So you've got your CS graduate which you recruit and pay $40/hr, slap a badge on them and rent them out for $120/hr. Once in a while you fall short and need to hire some freelancers for $60/hr. That's it.

As your gov agency is capped on paying it's own recruits $25/hr for the position, very few will end up as 'native' gov workers, and the once that do will get poached swiftly by the consultancies.

Now these juicy contracts are not sold piecemeal, but in huge bulk. Not 3 guys for 2 months for a project, but an umbrella contract for delivering 2.000 full time profiles over the next 2 years. Very few consultancies can credibly fulfill on such commitments making the market fairly small and not too competitive. The few that participate have no incentive to spoil the roost and derail the gravy train. No explicit collusion is required. It's an iterative prissoners dilemma situation where the few players all know each other and frequently switch sides.

Consulting - best though of projects, governance, and on-demand expertise. There are definitely junior resources in play, but the objective is to build on the IP of the consulting firm and to create a external channel for problem solving or delivery that is not dependent on or hampered by internal inertia.

Staff Augmentation - a lot of time this is just billed hourly, and you really are looking at paying a premium for a non-committed spend - if FTEs are "reserved instances" then staff aug contracts are the opposite. You pay a premium for the lack of long-term commitment and to make this look like variable OpEx. my opinion is that this model is over used in most businesses.

Managed Services - longer term commitments to deliver services. Generally the good advice is to contract on "what you want done" rather than the detailed "how you want it done", though that is more philosophical than practical. The expectation is that the service delivery will improve, and that those process improvements, automations, training, and provider IP/Tools will deliver decreasing unit prices for "resource units" over time.

Thinking of consultancies as pure brokers is certainly a mental model you can use, but is not the most nuanced model. I think it tends to be better to acknowledge that there are structural reasons why all of these models are present in organizations and rather to think about how they should be governed.

(disclaimer, my employer is an advisor on how to contract for these kinds of services. My work is not related to contracting, but research about this market)

“Contractors” has become the more common term over time.

We have two types of Statements of Work (SOWs) we get signed by the client. The first type and the only type I would ever get involved with are project based. The client has a business need but not the technical expertise. I come in right after sales and work with the business to tease out their requirements, get their sign off. We do the work and leave the project once the requirements are met.

With this type of SOW, we (I) lead the project technically, the project management etc and once the work is handed off, we move on. It’s outcome based.

The second type of contract is where the client has the technically expertise. But not the manpower. They then sign a contract with us to get $X number of people for $y hours with the expertise they need. The client controls what gets done and when. They handle the project management. This is your typical staff augmentation.

Furthermore, in the cleared space you're pretty much silo'd to places that grant clearances - so while you might build up some IP you can never actually leave that market because your credentials are too valuable.

This is also a lot of PE. College graduates want to live in a city and work for a “reputable” company. The founder of the Baton Rouge chemical plant, meanwhile, doesn’t recruit in New York and Los Angeles. So he hires Deloitte or gets taken over by Bain who hires some graduate and takes 40% of their pay in exchange for letting them commute from a city during the week and say they work in PE on Raya.

(Of course there are more reasons as well, but this is a popular one that some of my friends in government agencies complain about.)

From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.)

I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual software license budget higher than their employee budget asked for and was denied a single new spot.

Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn person, but it ends up being way more expensive.

My current employer is even stricter.

In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that I'll never know.

Not defense, but my government contract works the same way. I'm on company number two, but I know people who have worked for 4 different companies, all while doing the same job on evolutions of the same contract. There are people who have done full careers working onsite for my agency without ever converting to be a civil servant.

This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at whatever social media tells them to.

There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2017.

Look at the email server debacle, did the supporters understand what the crime was? Then Signalgate occurred and it’s crickets in the news now. Freedom of speech now means freedom to spread misinformation.

Haha, those yokels getting a laugh from all those richies losing money in the stock market, but jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds. And those coming tax cuts, who will be benefiting the most from those? Haha, the joke keeps getting funnier…

The other one was a private email server, set up on purpose.

Many of these people don't have meaningful retirement savings to lose. Or they're young enough that time in the market will expect to recover in 30 years.

But yeah, I was thinking of that as I wrote it. I can confidently say that what I said still applies to my job.

A friend knew a hiring manager and was a quiet shoo-in for a job. HR dragged their feet for half a year and then, suddenly, moved at absolute light speed to get the job posting up, closed, and the shoo-in to be approved as much as possible.

It was because the contract was ending soon. Laid off workers (including contractors), veterans, and people with disabilities are given priority during the hiring process (which makes some kind of sense), but these contractors had such a stink associated with them that the HR people who presumably didn't want to work with the manager suddenly did, just to avoid hiring the contractors.

The government got angsty about being bilked by monopolies and started trying to mandate that contracts be split and awarded to different contractors. The first time they did this, they took the contract away from Raytheon and gave it to Lockheed, who probably felt the way the average reader of Hacker News feels, that surely this was a weekend project that five guys could do for a hundredth the price. It was not. Their solution completed the process of turning raw downlink data into human-legible imagery hundreds of times slower than Raytheon's. The government caved and gave the contract back to Raytheon.

A decade later, they overhauled the entire geoint enterprise to try and modernize it, bringing it to the cloud and using Kubernetes for everything, and did the same thing again. They gave the orchestration contract to Raytheon and the processing algorithms contract to Lockheed, with a rule saying the contracts can't go to the same company. Lockheed in this case just subbed the actual work back to Raytheon. The only way they could really do what the government wants, and have Lockheed employees working on this, is if they hired all the people who currently work for Raytheon, not out of any kind of nefarious underhandedness, but because these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it.

Lol, is this a joke? Any good dev can do software development.

Most people aren't willing to work for peanuts, don't want to stop using drugs for a clearance, or are ideologically opposed to building weapons used to kill children or propagate genocide.

Sounds like Raytheon employees are all good on those fronts, rather than being good at their jobs. After all, if they were so effective, why wouldn't they work somewhere without all those caveats?

Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong.

ie. they are generally a political choice rather than technical.

The disparity is extremely but to be honest I liked the idea of working for the government. There was a lot of drive to solve for the mission and smart people. But the level risk mitigation made working extremely difficult. The government impressive getting people to work as hard as they do and I respect it, they were a good employer but political offices severely shackle it from doing even better work. In wages yes but even in allowing experimentation, political appointments waste a ton of energy and time to. Its like selecting the worst person for the Job in a non meritocratic way and expecting things to run smoothly is a poor idea.

maybe it's different at the federal level, but at the state level it's pretty hard to beat the benefits, unless you're strictly looking for hourly wages. Not everyone needs $500,000 a year, nor wants it.

The stated policy of the current admin is to "traumatize" federal employees so the number of these people is likely dwindling fast. Burnout was already a problem before the current admin - if your efforts hit a bureaucratic brick wall one too many times that private sector job starts to look a lot more appealing.

Although the large consulting firms are also not great if they are just shipping software requirements overseas for cheap software dev labor, that also can be very ineffective. So many never ending government projects are a result of this. On the surface everything is competently managed (grant charts forever, with perfect org charts), but at the strategic level of actually getting it to work and on-time is lacking (because there are a ton of cautious "professional managers" who don't know how to actually ship.)

I am so tired of people who have "experience" repeating this talking point.

1) If an employee is union and being a freerider a manager has to document their failing before being able to fire them. And, yes, the union is going to defend them and make you do your job and put those documents in writing. The problem is that most managers don't want to put things in writing because, lo and behold, most of the time you wind up with written documentation that the manager is the problem instead of the union employee.

2) Union employees often hate freeriders more than managers do. Someone freeriding is making your own job far more miserable and if you can get rid of them, your own life is going to improve.

3) I can count the number of the freeriders I have encountered in union positions on one hand. I have lost count of the number of those people in non-union positions.

They are probably not chasing the job security either.

Healthcare may be vouchers soon.

There is some department in the government that's very unsexy and has a very real problem that could be solved by a smart finance MBA student diligently working on it. But there's no way that diligent young employee would want that job. Nor no way if he had it that anyone would take him seriously and put his changes in place.

He doesn't want to work for that unsexy department. The people at that unsexy department do not want to work for him.

Put a consulting company in the middle and he has a job title that sounds cool and that organization gets their problem solved.

( This is how someone explained business consulting to me. )

Those happen be 2 different types of consulting categories.

Accenture/Deloitte are more "professional services" type of consulting. Things like IT technology integrations and business process reengineering with software. So installing a multi-million dollar ERP software package like Oracle Financials or SAP and helping the client company migrate to the new accounting system. Also a lot of "staff augmentation" type of work. E.g. a lot of USA Homeland Security contracts for Accenture were IT services related: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22homeland+security%22+awar...

McKinsey/BCG is "management consulting". E.g. the CEO is considering opening a new international subsidiary but needs some research on various "strategies". So McKinsey consultants taps their vast network of other companies in the industry, creates spreadsheets of scenarios, writes up reports, etc.

The "professional services" category may be on a lower tier of prestige than "management consulting" but in general, most college graduates who prioritize career advancement will still prefer the (typically higher salary) job offer from Accenture/Deloitte rather than a government office such Veterans Affairs. Where government jobs often win candidates is the "no travel lifestyle" if it's a local office. Consultants can get quickly burned out by commuting on airplanes every week.

It's not too bad

I had the impression that it was also easier to fire contractors. (Well, not to renew their contract.)

If a developer who works directly for the government is underperforming, their boss has to jump through many, many hoops to fire them.

So if they have a project that needs 100 people to do and is expected to take two years, they have two choices. Hire 100 people, hoping you can find something else for them to do in two years, or you can offer a two-year contract to a private company, letting them deal with the problem of figuring out what to do with the 100 people once the project is completed.

The contraints of the GS pay scale aren't real constraints. The federal government already has special bonuses paid to medical doctors to make their pay commensurate with rates in private industry, in spite of the fact that those rates are way the hell higher than anything on the GS scale. They could easily do the same for engineering labor. What they can't easily do is hire people for six months guaranteed with only conditional renewals after that, because very few people would agree to that unless you're paying them far more than they'd get in normal industry.

I did a coop with the navy in college, and would have gladly converted over to a full time GS employee on graduation, but:

1. Actual, honest to god GS dev positions were super rare outside of DC

2. The application process through the usaJobs website had a ridiculous amount of red tape

3. As you pointed out, the salaries were laughably low, even if you included benefits like the pension and healthcare.

I eventually gave up and went with the private sector. I had interviews in a week, an offer within days, and was paid more than someone with years of experience on the GS scale.

I was bummed about missing out on the opportunity for a pension, but the higher salary helped me hit FI by my mid 30's. When the ACA passed I effectively had access to health insurance on the private market for the first time in my life.

TLDR: I would have been a fool to go into GS as a dev. Giving up on that was the best thing I've ever done.

Pay scale for the DC area: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

I don’t think it’s the money, I think it’s the mindset. There’s more project managers than actual hands on engineers.

In my org (10000+), over the past 5+ years we’ve hired maybe 20-30 15s and 14s who are non-supervisory engineers. It’s not a ton but it’s more historically.

My point though is that people will take the jobs on government pay scale, but it’s organizationally very difficult to get the positions through HR.

1. Exactly zero companies, much less startups, are like the US Government.

2. He had 2 years at the NSA prior to his Google run.

3. I'm pretty sure he's one of the highest profile google engineers, you're not getting that for $500k.

Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.

In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions.

"In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions." Not sure if you have taken a look at Britain lately but they absolutely don't care about what the citizens want.

With respect to the British Empire, you may want to review the concept of “no taxation without representation”.

I don’t mean to be graphic, but being forced into silence (“you could have stopped me”) is absolutely not consent. The Trump administration is full of people who will need to go to jail if were to keep our republic.

* - readers, please note that I said "most", not "all", so a couple counterexamples would not have any bearing on the statement.

If it's outside our capability as a community to even acknowledge that they're moving fast, how can we note that they're moving way too fast to be doing it right?

I bet on any particular issue you can find 3-4 major groups with conflicting opinions.

I mean, carpet bombing New York City would demonstrate "incredible efficiency" - as it would probably take much less time than demolishing a single building in the city following the laws.

The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company is heading towards oblivion one way or another.

Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets wind up as net job creators on a 5-10 year time horizons. That's despite the fact that they do usually start by divesting assets that don't make sense and laying off non-productive employees. But divested assets aren't generally killed – they are usually sold to somebody else who often does something better with it.

Also, companies conduct massive downsizing and rationalization all the time when in distress, and not only when they are taken over by a "corporate raider".

In the private markets, these actors are definitely distasteful. They do cleanup work that feels bad, and they often get rich doing it. But they also serve a necessary role in the markets.

Companies that are egregiously misusing capital and resources are a drag on the economy. It's a bad thing for there to be a bunch of zombie companies holding onto assets that could be used in better ways.

A more generous framing would be something like a home flipper. They buy properties that are a mess, clean it up real good, throw out the old stuff for recycling, install some modern appliances, and sell it to somebody else.

One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission.

I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.

A good metaphor here is apoptosis / programmed cell death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis)

There was. It's the GAO and the inspectors general of the agencies, both of which have been gutted by this administration.

> I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.

LMAO, you're not defending the specific actions, but you know enough about the actions to know that they are "cutting stuff that is irrational". This is a defense of DOGE but with the "no, i'm NOT defending Musk" veneer that doesn't pass muster. You're giving this administration the benefit of the doubt and a large amount of good faith that they have not earned.

You say "No automatic force... whether (the agencies) are achieving any progress)". Don't we have oversight agencies and committees? I'm not following your 'grow and grow'; can you provide evidence that all agencies just 'grow and grow' without achieving progress? If not all agencies, then be specific.

Also, what evidence is there of "stuff" that is "irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission"? Which mission? What corruption? What evidence of this? Can you speak more specifically here?

Please provide evidence to claims so we can have an discussion around this.

He's not talking about consultants, he's just correcting the pop culture meme that "private equity is evil" which is what the parent comment implied. Everything he describes is correct.

Had they the slighest wish to shrink the debt, or at least not expand it further, tax cuts would have been out of the question until the budget allows for it.

Perhaps, and in such a case, the american economy would not be cratering like it has been lately, and americans would be suffering less, and america would be stronger on the international stage. In fact, all things considered, more spending would have been better for america than the current state of things.

> the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget

There's always taxing the rich, but the plan by the american ruling elites in the republican party currently seems to be to increase the debt sky-high via tax cuts for rich americans, only partially paid for via increased taxes on non-rich americans, with the rest piled onto the american debt burden.

In fact, most solutions to troubles require spending time and/or money. Very few are resolved by "do less, and do it worse".

> At some point there need to be painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like.

Perhaps: america can start with increasing taxes on the rich, instead of decreasing taxes on the rich and increasing taxes on the non-rich. That should get america more money and hurt fewer people.

It seems as though republicans like to decrease both spending and taxes while democrats like to increase both spending and taxes. Both strategies are not helpful when it comes to national debt. Perhaps when democrats come to power again they will be wise and raise taxes without restoring all the spending/programs Trump cut.

If you think I’m just being a partisan, take a look at the US Bond market for the last two weeks.

I can name a half dozen people who are in roles like this for F500 companies.

Hell, my wife was zoning SANs for $300/hr for like 6 years at a big bank. Another friend is essentially a pimp for a bunch of companies providing logistics staff. He takes a vig from the work of like 10k people.

I think these are both extremely stupid policies, but its just not correct to say that the Trump administration is increasing spending to benefit Musk.

So Trump is increasing spending already. One might also comment this is hardly surprising since he did the same in his previous term, when he overspent by 4.6 trillion (meaning he enacted policies that would cost the US that amount over 10 years), and that was because congress stopped him from doing more damage. Trump is responsible for 20-25% of the entire US public debt in 2025 (Biden at most 5%, and a lot of that was Trump policy, mainly the tax "reduction")

Does this benefit Musk? Well, the pentagon announced they're paying about 6 billion to SpaceX, so in one announcement about 3% of their Trump-announced budget increase is going to Musk. They're also buying from Tesla, against just about everyone's advice, but are unwilling to say how much. They're also paying a lot for Starlink and even Xai, but also not known how much.

Such bullshit. Our tax dollars were being stolen and thrown around the world covertly by a USAID slush fund. The entire organization was co-opted and projects were frivolous.

It's not a conspiracy. You can read about the spending online.

Anyone who thinks Trump's admin is any more detrimental than the previous one is either misinformed, uninformed or a bad actor.

I stopped taking these discussions seriously because the other side is so high on propaganda that the conversations aren't authentic. It's just talking to ActBlue robots.

I keep hearing about all this corruption, but nobody seems to be in jail about it.

The point of a slush fund is that the funds weren't allocated for specific programs by law, they were discretionary. So, while technically not illegal, they are frivolous and unethical. Not to mention, how would half the country and most of the world react if Trump's DOJ started arresting the people involved? They'd call him a tyrant and burn more Teslas.

So now, instead, we just have to take some rando's word for it that bad stuff was happening but nobody's going to jail over it because it was "technically not illegal"? And you call that accountability?

Congress decides how taxes are spent, not the Executive Branch, and certainly not the accountable to no-one DOGE.

https://apnews.com/article/usaid-funding-trump-musk-misinfor...

I work at a consulting firm, and, trust me, you want state employees doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary. Ideally, you just have enough people to administer the funds and then all work anyone cares about should be routed to private entities through a competitive process (market discipline for consultants is key here). My experience is that the people at the state are highly likable, but in terms of productivity are close to worthless or are a major obstacle to productive work. I work for a department of transportation where the leadership in the materials division does not actually know what density is or that it is measurable. I would expect someone with good grades in high school to understand this. Every single construction contract for highways has about a 15% overage on crushed rock. The weight to the material is determined by a “50% compaction factor“ and if you’re thinking “that sounds like a made up concept“ you would be correct. This has been happening for years and nobody is allowed to use the correct number because that would embarrass someone with a long tenure. The state Congress needs to liquidate the whole agency.

The consultants would actually cost more money overall, especially since they could be engaged longer than the average tenure of a full time engineer. But it wasn’t on the wage bill so it was fine.

In reality it was just really unfair to the full time engineers who, while they did get some benefits for being on board, did not get anything approaching equal compensation.

Even being outside IR35, which is the legislation that stops employees masquerading as contractors to lower their tax burden, they would fundamentally just be better-paid employees.

Of course, this is more on the individual level but even bringing in an agency… they could charge 1200 a day while the person on the job takes home about 400 of it if they’re lucky.

My point is (in an effort to maintain a most respectful interpretation) that I imagine the environment is becoming more hostile to people with certain values while becoming less hostile to people with other values. And while there's a good chance I'm wrong, my generous assumption would be they are making a hostile environment for people who value process over outcome and making it less hostile to people who value outcome over process. (Replacing bureaucrats and risk-averse money wasters with problem solvers, innovators and cowboys)

When you shoot from the hip at a tech company, the bad outcome is that a lot of money gets wasted and people lose their jobs. When the federal government shoots from the hip, trust in the institution erodes and people die.

Not that there is no room for streamlining and reducing bureaucratic and IT bloat, but it is very important to remember that the government is not a business, and in many ways should be run very differently from a business.

It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't been appropriately evolving, and now the US as a whole is between a rock and a hard place.

If I'm going to spend time thinking about these things (that I have virtually no control over), I would prefer to do it in a curious and mostly emotionally detached way.

The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not to remove the rails and aim directly for the cliff.

Unless you're an accelerationist. Accelerationists are people who view bad times as inevitable, and want them to come as quickly as possible so we can get through to the other side (where times are good again) as quickly as possible, instead of prolonging the collapse by doing it more slowly. Does that describe you?

If you are actually interested in what's going on, I think what they are talking about is a big important piece of the puzzle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCgHj1_GBuY

It's awfully convenient that "in economics you can say what's going to happen but not when." So you really don't know where the cliff is, how steep it is, what else is between us, etc etc. They even say at the end it's possible to outgrow the debt, but then just dismiss it.

I know you're trying to approach the whole thing in an abstract unemotional way and not defend Trump. But there is just no world in which what he's doing is somehow better in the long run... Well maybe being a pariah state solves the trade problem, but that's not "better" in my book.

The answer is for Congress to balance the budget and intelligently incentivize new industries. The fact that Congress has failed doesn't mean an incompetent strongman is the answer. The things he's doing to reorganize the executive and ship people to foreign gulags with no trial have nothing to do with improving the economy. And the legal argument he's using to claim tariff power is specious at best.

The structural reform we need in the US are things like: ranked choice voting, proportional representation, eliminate the electoral college and/or redraw state boundaries, and for the love of God get limitless corporate money out of politics.

I have also witnessed first hand how new terminology can have very different meanings to different people. Ask 100 product leaders to define what a "customer need" is and you will probably get dozens of different answers. Ask 100 CIOs to define what a "data mesh" is, and you will probably get dozens of different answers.

I think that when an environment is changing at an accelerating pace, its necessary for the organisms living in the environment to adapt at a similar pace in order to survive/thrive. I also believe that our environment is changing at an accelerating pace.

I suspect that you think I have reverse the metaphor because you have been paying more close attention to recent rage-baiting news, and I have spent a longer time paying closer attention to "boring" economic analysis. My model of the situation includes many historical examples of hyperinflation and what led to them, the consequences of Muammar Gaddafi dropping the petrodollar, the impact of citizens united on the military industrial complex, the exploding web of "NGOs" meddling in world affairs, how technology is an extremely deflationary force and how regulatory capture shifts economic benefits of new technology from the consumer to industry incumbents, how the Bretton-woods era started and ended, and how the neoliberal era started (and was ending regardless of political party), etc, etc.

Despite all this perspective I mentioned, I feel as though I know a tiny % of what is important to know in order to judge the situation accurately. The more I learn the more it seems like I don't know, and the more curious I get. Color me in the Dunning Kruger "valley of despair".

So no, I don't think the simplistic blanket decision making protocol you defined describes me.

Do you agree that these processes need to evolve over time?

And if so, what if they haven't been evolving as fast as the rest of the world and have fallen behind?

What is a leader to do, when many processes no longer are in anyone's best interest other than the people who maintain them and those have learned to exploit them?

The government doesn't seem like a machine to me, more like society's nervous system. It's a very scary idea that it has become so rigid and so outdated that a massive overhaul is necessary. It does seem like an opening for extremism (fascism, tyranny), which I'm sure we both fear. I just find it very hard to tell whether disrupting the system or letting it continue will lead to a better outcome for Americans.

This wouldn't be happening if everyone was happy with the status quo, if the US was in a golden era, but it wasn't. Many things clearly weren't working. Sometimes it's easier to tear something down and rebuild it than fix it (not always, but sometimes).

You may not put much stock in another billionaire's opinion, but personally I think he's been engaged with our system enough to have a good perspective on things.

That doesn't mean every government operations are 90% efficient, but I'd rather walk the side of slowness and bureaucracy than graft and corruption, let alone Trump's outright fascism.

And by the way, my father worked at a federal manufacturing plant so I've heard plenty of stories, good and bad.

I would doubt Gates's number because I have never been in a company that had 15% or less waste. e.g I don't think you could find a tech company out there that couldn't reduce its AWS bill by 15% without any service degradation, but it's just not a priority.

But the meaning of "waste" is highly subjective so some people wouldn't count that type of inefficiency as "waste". It may take a lot of resources to follow the process that the government mandates or use the ancient technology that it uses, and if the government efficiently follows the process with the existing tech, then it's not "wasteful." But I would call the process itself and the failure to upgrade the tech waste.

As for corruption vs bureaucratic inefficiency, why should I favor one over the other except by cost comparison? If the government pays $100 million to build a road that really costs $50 million because the contractor is owned by the governors cousin, that's a lot better for me than paying $200 million for the same road because the bureaucratic process to keep the governors cousin from unfairly getting the contract costs $150 million. And that's not even getting into the fact that the bureaucratic path also costs more in terms of time.

IMO the process is just as much graft as the nepotism. All those lawyers and consultants and government employees that consume the $150 million are just as much the recipients of ill gotten gains as the governor's cousin. I recognize that this can't be eliminated, so I simply would choose whichever one was cheaper. And in the US I think we are in a situation where the bureaucracy consumes much more than would be taken by corruption. China is quite corrupt and yet their government gets a lot more done for a lot less money, and in a lot less time than ours does.

If the governor's cousin cuts corners to save money, it puts lives at risk. Or the thing doesn't last as long and costs more money later. The cost difference is rarely just pure price gouging.

A cop planting evidence to make an expedient trial is also a form of cost cutting that I really don't want. But when people see corruption or legal corner cutting they will believe it's acceptable to do themselves. There is a broken windows or slippery slope situation.

Legible but inefficient systems can be corrected through sensible redesign. Corrupt systems are a cancer that spreads as good actors are pushed out.

I would be supportive of a DOGE style effort that actually looked carefully and critically at systems to rearchitect them. But accepting illegality will simply produce a low-trust society with many bigger problems.

Wait who thinks what Elon did with Twitter was a success?

While it hasn’t fully collapsed like some predicted, it seems like a total unmitigated failure in any standard economic or business terms. It’s been a success only in terms of providing a bigger mouthpiece to Elon and those he favors, not a typical metric of corporate success.

In that regards, yes what is happening at the federal government mimics Twitter - making the government worse in terms of any usual metric of government performance but making it better in terms of carrying out arbitrary whims of a leader.

Reminds me the joke of how to become a millionaire that’s basically start with a billion and invest in xyz terrible idea. That’s basically twitter, a shell of its former revenue and status.

Instead they just cut everything uncritically, because the outcome they want is for nothing to work.

And the value they want in the remaining people is personal loyalty to Trump, not loyalty to the law or expertise in their job.

But too often, consultants are brought in to do work that existing staff could already handle or to maintain systems that should’ve been fixed years ago. It’s not always outright corruption, but it props up managers who rely on outside help to get by. And many of these consultants aren’t adding value — they’re just billing for work that could be automated or easily solved.

One example involved consultants paid to babysit an outdated system. It was generating massive reports, and instead of fixing the root issue, someone had to manually delete files every few hours. Thousands per week were spent when a simple script or hardware upgrade could have fixed it. It’s wasteful and completely unnecessary.

This isn’t rare. It’s everywhere. And while it’s not always illegal, it’s driven by self-interest, favoritism, and comfort. That’s where the real waste is, and that’s where the cuts should happen.

Consulting used to be about value. It was a profession grounded in skill, purpose, and a drive to contribute. Now, it’s often about milking the system. People leave the public service knowing they can return as consultants and get paid two or three times as much, just because of who they know.

We’ve replaced public service and merit with opportunism. Instead of building better systems and serving the country, we’re incentivizing people to exploit it. And the worst part is, it’s become normal. But it shouldn’t be. This is structural corruption — accepted, embedded, and everywhere.

In the UK that's got especially interesting. When more consultants started quitting these big firms to go independent (offering cheaper services to public sector and often better quality), these corporations lobbied for something called IR35 - basically means if company is worker owned, then it cannot make profit. Now big consultancies have very much a monopoly on making profit from some else's work and charge public sector - tax payer handsomely.

You would think that such setup is ultimately corrupt.

Individual consultants never were competing particularly closely with Accenture or Deloitte or McKinsey and their mass of bodies, brand and board level access, and IR35 really doesn't change their competitive position, or affect small boutique consultancies composed of people who quit Big Consultancy to do better at all. (sure, if you want to spend your next 6 months contracting as an individual on site for one employer you might now need to enlist the support of a specialist umbrella company to assure IR35 compliance, but if you're in that position you're not really competing with expensive big consultants selling massive projects at C level on brand rather than their own capabilities to departments based on individual skillset)

It's not about preventing companies from treating people like employees. In fact, post-IR35, it enabled exactly that - but with fewer rights. Now, individuals can still be engaged for long-term, full-time work, as long as they go through an umbrella company and give up both autonomy and the ability to run a business. The result is employment in all but name, with none of the legal protections, and often less pay due to umbrella fees and unreimbursed business costs.

You're also wrong to suggest that independents weren't competing with the likes of Accenture or Deloitte. In practice, they absolutely were - especially in the public sector. Individual consultants and small firms were frequently:

- Delivering the same work at lower cost and higher quality

- Auditing or overseeing work delivered by big firms

- Winning smaller-scale, high-trust engagements directly with departments that didn't need an army of suits and a 200-page PowerPoint.

This did threaten the margin-heavy model of large consultancies, and they did lobby for IR35 and the subsequent reforms to de-risk their position. What IR35 achieved was to push out small, agile operators by making them legally and commercially "difficult" to work with - not because they were "tax dodging", but because they lacked the compliance resources and political access to fight back.

Meanwhile, large firms were exempt from these concerns. They can place workers with clients indefinitely without IR35 scrutiny, because the worker is not the owner of the delivery company. That's the loophole. The exact same working pattern is treated as fine if the profit flows to Deloitte, and suspicious if it flows to a one-person or small, workers owned limited company.

This isn't about "6-month gigs needing umbrellas" - it's about eliminating small, independent service providers from public sector procurement pipelines. It's about monopolising access to taxpayer money. And calling that "ensuring proper employment classification" is naive at best, and disingenuous at worst.

IR35 didn't restore fairness. It restructured the market to favour large corporations and removed one of the few viable routes working professionals had to operate independently and build something of their own.

It's the only way of looking at it that makes sense. The enemies are in the gates and no one is fighting.

yet it happens.

The problem in any case is when the consultants/contractors/temp workers become entrenched.

It's really easy to do it - just put people who know less next to people who know more but are paid less. Then you can't keep your normal employees and have to keep hiring from outside.

It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.

higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.

Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing.

It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.

Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability. Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure and hierarchy.

People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a thing in large enterprise. You haven't seen civil servant yet.

I cant remember which party it was but stopped the Pay Band usage and everyone is simply paid by the starting rate. UK civil servant has basically stopped most salary increase for a long time.

Because of that, instead of pay raise a lot of people got promoted which is basically everyone in every department has inflated grades. These promotion are also problematic, again, not based on merit. There are now more SCS1 than ever.

40% of work are irrelevant and made up by seniors to improve their chance of promotion. Another 50% of the work are getting around bureaucracy, only 10% of the work are actually useful.

And there is no way to fix it. Ministers dont want to fix it because they rely on cvil servant to get things done. Civil servant internally lack the interest to reform. And if anything the power of a department is measured by how many staff it has.

But none of these are new. We are now close to 50 years since Yes Minister first aired. And the documentary remains relevant, and everyone should watch it if they want to understand more. And as far as I can tell, this is not UK specific.

The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.

It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.

Here in France it's quite common for government employees to jump through agencies during their career, so the average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite big.

Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is about the UK.

One person once said the people at the NSA are much more like Marines than Silicon Valley types. They’re more interested in the mission than in getting rich. The fact that so many people look at a job as a money optimization problem says a lot about society.

This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive jobs. It's finding enough skilled people willing to accept the tradeoff.

Public schools haven't solved that problem. Healthcare hasn't seemed to solve that problem either. They're cautionary tales in that if you can't find enough people to accept the tradeoff, the remaining job openings are filled with significantly worse candidates because you pay below market rate.

I'm not sure the pay argument holds. For example, where I live, the average starting teacher salary is higher than the median overall salary. When you couple that with the fact they are on 4-day workweeks and get substantial time off (summers/holidays), the pro-rated pay is actually reasonably high for a starting salary. (Granted, I think it hits a ceiling relatively fast.) From talking to them, I suspect the driving force that make it hard to retain teachers is the lack of quality of life. I think it was Csikszentmihalyi who talks about the need for autonomy in one's career for it to be fulfilling, and the current system seems to limit that to an extreme. Just like u/lotsofpulp's comments about doctors, I think this means the job shifts much of the work from the purpose teachers chose the profession in the first place, and leads to burnout.

People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay to avoid writing or saying all of that out).

You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and not expect a decent pay to quality of life at work ratio.

If you do not increase quality of life to make up for lower pay, you will end up with less driven or less capable people. Note that quality of life also includes security of income, which can reduce that type of stress.

If your stance is that the healthcare system needs improvement, I’d agree. If your point is that the best doctors are the people who have money as their top priority, I’d disagree. I’d extend the latter to say, we may not get a better healthcare system by just paying people more. Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system.

Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?

There are most likely decreasing returns on both ends of the scale.

>Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?

"A new system" is too nebulous, but step by step reform is the obvious way forward. From decreasing unnecessary requirements for new doctors (there must be a way to not have to completely sacrifice one's 20s and early 30s and still become a doctor), to tort reform that allows for sensible judgments, to increasing funding for residency and medical schools to allow for higher supply of doctors, etc.

Also, doctor pay (per hour or per patient) has been declining in real terms for many, many years now. Which is not bad in and of itself, but when you are simultaneously decreasing remuneration and quality of life at work, intelligent people will pick up on that signal to look elsewhere to sell their services.

A lot of US healthcare is performed by smart people from poorer countries who just want a chance for their kids to grow up in the USA. That the country relies on that arbitrage has always been ridiculous to me.

With all that said, it’s still a different argument than “pay = ability”. Put differently: the $ amount in TFA could be used to increase Congress member pay from $174k to $10MM each. Do you think that would result in better politicians?

Ignoring all the other non-salary pay they get, I'll buy that low pay can select for rich politicians because it means you can't rely on your Congressional salary to make ends meet. But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money. That is the presupposition that seems to frame your whole argument, and the one I have been pushing back on since the original comment. That sentiment undergirds the premise that pay is commensurate with ability. We can create systems that don't select for people with a primary motivation related to financial gain. $10MM salaries ain't it, though.

Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.

This just doesn't make sense in the context of what you've previously said. Based on your above post, you're saying low pay selects for corruption because they're in it for the money. But giving $10MM a year selects for people who are in it for the money, meaning you have the same problem. I fail to see how that selects for better people than are there currently if it gives the same incentives.

If you re-read my original comment, I advocate for a "reasonable" salary, but not one that selects for people who have money as their primary motivation. I think there's an argument that $174k/yr is not reasonable for Congress person. We could increase that (and there are proposals to do so*) while also having the guardrails in place that don't disproportionately select for people who care more about money than their constituents.

*I suspect there is more at play than just Congressional salary. E.g., the civil servant salary ceiling is pegged to Congressional pay, so there are second-order effects to consider.

Everyone has some motivation for money. So this introduces bias towards the corrupt at any level. That’s especially true for a pay level that really is not enough for the expenses the job requires.

You seem to be assuming that being in it for the money implies corruption. I don’t think that’s even remotely true. There are plenty of honest people who value high pay. As it currently stands, Congress attracts dishonest people who are in it for the money because there are plentiful opportunities to make money dishonestly in that job. It doesn’t attract honest people who are in it for the money, because the honest pay sucks. If you pay them really well then that second category will compete for positions. It won’t be corrupt people versus true believers, it’ll be corrupt people versus true believers and honest people who want a well paid job. This would be far better than what we have now.

Yes, to an extent.

Looking at the costs of housing, especially in a market like DC, the motivation isn't "making lots of money" per se, but rather "maybe I can actually make enough to afford the mortgage on an 800k crapshack" and the acknowledgment that gov roles aren't likely to cover that.

With low pay, you’ll get true believers and people who are bad at their work.

With high pay, you’ll get true believers, people who are bad at their work, and people who are good at their work. You can fill more positions without taking the bad ones.

As for what this says about society, I think all it says is that money can be exchanged for goods and services. If I’m selling ~50% of my waking hours, you’d damn well better believe I’m going to try to get a good price for it.

1-A wealthy ruling class who can afford and feels entitled to be the government. See: the British Empire.

2-A wealthy ruling class who can afford to postpone profits while they accumulate power, to eventually trade that power for profit through grift. See: western democracy.

Pay people as well as possible for their work and ruthlessly go after theft, corruption and incompetence. That’s how you build a lastingly successful system. Shades of Singapore.

I don't think we can, yet, call Singapore a lastingly successful system, considering most of the time since its independence has been under a father or his son.

It’s just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to actually perform, and combined with environments such as WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking like a fairytale life paid for by other people.

This happens in the private sector as well, but tends to correct over time - hence big tech’s layoffs, especially of managers and nontechnical staff, after the excesses of 2021-2022.

I don’t think this is true of all state employees, but it seems to happen more with the educated professional class with more abstract work.

The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated most statistics like unemployment rate for the government. So lots of PII and therefore strict background checks.

All good except that they hired people before the checks were done. And the checks were slow so people were waiting months before getting access to systems.

That's pretty bad, but at the start at least we were in meetings. We couldn't do anything without system access but at least we could get up to speed on the project and provide general advice.

Someone somewhere got word of that and one day there were armed Federal agents outside the offices. No badge = no entry and thus ended our participation at all in the project.

But it did not end our getting paid. I was flying into DC costing $2kish in expenses per week and I think I was being billed out at nearly $8k a week (I got $2.5kish of that). If I tried to do any actual work for that money someone would have literally shot me.

That went on for months because the background checks took that long. There were dozens of us in that situation and several hundred thousand in government money was burned for literally no benefit.

I don't know exactly where that project ended up but it did not get used for the 2020 census.

Think about the teachers who buy classroom supplies out of their own meager paycheck because they want them for the lesson, and 'cost-cutting' means they don't have enough resources in the school.

Think of all the people at the CDC, or at NOAH, or similar.

In any large organization, and the Fed Government is > 2m employees, so it counts, you can easily find example of people who are driven and people who coast.

And actually, people are sacked in the fed if they don't make their numbers, or they are quietly sidelined.

Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated.

PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.

Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.

Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.

They don't have veto power over Congress, it's about allowing workers to dictate the terms they seem fair for themselves against the US government. If Congress and the executive branch can't agree with labor terms with workers at the table, that's bad.

Not having unionized federal workers is way way way worse.

One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?

> One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?

Not everyone fits into two political buckets. I am extremely anti for the reasons above as well as additional reasons particular to police unions. I also favor big tax hikes, banning guns, and higher spending on housing subsidy, snap, etc.

I just also think governments should be capable, student outcomes are important, the interest of voters are greater than that of govt employees, etc.

0: https://morganfoy.github.io/papers/Foy_JMP.pdf

Presumably this also rules out any company or non-profit from negotiating a contract with the government, or suing the state.

both private companies and workers should not be allowed to band together to deny the government all contracts until they get the one they want.

Every sector of the economy is looking for more workers.

Having an executive with contempt for the law and the concept of separation of powers and judicial review is a perversion of democracy.

The democratic rule of the people is driven by the law. What laws have the republicans passed authorizing these actions?

I agree it’s unreasonable that you’re being downvoted. I disagree strongly with your position, but you’re expressing it in a completely appropriate manner.

That makes it easy for people to leave the government.

The question you should be asking is: are there enough people who are sufficiently competent to take on the government roles?

Case study where the workers had less power than expected: Reagan vs. air traffic controllers.

Case studies where the government had less power than expected: Every coup ever, UK's Winter of Discontent (even if the long-term result was electorate going for Thatcher who gutted the unions), Polish Solidarity Movement.