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Comment by DickingAround | Hacker News Reader

I think the concern is that the reason it is so different is disturbing to taxpayers: If it is filled with more bureaucracy than a similar commercial deal, then they're wasting taxpayer money. If that bureaucracy is the only way to prevent corruption, then they must be horribly easy to corrupt. If you can get a guaranteed revenue stream to grow your company to 100s of people with no day to day risk of losing this customer, then they're not being good stewards of that money. In short, them being different in these ways are bad sign for the taxpayers who fund this.

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Having worked for a government contractor, it was my impression during my time there that they're so worried about oversight of the money and what miss-spending and corruption looks like that they spend most of the money making sure it doesn't get miss-spent. Often the amount spent recovering miss-spent money far out-weighs the cost of what was miss-spent in the first place.

One example my attention was drawn to is that a government employee overspent by $1.50 for a drink that was misassigned an expense code for the amount they spent. If they'd used the correct expense code or spent $1.50 less, no eyebrows would have been raised. Instead everything was processed and the person was pulled into a tribunal in front of other government employees who were being paid to oversee spending. Lord knows what those employees were paid to investigate this miss-spend. On top of the fact this employee was paid to attend the tribunal. This kind of behaviour is a gross waste of time and money... for $1.50 at a cost of many thousands of dollars to reclaim - or more likely re-assign to the correct expense code... and for what?

If you want to see your tax dollars at work, it's right here, making sure none of your hard earned money gets miss-spent.

It's accountability in the age before we had AIs that could spot strange patterns of behavior across millions of government employees. Presumably now there might be more efficient ways to do this, but it's a combination of inertia and fear of what the consequences would be if such a program didn't work out. The upside of the current system is that it leaves huge paper trails and everything is auditable; the downside is that actually auditing all this stuff is so painful.

It also doesn't really help that a majority of the politicians and a majority of voters foam at the mouth about government waste, no matter how minuscule and how much it would actually cost to eliminate. If we implemented more efficient algorithms and saved 90% of administration but some waste slipped through they'd say the government was getting sloppy. You see this a lot when people rail against, say, fare evasion on public transit; people would rather have 10x of a bunch of highly paid employees to manually check every ticket, instead of having proof-of-payment and random inspections with fines, because it feels like the right thing to do.

Here's the scale of problem the government deals with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkcrtvN60s

That's an experimental YF-22A crashing due to a software glitch. That's a $300-400M hand-crafted state-of-the-art-on-a-hundred-dimensions supersonic jet, almost killing the test pilot (an engineer who flies planes) 50 feet off the ground at 150 mph. Just the cost of training that pilot is easily in the millions of dollars.

Everyone agrees the budget process is nuts, right up until something like that happens. And then everyone who ever signed any document related to that airplane is able to sleep at night. Except the software teams that wrote or approved the code. They're going to loose sleep, and they know why.

Oh, and the DoD is a rounding error compared to CMS. They have routine fraud complaints that would sink a major defense contractor.

I think fraud detection and holding people accountable for safety lapses are two completely different problems calling for different solutions. Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean everything's a nail.

If we didn't spend so much money on fraud detection via immense bureaucracy, that would increase the amount of money available to provision services.

Serious investigations of seemingly-trivial events can produce some startling information. Look into the ongoing Kealoha scandal in Oahu. One broken mailbox is tearing down a massive criminal conspiracy.

But the bureaucracy is sometimes for good reason (usually driven by Congressional mandate). What people need to do is learn to work within (and around) the bureaucracy. That's key to the government market. There is a reason for the way it is, and you need to learn to work with it instead of fighting against it.

I'm not sure you're understanding really how the system works, which is exactly what I was pointing out in my statement. I never said "guaranteed" - I said "stable". There is ALWAYS risk of losing the customer and the government can terminate at any time for almost any reason. But if you perform, then you can maintain the same customer for a decade or more.

This is how the system works and it works this way for a reason. There is more accountability in the government market than people realize - moreso than in most commercial transactions even.

I think people would be more willing to accept the bureaucracy if it delivered results. If you've ever been the customer of a government tech product (even a public-facing one like healthcare.gov) you know it does not.

Take a look around the world and look at the average state of governance and you will find a lot of appreciation for American bureaucracy.

And it is indeed independent bureaucracies that are responsible for making agencies and institutions run. Bureaucracy gets a bad name in many places, but the alternative to bureaucracy isn't just automatic improvement, it's most often politicization. Which is significantly worse.

Historically, government contracting and the public sector has been incredibly corrupt, as it's basically unlimited funds with no market-based mechanism to address it (in a private entity, the owners will be angry about money taken from their pockets by employees, and in places where corruption is too high, you end up with family firms or other external trust structures, very small entities, etc.)

This is why the heavy-handed regulations exist in US contracting (along with massive risk aversion and other things). The Government uniquely cannot be subject to market forces and punishment for bad actions.

That's true in places like India, but not really in the U.S. I own a company that does government contracting and have never "paid someone off" or done anything remotely "corrupt" but we have been wildly successful nonetheless.

There are NUMEROUS mechanisms for oversight and redress at every level - but the typical commercial-focused company doesn't understand them, so they don't research or learn what they are and just give up thereby developing a very misguided interpretation of the system akin to what you believe it is like.

This was true in the US before we created all these stupid regulations, which is why they were created. 1700s/1800s, "spoils system", etc. That is the whole reason the regulations (and attendant overhead) exist.

(I bootstrapped a US government contractor and have worked for several others.)

Can you clarify your point, were you saying that the US had 3rd world-levels of corruption before the regulation, or were you saying that the US was as fine as it is today, before the regulations.

The former- before the regulations in the 1800's there wasn't even really a concept of 'third-world levels of corruption' as it was universal to every government.

The former. Google the "spoils system."

I've worked for commercial, government and semi-government organizations. It's not corrupt in the sense that it's illegal. The problem is that while the stakes are high within the private sector there are no such stakes within the government sector. Yet people do get payed high stakes salaries. There's no incentive for efficiency. In the government realm when the end of year is nearing, departments start burning through their budgets to ensure they don't receive less the next year. Inefficiency is rewarded. It simply means more people get to pay for nice mortgages.

> If that bureaucracy is the only way to prevent corruption, then they must be horribly easy to corrupt.

The bar is much higher for government procurement, though. As an example, if I decide to use Codacy as my static analysis tool at work because I know the founder, nobody would bat an eyelid. If that same dynamic were reproduced at the government level, it would amount to corruption.

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