Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the private sector except the most dire circumstances.
You have to understand consultancies in IT are just brokers. They buy in "inventory" of "profiles" at as low a cost as possible, and sell that inventory to their customers for as much as possible.
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.
I think it is important to distinguish between Consulting, Staff Augmentation, and Managed Services. Many of the large integrators/consultancies do all of these options, but the objectives, contract sizes, and durations of the contracts are all expected to be different.
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)
I disagree - no one is calling large scale gov contractors such as Northrop Grumman, GDIT, CGI, CACI, many more etc. consultants - yet a lot of the IT work they do overlaps with the consultancies.
“Contractors” has become the more common term over time.
That’s definitely not true. I’ve worked for companies on the consulting side for five years.
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.
I would say that "Consulting" model as defined above is employed moreso (but not entirely) by Deloitte, but Accenture and Booz Allen have a higher percentage of on-site folks not at all engaged with internal IP building, sales, etc that amount to staff augmentation. As Booz Allen and Deloitte went after service contracts typically held by folks like Lockheed, GD, CSC, etc it was a race to the bottom for fees to grab as much land as possible, so there wasn't really any head room for people that could do both in the rate they pass through to the customer.
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.
Sounds like the richest and most powerful organization on Earth should start paying market salaries for its engineers. Not sure why that is so difficult.
Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't even available because there is some rule about how people can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for consultants and all of their overhead.
(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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn suicidal en masse.
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.
I don’t think it has anything to do with whether it was a white collar crime or not. If it was the other team that committed the crime there would be endless outrage from his supporters whether or not they understood the crime.
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…
I understand what the email server thing was about. I also understand what the signal thing was about. I don't think it's possible to compare the two. One involved a device/software "helpfully" adding a phone number to group chat because it "helpfully" added the phone number to a contact that was not that contact's phone number.
The other one was a private email server, set up on purpose.
> jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds
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.
I know someone who wanted to move from government contractor to government employee. He was already a veteran, had a degree, few years of experience as a contractor, etc. it took an entire year from “okay we can give you a job” to him starting.
More anecdote: a bunch of contractors were being fired (or whatever it should be called) because the project they were working on was a horrible shit show. I don't know what went wrong, but it was a lot of money that produced nothing and was publicly canceled.
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.
I worked at Raytheon in geointelligence services a long time ago and saw this happen and it wasn't a particular mystery why. Raytheon had acquired a smaller company decades back that handled all the ground processing for US spy satellite collections. This was a small group of like 50 people who'd been working in an extremely niche domain that was also classified and they'd been doing it for 20+ years each.
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.
>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?
Not all software work is generic CRUD work. Some work requires actual, domain level expertise that has been built up over decades. Admittedly, this work is few and far between and usually you wind up shoveling shit into a dumpster fire...
That makes sense. An FTE costs 2x as much as a contractor to the government and the latter can be fired. I’m glad it is this way. Even DOGE is temporary.
They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV.
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.
As a computer scientist who worked as a research scientist i was paid more as a Federal Surfguard (beach lifeguard) than i was doing TS cleared work with the government. The GS scale is fundamental a broken wager. When I gradated college the government was willing to pay 75K for employment. I had offers from private industry as internships making more than that per hour. They were easily 15K off my next offer and that was only because I thought I would like defense in general where the pay is pulled lower because they do so much government contracting. After exiting the defense industry I was making what I was predicated to make in 20 years at the government in 3 years in private industry. Not counting stock options etc.
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.
if you work for the government you can get your student loans forgiven without the tax burden, you get retirement, you get 1 hour of k-time (time off) per week of work, which means a day off every 8 weeks, or 13 days+ a year of PTO, plus sick leave, plus health insurance that is pretty good, plus...
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.
> They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV.
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.
Another reason why consultants are good in government is because of unions. I am generally pro-union, but a side effect of unions, at least in my experience, is that you will have a proportion of incompetent people who can not complete anything and you can not effectively get rid of them. Consultants who are clearly incompetent or even just not a good fit are much easier to get rid of.
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 generally pro-union, but a side effect of unions, at least in my experience, is that you will have a proportion of incompetent people who can not complete anything and you can not effectively get rid of them.
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.
Working for the Federal government used to provide a solid pension, solid healthcare for life, and rock solid job security. The first has been mostly eroded away over the last decade. The last of course has completely evaporated over the past 3 months. AFAIK you still get healthcare for life if you manage to retire. All in all, I can absolutely see why someone would take the US civil service deal 20 years ago. Not so much 5-10 years ago.
Healthcare has also been eroded away as it is frequently needed to pay extra for concierge or direct primary care to be able to see a doctor, otherwise you are being seen by a physician assistant or nurse practitioner first.
And that is one of the more charitable political reasons that exist. I'm guessing Dolette and the like didnt drop enough campaign contributions. Betting in a couple months Tesla is gonna get a big fat contract.
Theoretically, there's some sort of arbitrage happening.
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. )
Only place this falls apart is that Accenture / Deloitte are really not sexy. Like being a federal employee at a similar pay scale would actually be more sexy. McKinsey/BCG maybe this makes sense.
>Accenture / Deloitte are really not sexy. [...] McKinsey/BCG maybe this makes sense.
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.
Well, they are a lot more appealing than government jobs at least, and have a very strong system for recruiting and hiring people right out of college.
That was Edward Snowden's explanation as well, for why he was technically employed by Booz Allen Hamilton while doing sysadmin work for his former employer, the NSA.
This is close to what I wrote myself, but the problem here isn't being able to fire people because they underperformed. The problem is what to do about temporary jobs that finish. They performed exactly as expected, maybe even exceeded expectations, but when the work is finished, you still need to get rid of the position, and they can't do that with permanent civil servants.
On one hand it's true, on the other people want stability in their jobs. You need a compromise between flexibility for the employer and stability for the employee, and one such compromise (in this area) is having a consulting company whose contract with the client can be easily terminated, while keeping the actual people doing the work with a job and stable income.
Another reason in favor of reliance on contractors, at least in a couple of federal agencies I’ve worked with, is to improve diversity metrics. For agencies that require lots of technical workers, the reality is that means a heavily male workforce. But agencies (up until a few months ago) liked to tout that they were “model employers” with very diverse workplaces, and near gender equity. Then you actually show up and notice the building is full of the usual (for tech) contingent of white and Asian dudes but they don’t count as employees for diversity statistics.
The greatest reason they need to use contractors in general, not just "consultants," is that hiring a civil servant is opening a position forever. The federal government certainly can downsize, as we're seeing now, but they rarely do, and they don't hire people for six-month contracts. They hire them permanently, and would then need to go through a layoff process to reduce staff.
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.
A major incentive for hiring work out to the private sector is the impossibility of firing GS-series employees. Ultimately, whomever the elites are who happen to be taking a lap through government today are interesting in maintaining a responsive chattel workforce capable of reaping and sowing the crops of the day. They depend on their slave drivers, I mean senior HR staff, to keep them informed about how their current staff mix affects their ability to react to the crises of the day. If you have tons of highly trained agroconomists in GS billets, what are you going to do with them?
>they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales.
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.
It has been this way a long time. I interviewed and got a job offer with the Naval Research Lab in the late 1990's. It was a very cool job working on chips for space defense systems and I was told they could match any private offer and as a bonus I would retire with a full pension when I was 41 (I was 21 at the time). It sounded good and I loved the idea of making things that went into space. Then I started to get offers from companies in Silicon Valley. They were 50% higher and had free apartments for a few months plus a sign on bonus. I asked the NRL to match and they said there was no way they could. I moved to the valley...
Before DOGE it was USDS and they had lots of gs-15s. Especially back when they would just straight up match private sector salaries.
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.
Matt Cutts went from Google to the US Digital Service and did some amazing work. Maybe he’s an outlier, but I don’t think so. There are a lot of supremely talented people willing to take a massive pay cut to do good, meaningful work.
The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing.
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.
It’s amazing that people so committed to constitutional principles were able to enact the largest tax increase in history without the advice and consent of congress. Impressive even for tax and spend republicans.
In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions.
They absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress can stop this at any time. They elect not to. Their silence is consent in this case. You can attribute that silence to active support or cowardice but either way they can stop it and don't so they approve of it.
"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.
The latter comment is a reference to one of america's founding events being triggered by an ~8% tariff on foreign imports by americans, levied by a unilateral power who thought themselves king of the territory.
The law is still the law regardless of the congress’s desire or ability to execute change. A change in the majority doesn’t require a proactive affirmation.
With respect to the British Empire, you may want to review the concept of “no taxation without representation”.
> absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress can stop this at any time. They elect not to.
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.
Huh? Trump won the popular vote. Maybe make better arguments in the next election if you don't like the current leader, rather than a violent revolution to overturn a democratically elected leader
I mean, let's not act like firing people and cancelling contracts without caring if you get sued or break things is substantially more difficult than, say, closing browser tabs
I'll join you in getting downvoted for absolutely no reason. It's a shitty thing they're doing, but your observation is correct. My job working on NIH-funded research projects is directly in their path, so I wish they weren't stomping a mudhole across science and technology. But they are, and, as you note, they're doing it very effectively and with incredible speed.
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?
By their own metrics, sure, maybe. I don't actually know what the real measurement of success is for them. But, to clarify, I didn't mean doing it right by their metric, I meant in my estimation, or [gestures broadly] our estimation.
It's easy to destroy things - especially when no heed is paid to laws or down stream effects.
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 data on hostile takeovers by "corporate raiders" very much does not support the characterization here.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I was talking generally, not this specific set of cuts. From what I know (and what is generally accepted), there is an abundance of waste in government spending. I don't know anything about this specific Accenture contract, so can't say much about it. But I have enough close contact with government to know with absolute certainty that some amount of cleanup is long past due.
This deviated from the original topic, and I'm not following your metaphor flows. How does your post relate to consultants specifically? Is there an implication that consultants not part of the 'mess'?
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.
> How does your post relate to consultants specifically?
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.
Maybe the federal government needs a reset/dismantling/pruning/whatever you want to call it. With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal government would likely be expanding spending and gov't programs right now even though the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget, which itself exceeds the next 9 defense budgets in the world combined.
No need for the scare quotes. The current federal budget is expanding, under the current administration.
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.
Current budget is set to expand deficit spending due to tax cuts and certain spending increases, in spite of project cuts to social safety nets and entitlements.
> With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal government would likely be expanding spending and gov't programs right now
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.
You can't just spend your troubles away forever. It might temporarily alleviate things, but long term it will collapse the entire system. At some point there need to be painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like. It's unpopular to do painful things, but it's necessary for survival.
You can't just cut your troubles away: Poor educational system; low education; high income inequality; low real income growth rate; high rates of drug addition; low social mobility; housing shortages; poor public transit; decreased access to healthy food; private equity buying everything and jacking up the prices; etc.
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.
I don't disagree with you - I'm in favor of both slashing spending and increasing taxes.
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.
you have a fundamental misunderstanding of govermental debt and the US.the US CAN 100%, its not a guess its a fact, spend away their troubles forever.
learn how the global economy is, understand what fiat is, find out what your missing. (first hint, money is a construct - and follow the tbills)
you know what does make the US have to do "painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like. It's unpopular to do painful things, but it's necessary for survival" ??
Watch everything the current administration does because they dont understand modern economics and you'll see.
Yes, the US can spend away their troubles, as long as it maintains treaties it signed on to, can, at least, to some degree, demonstrate some maintenance of its debt, and doesn’t alienate its trade parters, much less the whole world.
If you think I’m just being a partisan, take a look at the US Bond market for the last two weeks.
Trump is looking to increase spending. Musk's future is dependent on increasing spending. Where do you get the idea they're cutting the budget? They're cutting normal people ...
This is also true for 'big bets' that a company makes that gain enough momentum to stick around but haven't fully been realized or financially reconciled with the corporate strategy. Source: cloud engineering lead at a large financial.
Sorry, but it does occur in the private. I recently worked at a company which pretty much did this. They fired all of the contractors and a bunch of employees because they decided change their focus. It is far from dying.
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.
But ... Trump will increase spending. Musk's financial future is dependent on increasing spending. They want to INCREASE the load on your paycheck, not decrease it.
Not really. Trump has cut the budget of NASA which is the part of the government that is the biggest customer of Spacex. They have also want to get rid of EV tax credits which are a huge source of income for Musk. Financially he would be much better off under a Harris administration.
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.
The last data is from the previous month. Trump had already started "cutting costs", and requested a budget ... 8% higher than Biden's last budget. Same week data came out, showing Trump has overspent by about 10%. This combines to Trump outspending Biden by about 15% so far.
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.
Why has nobody been prosecuted, then? Why was USAID's detailed budget website removed by the current administration? If crimes were being committed, why has there been no accountability?
I keep hearing about all this corruption, but nobody seems to be in jail about it.
Accountability is shutting down the agency and shuttering the programs. They did that.
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.
No, if a project does not work then you shut it down. If someone is stealing money then you prosecute them for theft. That's what the DOJ is for. There are plenty of instances of the DOJ prosecuting government employees for crimes.
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?
What exactly do think the Federal Budget is? Discretionary budgeting within USAID is a tiny, tiny amount. Even the items they cherry picked as being wasteful, many were from the State Department (Ambassadors has some discretionary funds to support the local arts.)
Congress decides how taxes are spent, not the Executive Branch, and certainly not the accountable to no-one DOGE.
tbf, unlike the US government employees selected on the basis of being sufficiently immune to reality to assert that Trump won the 2020 election in their "fidelity to the Dear Leader" tests, those who think that endorsement of such views is "deplorable" might have a point...
I feel the appeal of your argument, but people just aren’t fungible, and the incentives in a public in private identity are completely different.
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.
I'm not paying close attention to all the noise, so forgive me if I am way off base. But aren't they effectively doing a values purge/refinement/reset? Similar to what Elon did with twitter and what few companies have managed to do to transform themselves?
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)
Even if this is the case, “process” is immensely more important in government and military than in companies because government has the authority, the prerogative even, to use violence, ruin lives, and kill people. The onerous processes are in place to protect civilians.
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.
That's all true. Process and bureaucracy are guard rails, and guard rails limit change. So when the whole system is barrelling towards a cliff (default, hyperinflation, kinetic war), what should the leaders try and do?
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.
I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff because of the current administration, who took away the guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff.
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?
In this video Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger talk about how the US system is heading towards a cliff, and the video was recorded in 2005. They articulate it well, although the video has a couple glitches in it.
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.
20 years ago. We had the 2008 GFCI and COVID since then. I'll take whatever cliff they are referring to over the deliberate madness of Trump.
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 think that the most appropriate strategy depends on the specifics of the situation. For some types of problems the best course of action is to do nothing, some times the best course of action is to make small adjustments, sometimes do less, sometimes do more, sometimes slow down, sometimes speed up, and sometimes the best course of action is to make radical changes. I don't over-generalize and prescribe the same ideological answer to everything.
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.
Plus, many of the laws government has to follow are exactly about the process by which things are done. That is what helps ensure it is fair, effective, transparent, etc.
I agree, but what was fair and effective in 1970 might not be anymore, right?
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.
Yeah, structural changes don't happen slowly and by the rules. What people don't like is what they think the new system is going to look like. But we don't know what that is going to be because Trump seems to be better at destroying than at building. It will depend on his successor(s) being good at building institutions. Or it may fail and the old system regenerates.
This seems accurate to me. They are destroying many US institutions, and what replaces them may be better or may be worse. I am not sure anyone can tell right now.
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).
I'm not convinced things were as bad as people claim. The right wing has been conducting a concerted propaganda war for the last 20 years to make people scared.
Fair and transparent are arguable. I have never met someone who deals with the government on a regular basis that has ever described it as effective, and at this point I am willing to sacrifice some fairness and transparency for effectiveness.
In a fairly recent interview where he was asked about DOGE, Bill Gates estimated 10-15% waste in government spending. Saving that amount is not worth all the collateral long term damage Trump is doing.
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.
First of all, my comment has nothing to do with Trump, so let's leave him out of it.
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.
I'm not totally disagreeing. But the problem is that there is not just the dollar cost of contracts.
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.
I don't really see the bureaucracy as preventing that sort of thing. The $800 million Obamacare website was both a complete waste of money and it didn't work. A corrupt contract might even be less likely to be a failure because the governors cousin knows that if he fails to deliver there will be a public outrage and he could go to jail. Whereas there are almost no consequences when a government contractor screws up after having gone through the legal process.
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.
Well, years later the website is still operational and the company still seems functional after Musk cut 80+% of the staff, which to me is pretty mind blowing. I'd call that pretty successful. If I, as the end user, can't tell the difference between pre-80% and post-80% cut twitter then what value was that 80% bringing to the organization, exactly?
Well, it's an incredibly unpleasant place to be, the curation is terrible, ads are dregs of the internet, and they no longer allow public access to the site or API in any meaningful way. Yay.
Lost massive amount of revenue so other financial partners on the deal had to write it down substantially- is losing money a successful investment in your book?
Well revenue cratered and that’s usually a critical business metric for financially viable businesses
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.
There are many legitimate reasons to criticize Elon, but I think you are mistaken about this one.
After years of implementing no new functionality at twitter, Elon cut 75% of the workforce and in a relatively short time that followed they implemented:
Expanded Content Capabilities: Users can now post long-form content, including articles up to 25,000 characters, and upload videos up to three hours in length.
AI Integration: The platform introduced "Grok," an AI chatbot developed by xAI, integrated into X to provide real-time assistance and content summarization.
Job Search Functionality: X added a job search feature, allowing users to explore employment opportunities directly on the platform.
Financial Services: Plans were announced for "X Money Account," a digital wallet enabling real-time payments and fund transfers, developed in partnership with Visa.
Communication Tools: Audio and video calling features were introduced, expanding the platform's communication capabilities.
Content Monetization: Users can now earn income from engagement on their posts.
Many more things... tiered subscription plans, overhaul of moderation policies, community notes expansion, algorithm changes.
They were able to do all these things with a 75% reduction in workforce. Don't you find that interesting? If it had nothing to do with Elon, what would you think about it?
It's also been reported that X/Twitter is now more profitable than it has ever been. It's revenue may have shrunk, I am not sure, but even if it's true cherry-picking that fact isn't intellectually honest.
You're being way too generous about the values they're trying to set. If it were about "people who value outcome over process", they would have done cuts in a way that keep those type of people, and programs that already have good outcomes.
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.
In the UK, the preference for consultants and contractors was always because it’s accounted for differently on the balance sheet.
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.
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.
That's nonsense. IR35 basically makes it more difficult for companies to treat an individual like an employee whilst paying them as a "consultant" (saving themselves various obligations and allowing the "consultant" much more flexibility in avoiding tax). Accenture actually used to hire a lot of people that way themselves...
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)
You're missing how IR35 actually reshaped the ecosystem - not just in terms of tax compliance, but in terms of who's allowed to profit from delivering services.
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.
There are consultants who bring real value. They’re experts at the top of their fields, offering skills not available in-house. They help upskill staff, deliver results, and provide knowledge transfer that has long-term benefits. Those people deserve to be paid well for what they bring.
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.
I hope senior government staff face hostility exactly proportionate to the salaries and budgets they've extracted from the US populace through taxation and inflation, alongside the foreign influence far too many of them are responsible for peddling. The government is not a jobs program, and they owe the people, not the other way around.
Their actions are actively hostile to the US government and its citizens. You'll never convince me otherwise. Republicans act as if US citizens are the enemy and they want to destroy the country.
It's the only way of looking at it that makes sense. The enemies are in the gates and no one is fighting.
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.
