it is measurable. I would expect someone with good grades in high school to understand this. Every single construction contract for highways has about a 15% overage on crushed rock. The weight to the material is determined by a “50% compaction factor“ and if you’re thinking “that sounds like a made up concept“ you would be correct. This has been happening for years and nobody is allowed to use the correct number because that would embarrass someone with a long tenure. The state Congress needs to liquidate the whole agency.
My point is (in an effort to maintain a most respectful interpretation) that I imagine the environment is becoming more hostile to people with certain values while becoming less hostile to people with other values. And while there's a good chance I'm wrong, my generous assumption would be they are making a hostile environment for people who value process over outcome and making it less hostile to people who value outcome over process. (Replacing bureaucrats and risk-averse money wasters with problem solvers, innovators and cowboys)
When you shoot from the hip at a tech company, the bad outcome is that a lot of money gets wasted and people lose their jobs. When the federal government shoots from the hip, trust in the institution erodes and people die.
Not that there is no room for streamlining and reducing bureaucratic and IT bloat, but it is very important to remember that the government is not a business, and in many ways should be run very differently from a business.
Wait who thinks what Elon did with Twitter was a success?
While it hasn’t fully collapsed like some predicted, it seems like a total unmitigated failure in any standard economic or business terms. It’s been a success only in terms of providing a bigger mouthpiece to Elon and those he favors, not a typical metric of corporate success.
In that regards, yes what is happening at the federal government mimics Twitter - making the government worse in terms of any usual metric of government performance but making it better in terms of carrying out arbitrary whims of a leader.
Instead they just cut everything uncritically, because the outcome they want is for nothing to work.
And the value they want in the remaining people is personal loyalty to Trump, not loyalty to the law or expertise in their job.
The consultants would actually cost more money overall, especially since they could be engaged longer than the average tenure of a full time engineer. But it wasn’t on the wage bill so it was fine.
In reality it was just really unfair to the full time engineers who, while they did get some benefits for being on board, did not get anything approaching equal compensation.
Even being outside IR35, which is the legislation that stops employees masquerading as contractors to lower their tax burden, they would fundamentally just be better-paid employees.
Of course, this is more on the individual level but even bringing in an agency… they could charge 1200 a day while the person on the job takes home about 400 of it if they’re lucky.
In the UK that's got especially interesting. When more consultants started quitting these big firms to go independent (offering cheaper services to public sector and often better quality), these corporations lobbied for something called IR35 - basically means if company is worker owned, then it cannot make profit. Now big consultancies have very much a monopoly on making profit from some else's work and charge public sector - tax payer handsomely.
You would think that such setup is ultimately corrupt.
Individual consultants never were competing particularly closely with Accenture or Deloitte or McKinsey and their mass of bodies, brand and board level access, and IR35 really doesn't change their competitive position, or affect small boutique consultancies composed of people who quit Big Consultancy to do better at all. (sure, if you want to spend your next 6 months contracting as an individual on site for one employer you might now need to enlist the support of a specialist umbrella company to assure IR35 compliance, but if you're in that position you're not really competing with expensive big consultants selling massive projects at C level on brand rather than their own capabilities to departments based on individual skillset)
But too often, consultants are brought in to do work that existing staff could already handle or to maintain systems that should’ve been fixed years ago. It’s not always outright corruption, but it props up managers who rely on outside help to get by. And many of these consultants aren’t adding value — they’re just billing for work that could be automated or easily solved.
One example involved consultants paid to babysit an outdated system. It was generating massive reports, and instead of fixing the root issue, someone had to manually delete files every few hours. Thousands per week were spent when a simple script or hardware upgrade could have fixed it. It’s wasteful and completely unnecessary.
This isn’t rare. It’s everywhere. And while it’s not always illegal, it’s driven by self-interest, favoritism, and comfort. That’s where the real waste is, and that’s where the cuts should happen.
Consulting used to be about value. It was a profession grounded in skill, purpose, and a drive to contribute. Now, it’s often about milking the system. People leave the public service knowing they can return as consultants and get paid two or three times as much, just because of who they know.
We’ve replaced public service and merit with opportunism. Instead of building better systems and serving the country, we’re incentivizing people to exploit it. And the worst part is, it’s become normal. But it shouldn’t be. This is structural corruption — accepted, embedded, and everywhere.
It's the only way of looking at it that makes sense. The enemies are in the gates and no one is fighting.
yet it happens.
The problem in any case is when the consultants/contractors/temp workers become entrenched.
It's really easy to do it - just put people who know less next to people who know more but are paid less. Then you can't keep your normal employees and have to keep hiring from outside.
It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.
Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated.
PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.
Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.
They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d...
Arbitrarily breaking contracts usually trigger clauses where you have to pay damages/penalties for doing that, so Accenture most likely isn't loosing any money here. All government contracts tend to have clauses like these, at least where I'm form.
Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that:
1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that bet on future innovation and 2. Grad students have very little power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better positioned to see new intersections emerge.
Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner that the expert can extract from simply by having them around
So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
I think that's the problem. They're not. I know some folks who went to consulting shops like this. They're invariably 2 types of people: people who got very high GPAs but cannot actually code a working program, and people who got pushed into the degree for various reasons but have zero passion. Note I'm not saying you need *passion* to be in this industry. But these people literally did not care if what they were doing was programming or washing dishes (beyond the pay delta and their parents (financier's) opinions).
And to some degree that's the point of these places. They take in the 40% of each CS class that can't fizzbuzz, put them through an internal bootcamp in their generic crud framework they fork every time they get a new customer, then unleash them on the world, either as "staff augmentation" or doing contract work.
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 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.
Nah
the secret sauce is "who you know"
it's a tale as old as time
No, fresh 22 year olds with bachelor degrees.
> effective institutional ecologies
More so, they act as liability sponges. Leadership can blame them for any problems, poor decisions etc.
Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).
1) Consultant is hired to solve a problem.
2) Consultant struggles to understand the nuances of the problem.
3) Consultant relies on government employees to hand-hold them through the solution, effectively subsidizing the consultant with free labor.
4) Consultant writes it up in a final report with their company logo on the title page and gets paid.
Maybe that's not necessarily bad if it eventually solves the problem, but it does seem pretty inefficient for the taxpayer.
Consultancies have never saved the government money.
US governments hire consultants because they have been obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about downstream effects.
The government is obligated to provide it's services, and that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job.
Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets. They pay well above market rates for the position too, which is insane.
E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.
Just increasing the salary band would do a lot to attract more talent, which is a good-not-perfect solution. Last time I checked going to work at a federal job would have cut my total compensation in half, but if it was just a 20% cut I would have looked deeper.
Just FYI: everyone who contributes to OSS makes the same!
He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from people who are substantially lying about their experience and maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he wasn't from an approved source.
His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get herself hired as a consultant.
Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may have inaccuracies in this story.
I was able to work as an individual as a subcontractor for a subcontractor for a company on the list. Rates aren't as high, but with federal regulations (for now) mandating that subcontractors be paid as soon as the primary contract holder was paid meant that there was 0 chasing after invoices which is actually very nice.
Your friend could go through her firm then.
Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences.
Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince enough people that their bold move was a good thing and that the consequences will diffuse throughout the years on to other people.
This very well could become more expensive to cancel abruptly when you consider the second and third order effects.
That's the goal. The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it can complain about government inefficiencies.
What we are seeing is the end game of this idea - turn the government itself into an gigantic inefficient corporation designed to siphon as much money as possible from people.
In this specific situation, these expensive contractors will be replace with even more expensive "AI contractors" that work for companies founded by the Global Elite Tech Bros. So more money spent on on less outcomes. Destroying the system first ensures that there's no direct performance comparisons that can be made between the old expensive, but functional system and the new even more expensive, disfunctional one they created.
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.
> The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform
I think this part is overestimated. It will get fixed.
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.
It’s not usually the type of work, it’s the specific commercial model and mode of engagement with them that’s generally at fault, often aided and abetted by procurement processes.
I have enough friends who work in University systems and government roles (both similarly heavy in red tape) to know that many of these institutions would also spend an order of magnitude doing it in house.
It’s misleading to compare to an idealistic efficient organization with no red tape, because government jobs are very heavy on red tape. That’s where most of the inefficiency gets spent, whether it’s done in house or by consultants.
A couple times we made the mistake of giving a 'go away' number and they took it, and then i had to deal with the insanity of F500 business...
The general rule that employees good, contractors bad still holds. Even though people seem obsessed with the belief that firing public employees and replacing them with private contractors will make the government more “efficient”.
But if you were to tell me that 25% of the Pentagon's budget was waste? That's a big deal.
Yet somehow a certain segment of our population tends to focus on the small fries.
For me, I wouldn't have objected to Musk / DOGE going in and actually doing an audit of everything to look for waste, fraud and abuse. And if actual waste, fraud and abuse are found, where evidence and details are provided, I'd personally celebrate that.
It turns out that there is generally waste in all operations; it doesn't follow that all operations should be terminated.
This is basically a tautology. The question is what’s actually being funded in the name of public health. Wasting money in pursuit of public health which doesn’t help the public is bad actually,
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.
You could get an oncologist to admit that the patient had some cells that needed to be removed, due to the advanced cancer. But the layman chose to get rid of a couple of perfectly healthy, cancer-free limbs.
Coined by author Michael Crichton:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
I find skimming NYT’s and FOX’s headlines are perfectly satisfactory. If anything peaks my interest I do independent analysis, putting weight on primary sources. I often try to listen in on experts discussing the matter among themselves.
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.
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-...
The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house.
... which means more work in-house.
... done by the same teams they just cut the size of.
Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work itself well.
Eventual costs, well that's not really a concern and neither is national defense.
Where are you getting that this is "actual" waste, because you read some mean things about consultants? Go easy on the kool aid.
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.
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.
I bet the median skill of a Deloitte consultant is higher than that of the average government office worker.
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.
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.
Honorable mention to running air conditioners in Afghanistan using gasoline that had to be trucked several thousand miles through loosely-held territory at the cost of several service member's lives over the years.
It's one of those situations where the roles have been briefly reversed, the left complaining about military spending and the right promoting it. Except the new budget is apparently going to spend MORE on the military, which is almost certainly going to be wasted since there's no clear justification or plan for it.
Since Eisenhower and before everyone has known that a lot of military spending was pork-barrel jobs programs for various states, plus a certain amount of overt corruption (see "Fat Leonard"). But the media environment and right-wing prevented any serious questioning of military spending.
Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land, sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in government spending that's needed to pay for those higher salaries.
It's classic cognitive dissonance in full effect leading to a tragedy of the commons. It goes to show that tech folks are no different from regular (DEI, MAGA, other) people.
The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They should be used as little as possible.
Networking or day to day software/application maintenance? I get they were probably bloated (I did work for a defense contractor at one point) but presumably they were doing something. I mean isn’t Deloitte a accounting firm?
I’m a little worried about the “stand down” attitude against cyber attacks.
IMHO firing Accenture is probably a good move in this case. I bet they were extracting money at every opportunity just so the gov't could nominally avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
I think Deloitte makes about half of their US revenue from various consulting projects.
> The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth said in the memo released late on Thursday.
I obviously don't know the details of these specific contracts, but the general sentiment that qualified federal employees can do better than overpriced private contractors is something I agree with, at least in broad brushstrokes.
But, that said, this would appear to be in direct opposition to DOGE and the Project 2025 playbook - here is a recent article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-pr....
This is why I hate what DOGE is doing. I could definitely get behind a coherent effort to streamline the federal government and save money - BTW, this was done rather successfully by Clinton and Gore in the 90s, who eliminated a huge portion of the federal workforce, they just didn't go on stage with chainsaws to promote it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv.... But now it's just "throwing bombs", and the overt corruption of the administration leaves me little faith that government will actually become more efficient with this current kakistocracy.
For example: if a bureaucrat does not use up their budget, it is (often) reduced proportionately in the next iteration. So these people have an incentive to use up the entire budget, if they want to have any hope of getting their requests next year. As a result, they will often do wasteful spending. I know this from experience, because in my previous life as code monkey in a small-ish government contractor, my boss had made it an art form to figure out who had extra money left over near the end of the fiscal year and pitch them ideas. A few 100K here, a few 100K there and the company was making decent money just mooching off of the leftovers from Federal budgets.
If you want to fix the Federal government, you have to incentivize the officials to be rewarded for saving money.
The '25 budget has not yet been approved, but the request is $8 billion more last year, not $100 billion.
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.
The marketing BS on their websites say alot of generic, motivational crack.
Could someone help me break down the real bread & butter of these firms and why people give them money?
Actually, the friction of hiring and placing made it relatively hard to let contractors go other than through downsizing. People showed up drunk or stoned, and hung on for a month or two.
I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly.
Accenture and Deloitte pay a lot of money to lobbyists for these Pentagon contracts. After the dust has settled, they'll still get juicy contracts. We will all forget that any of this happened.
Excellent point.
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.
Trump, Hegseth reveal whopping figure they want for the next Pentagon budget $1T budget would be a 12% boost over current levels
I understand the sentiment that quality of consultants ia very low.
Although I think neither that or waste is the reason for termination.
The US government has been moving to privatized contractors in most of it's work for some time, across many administrations and both parties.
Based on what I know of Trump, I'd have expected that to continue. Maybe it is everywhere except for special treatment for DoD? Or maybe this is just a fake and it won't be this way for DoD either. I don't have much idea what is going on.
I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field to login.
That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run by medicore people at this point
Remind me their valuation again to produce a junk product and ride on the coattails of an otherwise simple and reliable website that they’d rather not exist again?
Ideally, there would be a Digital Services government department, staffed with properly compensated people (to attract good quality talent) that the other government agencies would "contract" to build their services, rather than paying through the nose to Deloitte (who then offshores most of the work anyway). Then maintaining the services could be done by the contracting gov agency once completed (with support from DSA).
Oh wait, we had a Digital Services, the USDS, and they built some pretty good stuff too. Could have been a model for other work. Except that they just got gutted and taken over by DOGE goons. Wonderful.
But hey, I suppose sometimes we just deem projects too big and messy to comprehend, so we just toss it all and start over. It rarely turns out as nice or easy as we thought it would be.
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.
