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Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, we spent a gazillion dollars on a healthcare.gov website which couldn't even load for most users, much less give them checkboxes. I wouldn't trust our elected officials with any technology more complex than a tweet. Or even that...

God forbid you have to renew your driver's license. Fill out an online form like any sane business? Nooooo. Print out some materials, photocopy it, fax it, mail it, and still wait two hours at the DMV. Peak Murica.

Our shining beacon on the hill is rather turning into a big ol warning light. A government of the people, for the elite, by the lowest bidder.

Can't you pretty please send some competent bureaucrats over the pond?

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The .gov.uk vs healthcare.gov comparison sounds like a typical insourcing vs outsourcing story. The US government is of course big on outsourcing everything, but outsourcing is hard and many agencies don't have the talent and experience to do it well.

Yeah. Outsourced or not, I just can't remember our government having done anything well in my lifetime, except maybe winning traditional military battles against third world countries, which we also outsourced (then subsequently we lose the peace and create even more hostility, ripe for more outsourcing). The whole setup is just utterly incompetent, all the way up to the congress and president and supreme court... I don't know how it got this bad. Probably inevitable given the capture by for-profit entities and ideologues hell-bent on zero sum individualism.

The system is so incompetent and corrupt it lacks even the rudimentary feedback loops that might've otherwise allowed it to break the cycle. Seems like the only way for it to get any better is to completely collapse under its own incompetence. Egads.

I think NASA is a quite interesting microcosm of outsourcing in the US government. Just looking at the last couple of years you can see clear success stories (e.g. commercial resupply), but also cases where lobbyists and lawyers are heavily involved and try to influence the decision towards the worse and out-of-budget choice (e.g. lunar lander), and projects that are too big to fail and are continued mostly due to political reasons and lobbying (e.g. SLS).

With NASA all of this is fairly obvious because there's a big hobbyist community that's invested in the outcome, I have little doubt it's worse in other agencies where people pay less attention.

There were also numerous security issues on the initial release. Some folks went to press with them because no action was being taken in private reports and they were accused of having political motives.

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