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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them about it, and they shrugged it off by noting, “We are way more efficient than our competitors.”

I’m not defending DOGE’s specifics or competence here, but do we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.

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did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!

Stuff like this is why the Skunk Works at Lockheed was such a big deal.

Just a whole department of people who innovated without any of the red tape, in a government setting.

You might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point: "Fire the Contractors" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."

100%

And it's like 10 to 1 of contractors vs civilians that work for the gov. You'll find a hell of a lot of casual corruption there too -- companies bribing the civilians who select contracts to pick them. It cuts across public & defense spending.

Or collaborating with government decision makers to word the contract to ensure that they are the only company that can meet all of the criteria. TYL

i honestly could not find any root cause analysis in that article that i agree with. it is not a problem of “too few bureaucrats”, it is that the contract procurement process is not competitive, nor is literally any other process on the government side, including meta processes like the bureaucrat hiring and selection process. the entire govt side system top to bottom has evolved in a world where money does not matter and the contractors have simply evolved to the constraints of that interface to get at the money the way a plant grows towards the sun.

... i actually considered becoming a "civil servant" after this experience to try to help (on either the govt side or private side), but I could not see a viable way to actually make a difference, even a small one. Everything is so jammed up and deadlocked with outrageous anti-competitive regulation —go learn what is "IDIQ" "SPARC" "8(a) STARS II" "GSA IT Schedule 70"—that it's not actually possible for a startup to bid these contracts without partnering with the 800 lb gorillas and therefore becoming a part of the thing that you are trying to destroy. "Disruption does not come from within"

Because of the existence of [1] FedRAMP and other compliance initiatives that are blanket applied to everything even though 90% of SaaS contracts do NOT need it, and [2] past performance being predominantly the #1 factor for evaluation, contracting itself is an enforced oligopoly.

You need to be a big-ish company to enter, and will have to kiss the feet of existing oligarchs.

Contractors are hired by civil servants, these are not independent things.

I don’t think DOGE will fix this because the solution is easy but very counterintuitive — we would need around 30% raises to all federal employees at GS-12 and higher, to match market rates.

Right now they cannot hire civil servants that are skilled due to being unable to compete on comp; instead they have to reach to private sector, which will charge them 600 a head, while paying each contractor 200. Because GS only affords 120-130 for those positions, it becomes necessary to reach for contractors.

PWS contracts are the biggest suck on budget; eg there are more PWS contractors manning what would normally be FTE positions at Dept of State than total FTEs.

Unfortunately, it is so backwards to actually spend more and raise payscales to save money that I don’t think DOGE will land there as a strategy.

I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”.

I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired.

I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition.

So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.

I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States.

The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required.

In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)

Most of the startups fail, I hope we don't want that in government things

in evolutionary biology, almost all cells die, but some of those that survived evolved to become humans

Strictly, no? No cell has been alive through that whole process. Rather, many laid the foundations that lead that direction.

Yes, this is very much a Ship of Theseus argument. But, I think that is very apropos?

I'm not a biologist but I thought there are no new cells, just old cells splitting.

The next logical steps to this is eugenetics, I'll pretend I didn't see this comment

BTW, we already tried that and it didn't work

They wont because they're propped up by tax payer money :) the very thing they whine about.

absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.

Those sound like contractors, so a private company that's failing here? Or am I misreading?

Meta spent how many billions on Metaverse and has what to show for it? Some argue it was wasteful.

sell your stock then if you are a shareholder, it's up 225% on 5yr chart, 1525% since IPO, and has risen to a $1.7T mkt cap since the $13M Series A at $100M Post in 2005. That's a 100,000x ROI on the A if I did the math right, forgive me there are a lot of zeros to keep track of

The problem is not the government being inefficient and wasteful but the contractors -- aka private companies -- being inefficient and wasteful.

More people need to internalize that moral. Efficiency is an optimization after you are achieving a goal. It is not the goal. Unless you are not looking to do new things, maybe?

This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.

I don’t mind startups wasting money unless I’m a seed investor with a vested interest. We all have a vested interest in the way government allocates or misallocates funds. That’s one difference.

The other, as someone else pointed out, is a matter of scale.

> I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts.

As an aside, you're actually making the argument that we need more federal employees. The push to privatize everything has led to higher costs and more abuse. So DOGE is currently doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

There's no question this exists.

But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves.

Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?

Perhaps the private sector and their bilking of the government is what we are witnessing.

Who do you think hires contractors and puts out contracts?

The only way to get promoted at and above gs-12 is to amass reports and budget authority. The wasteful spending is not handed down mandatory by congress, it is conducted using budget authority afforded to federal employees.

If you lay off 70% of federal employees especially those in gs-12 to 15 range, you could probably easily cut 70% of discretionary spending with literally no negative impact.

You will never see them reduce their budgets because it reduces their political power; look up “Washington Monument Syndrome” for how they have evaded cuts for the last two decades.

Congress wants to _increase_ the defense budget by $150B instead of decreasing it. You could gut as many employees as you want, and that money is still going to be spent somehow.

The only way to reduce 70% of the discretionary spending is for Congress to reduce the discretionary budget by 70%.

That's why I like where I am. We usually work in really lean teams. One person in each role. And usually we're making a physical product so that's one mechanical, one electrical, one sideways, etc. Has its downsides but I don't feel like we're wasteful.

Are you in the private sector or government?

I've done both (though only once each) and it's been like that both times. Maybe I'm just drawn to it.

Yeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency, Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.

Good. We need a lot more representatives genuinely interested in eliminating government waste. Because the graft is real regardless of political party.

Yes, I maintain anyone who has spent any measure of time in govcon will come to the same conclusion. Our government is endlessly wasteful -- this was a universal, bipartisan take 3 months ago but now people are getting successfully gaslit into believing every dollar the government spends is efficient and critical.

Are they going to clean the entire house, or will they ignore the parts that benefit their cronies?

You spent a few weeks somewhere and knew all that? Seems doubtful to me.

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