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Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

> Why do government projects and agencies have to be poorly run?

Because lots of people, inside and outside of government, derive significant money, power, or both from government dysfunction. A classic case of goal misalignment.

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To provide a quote from the article:

..two lobbyists who managed to find their way onto the five-person panel testifying. They represented the interests of traditional IT contractors, who seem to believe it is their right to overcharge taxpayers for complex computer systems that don’t work. Even though, as one congressperson at the hearing put it, those special interests are likely to view the USDS and 18F “with a jaundiced eye,” they were given the opportunity to seize on the authority issue as a way to cast doubts on the Obama tech surge.

I think that's part of it, but there's also the facet that a lot of people just...don't care. Families, hobbies, etc are all valid reasons to live for outside of your employment. If the majority do just enough to get by and not get fired (which, as pointed out in other comments, is a pretty low bar in the government, as it is in many large large companies), then the system eventually converges into a sort of homeostasis of mediocrity, which is viciously self-preserving [1].

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[1] these together are pieces of Yudkowsy's revision of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to an enormous complicated System full of conflicting incentives getting stuck in a weird equilibrium. When that weird equilibrium is crushing people in its gears... We see a broken watch and infer a Watchbreaker."

That's part of it. Back in the mid-nineties the idea that the private sector could do government functions cheaper/better really took hold and the result is that whole core sets of responsibilities are almost completed outsourced to contractors. That in turn has made lobbyists and recently retired senior government and military employees wealthy when they join those same contractors.

However, a problem that has been around a long time is that it is difficult to fire government people for under performance so you have some people in positions of power crippling a whole host of IT efforts through their incompetence. That's not so much about money, it's just that the dead wood is hard to get rid of.

This is the default for large human organizations. The differences are merely shades of the same color.

Also, the purpose of any bureaucracy is self preservation.

The government is a complex adaptive system with almost no external signaling from it's environment. It's an extreme example of how large companies behave when they have no external pressures (competition).

Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that it produces. I know gov't waste is appalling but you should expect it until selection pressures are applied from the outside. Contrast NASA 1969 vs. 1986 and you'll get what I mean.

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