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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> The government at every level, just does not have the expertise to insure that contractors perform to the letter of the contract.

Ideally, they would have even more expertise to make judgement calls, so that they could rely (in some sense) on the spirit of the contract and not just the letter.

I guess comparisons to public sector and military procurement in other countries (and times) might be instructive.

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I think they have just as much experience and technical know-how as their contractors, but have neither the funds or the go-ahead to implement this stuff themselves.

For example, Obama signed an executive order requiring the DoD to use electronic records management systems to store all of their classified data.

The tricky part is that the way it is written, they have to buy this, they're not allowed to write the system that holds their own data.

(See JITC 5015.2.)

This is what I observed at McClellan AFB during my time there. No matter how hard I fought to do the work as a government engineer, management continuously turned the work over to contractors. As to why? I was taken aside and given the most ridiculous reason. If the project fails or overruns, the manager just gets more money to give to the contractor. Being screwed by the contractor was acceptable. But if done organically and there were problems, the manager gets a ton of grief. But this is the government, what terrible fate will come down on the manager? I also noticed that a lot of these managers retired from government service ended up working for the contractors, and the process recycles itself. This came back to bite McClellan AFB in the arse later. Come BRAC time, the contractors made it an easy choice to close the base by taking the work back their sites at a much reduced cost.

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