That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt our national security readiness.
... which have also been randomly cut.
That's assuming that all those consultants were not providing any value and that they don't need to be replaced by hiring more staff.
Or given to billionaires
We sure could.
Will we?
I bet the median skill of a Deloitte consultant is higher than that of the average government office worker.
It’s not about who bends and who doesn’t. They all will. Even Tim Cook who famously wears his politics on his sleeve has completely bent the knee to Trump.
Money talks.
Van der Leyen was famous for squandering german defense budget to mc kinsey and co - who poached heads from the german rearmament office. National Defense related industries should be in general forbidden to hire consultants.
Just ask them.
Where do people get these crazy ideas about government employees? There are some wonderful people in public service, but it's not some Wonkaland of saints who toil just to help others and do the right thing.
sorta like dining in a michelin restaraunt and deciding that cafeteria workers are really good at cooking
There are exceptions but few.
The skill balance (actual, tangible IT/software skill) was heavily in favor of the "younger" (as above).
Most of the managers/those in supervisory roles were busy "showing impact" and "aligning cross-functional teams".
Deloitte consultants have a much wider variance. They too are capped on how much they can be paid, but they do not get the benefits of government service (e.g. pensions.) They are shuffled from subcontractor to subcontractor and the project managers are more obsessed with extracting more money from the department than finishing the project. The incentives are so misaligned as to be comical.
"higher bar to entry" -> true civil service style testing for jobs is basically illegal in the feds and they have to give massive preferences to various interest groups.
Honorable mention to running air conditioners in Afghanistan using gasoline that had to be trucked several thousand miles through loosely-held territory at the cost of several service member's lives over the years.
It's one of those situations where the roles have been briefly reversed, the left complaining about military spending and the right promoting it. Except the new budget is apparently going to spend MORE on the military, which is almost certainly going to be wasted since there's no clear justification or plan for it.
Since Eisenhower and before everyone has known that a lot of military spending was pork-barrel jobs programs for various states, plus a certain amount of overt corruption (see "Fat Leonard"). But the media environment and right-wing prevented any serious questioning of military spending.