This is exactly why many areas of government should be privatized. With zero competition and virtually no accountability, these bureaucracies have no incentive to become more efficient.
Outside of shallow libertarian magical thinking, privatization isn't a panacea. Anyone who has worked for or with a large corporation has stories which are at least this bad — the main difference being that you rarely about about the failures unless it leads to a major lawsuit. The usual argument is that you aren't required to do business with those companies but … just try to live without insurance, telecommunications, cars, etc. Markets allow you to select the least-bad option but it often takes regulation or changing the problem to make significant improvements. Before someone mentions Google: consider how happy you'd be if their QA-in-production / no live support mentality was applied to your retirement checks rather than your free email…
There are two real problems here: the first is the well-known fact that we're still figuring out how to deal with large-scale IT projects, which affects everyone, and the fact that government agencies are significantly blocked from doing things the right way. For the last couple decades, politicians have “shrunk” government by giving jobs to the private sector rather than hiring lazy government workers. What this actually means is that instead of hiring the same person directly they're hired at a significant markup – equal or greater pay plus the overhead costs of all of the contracting company's staff and profits – and all of the work is pushed into a procurement process which forces you into the worst possible form of waterfall.
You're not the first person to notice that things aren't efficient – and I'm certain that staff at OPM would agree, given how many of them were quoted saying just that. The solution is easy – allow them to hire good people in house at market rates and give them the needed support / autonomy – but that's politically dicey. This and your proposed solution are both likely to fail as long as Congress has a sizable contingent of people who benefit from problems, even those created by their policies, and everyone receives donations from companies which do business with the government. This also won't magically go away with privatization, as anyone who has seen large deals go to the company which bought the best lunch can tell you, but at least in the case of the government the details are public knowledge.
Those companies didn't fail of course, they were wildly successful at raking in millions of dollars. It's the government that's responsible for spending that money well, and it's the government that's failing at it.
> The solution is easy... but that's politically dicey.
Which is another way of saying the solution is not easy.
This is true but misses the point that the government really needs to develop in house talent. If you looked at every one of those contracts, I'm sure you'd find that part of the work to be performed was project management, design, etc. but the problem is frequently that the government isn't allowed to hire people who can evaluate the options. It's quite easy to make a project fail by giving the client exactly what they asked for…
> > The solution is easy... but that's politically dicey. > Which is another way of saying the solution is not easy.
True – we're basically debating semantics but I would argue that the solution to this problem is easy but that's because the real problem is something else. As a country we tend to waste a lot of time talking about problems which are the product of other problems we've chosen not to deal with.
Yes. These contracts essentially amount to paying a company to work on a problem. There's no incentive for the contractor to finish. When they finish, the money stops. The most profitable activity is to drag the project out as long as possible until the government kills it.
I don't know what the answer is, but watching the results of privatization binges in a number of countries in the past, I don't think it involves moving things along the public/private axis. There are more ways to motivate people than just competition.
The answer is a smart self-directing AI that must be obeyed.
Pretty much everything else I've seen tried and failed.
The unofficial motto of the last place I worked was "the beatings will continue until morale improves".
For example, private contractors build the rockets for NASA. But there is no incentive to do it cheaply and right. Any cost overrun is covered by the government.
This is in contrast to the COTS program initated by NASA which is oriented toward rewarding space contractors on efficiency and milestones reached. They don't cover cost overrun and responsibility lies with the suppliers. For example, if SpaceX or Orbital Science's cargo ship blows up, they're responsible.
I still say it should be illegal for government employees or elected officials to take jobs with a company holding or bidding on Federal contracts for a period of 5 years after leaving government service. The only exception I can see is military personnel that have not served on a procurement job.
1) competition for contracts at this time is a joke
When you consider the cost overruns on, say, a single massive project it's much cheaper to pay people well than having a routine cycle to make up for low civil wages.
I'd pair a future employment restriction with enough money to make the job interesting to good people who otherwise aren't going to be willing to put up with the higher scrutiny of working in the public sector.
It's not like this is a secret – look at https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... and https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
If you're the GS-14 overseeing a contract with hundreds of contractors on it, it's unlikely you're using enough benefits to make up for the fact that your compensation maxes out at under $140K year in DC, particularly since your peers tend to be working for major corporations which have decent benefits. It's not like you're comparing the federal benefits with a bare-bones Wal*Mart plan.
I actually linked to that.
The benefits are a little better but not as much as you're making out. Nobody gets European-style leave allotments; health care is nice but again not noteworthy compared to how executives are compensated and not a benefit most people fully utilize. An extra week of vacation per year doesn't close the pay scale for an IT person, much less a managerial position in charge of similar numbers of people.
> Also, the security of a government job with all of the stops to keep you from being fired.
That is a perk but most of which does not apply to executive positions and, again, I have never noted corporations to be much faster to let people go.
The major mistake you're making, however, is assuming that the overseeing major contracts are all in SL positions. Yes, there's probably general in charge of developing a new fighter plane but an awful lot of projects are significantly run by people at the upper end of the GS pay scale who are not receiving anything noteworthy.