As someone who frequently books campgrounds at the county, state, and national level, Recreation.gov provides by far the best user experience for browsing sites on a map and viewing calendar availability that I've encountered. Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems. Maybe I'm being naive, but it doesn't seem too important to me that Booz Allen is collecting some of its payment as a part of booking fees rather than directly from government contracts. A government website that works this well seems worthy of praise to me!
Look, good websites are great. I’m glad you’re happy with the experience. But building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers. Building decent websites in 2023 should be a competitive fee-for-delivery service, even for websites that have specialized functionality and large scale like auctions. Someone should pay you a (potentially large!) fee for building it and an ongoing maintenance/support fee. Nobody should be entitled to collect a huge rent amounting to any substantial fraction of all national park recreational fees just because they built some infrastructure, any more than the people who paved the roads leading to the national parks should be allowed to collect tolls on every driver passing through.
If your response is that websites are so hard to build that our government can’t spec out its requirements and get it built — and therefore just need to overpay by 10,000x for the privilege of having a decent user experience, then maybe we (technologists) need to go have a long look in the mirror and ask what we’ve done to make things so terrible.
It's much more likely that the government agency in charge of this had $4.99 to build the site, not even enough for Fivver.
But they have all the latitude in the world to sign "portion of the ticket price" contracts, and so they did.
It's not Booz's fault; it's the situation that lead this to (apparently) be the best option for the agency.
(This same crowd here wouldn't even turn over in their sleep if the same agency had contracted out building the site and ran it themselves on AWS and paid Amazon 3-5x what Booz is getting, mind you.)
It is perfectly fine to diagnose the pathology that led to this outcome. It is not ok for people to excuse it because “the website works fine for me!” Government agencies need an interface to communicate with taxpayers and “customers” in order to exist. In the 1960s that meant paper mail and customer service agents, and most government agencies were reasonably competent (if sluggish) at handling those technologies. In 2023 and beyond it means smoothly-working websites, and governments have decided to treat these as a weird, expensive mystery technology - long past the point where industry has made website design into something routine. The days when governments could budget $5 to agencies for tech development and/or expect them to spend 50x standard industry prices on broken government contractors are long behind us. And there is no room for this kind of predatory outsourcing. We need to demand a lot better.
Even if we see things as charitably as you outline (and well done for that) the contract could be a "portion of the ticket sales up to $X total."
I don't blame Booz for that (entirely). Somebody else had to sign that contract, too.
But if I'm going to lay into Booz, I have to look in the mirror myself. I have worked for employers that charge as much as they can get away with in a market that wasn't exactly fair. When incumbents spend almost unbelievable amounts to build a functioning legislative mote, then exploit that for all it's worth, you could call that "good business." And you can rationalize by saying, "If I don't, somebody else will, so it might as well be me who benefits." But the excuses seem pretty flimsy when historians catalog the damages.
Still, the biggest blame goes to the other signature on the contract.
I agree it's "not Booz's fault". That's the point of honest graft. It's the fault of our government for allowing them to have so much control over these junk fees.
I would argue that the cost is less in setting up than in running and maintaining a site at the scale of Recreation.gov. That includes aspects of customer support.
Many of these agencies are forced into uncompetitive compensation structures which means contracting out most, if not all, of their technical work.
A major part of the issue is the government contracting system. In an attempt at fairness, it has massive amounts of oversight burden. That is, in turn, a barrier to additional competition for the work.
> Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems.
So what's the acceptable upper limit of rent we should be charged to use a website that's already built to use lands our taxes already paid to buy to a company who provides little-to-no ongoing service to us?
It's easy to get emotional about this. But when I try to be fair, I acknowledge that "little-to-no ongoing service" is probably not completely accurate.
There are storage systems, databases, app servers, etc. that all need some degree of constant care. I don't know what the scale or structure of those systems are, so it is difficult to say what that cost should be. Perhaps it qualifies as "little". It almost certainly does not qualify as "none".
Of course, the hardware and the labor might already be included in the taxes I pay. I don't know that either. I wonder how much work it would take to sort out all the different sources of revenue Booz has from this.
For most of Hacker News, it's easier to avoid the emotions that would come with actually looking at the horrible things corporations are doing to our society. You'll defend corporations no matter what, pretending to take the "rational" approach, because you benefit from corporations that are doing many of the same harms.
But being unemotional in the face of constant corporate destructive behaviors isn't rational or normal, it's effectively sociopathic. Yes, I'm emotional, because I have a conscience and I listen to it. You don't get to dismiss what I'm saying because it's emotional. Not being emotional when companies do shite like this is the problem. It's not my emotions that are the problem, it's your lack of emotions that's the problem. Where is your conscience? Why aren't you emotional when corporations do harmful things and profit?
> But when I try to be fair, I acknowledge that "little-to-no ongoing service" is probably not completely accurate.
Bro, I'm a freelance full stack web developer, and I've been the part-time sole developer for sites that serve millions of customers, because you don't need even one full-time dev to maintain a system to which you're not adding new features. There's literally nothing you have said I'm not aware of, and I'm saying "little-to-none" because that's accurate.
The largest costs here are hosting fees. If the system is at all efficient, that can easily be handled for <$10k/year, but let's just say $100k/year because even that amount is literally irrelevant. Millions of people book with the NPS yearly and pay a $6 fee. There is no way the money here comes even close to being reasonable.
You aren't trying to be fair. You're trying to defend corporations at any cost, like many folks on Hacker News. Your ideology is one of the most harmful forces in our society today.
> There are storage systems, databases, app servers, etc. that all need some degree of constant care. I don't know what the scale or structure of those systems are, so it is difficult to say what that cost should be. Perhaps it qualifies as "little". It almost certainly does not qualify as "none".
You could have this entire setup managed by AWS / GCP for < 1k a month. It's not a complicated site.
It sounds like your issue is with the federal government charging fees for the national parks, not booze Allen Hamilton charging a processing fee for it.
"by far the best... that I've ever encountered" is a terrible argument in support of a monopoly. It's legally impossible to have something better, so of course it's the best we know of.
'Exactly how much Booz Allen reaps from Recreation.gov is not publicly known, nor is how much it costs to operate Recreation.gov on an annual basis. The lawsuit contends that Recreation.gov handled 9 million transactions in 2021 and generates “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars of revenue every year for Booz Allen, constituting a complete windfall.”' [1]
I'd be surprised if that revenue were below 100 million. A team of a couple dozen competent developers could certainly operate it for a fraction of that.
Rather, the incentives to extract ongoing revenue and increase the take as much as possible are better aligned, not delivering the best possible experience for the public. This is not some service ran at cost otherwise it simply wouldn't be done, therefore there is public money being wasted for private profit.
The fact that the US even has a booking system and restricted access to national parks is indicative of a larger issue, that issue likely being that the number of national parks you have is far too low, and that they are too distant from where people live. If you fixed these issues (which at this point would be politically difficult since it would likely require land reclamations, but not impossible), you might not have to restrict access to national parks.
I, for instance, live in the Helsinki region in Finland, which is a metropolitan area tightly nestled between two modest national parks, both within a reasonable distance by public transport, and both of which I can simply stroll into without any such restrictions or bureocracy. The US could, if there was willingness for it, strive to offer similar opportunities near its major cities. It's simply a matter of willingness.
The other issue is probably that some of your national parks are so iconic (e.g. yosemite) that they'd probably have too much demand even if the country was filled to the brim with alternatives, but you probably can't do much about that issue.
This interpretation really doesn't seem very realistic. The government can't create more grand canyons or mountain ranges, at least not without raising taxes a few percentage points.
The issue isn't that there are few parks for people to visit, the issue is that these parks are unique and highly popular. There are thousands of parks in the United States, there just aren't thousands of grand canyons, thermal geysers, or mountain ranges.
I live within a 5 hour drive of something like 20 national parks. I live within 60 minutes of several National Recreation areas, State Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas with all sorts of different designations. I'm within a 60 minute walk of at least 4 popular campsites.
It is not my experience that the USA lacks in this respect.
But if you want to visit the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, or Zions, or many of these other places, your last paragraph is spot on. The policy of the State of Nevada has been that you cannot reserve campsites in state parks. I think that just changed within the last year for the two most popular state parks. If you want to camp in the Valley of Fire among the red rocks or petrified forest you now need a reservation. If you want to camp just outside the boundaries, there is no reservation required and no fee. Oh, yeah, and no potable water or restrooms, etc.
Note: the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, and Zions are not Nevada State Parks. And you'll have to wait another year now to catch Gold Fever at Buckland Station State Park[0].
Most national parks will allow you to "stroll"into them. And the US has quite a few national parks (as well as state parks" but she are more popular than others. It isn't like we can build another Grand Canyon.
It’s a pretty good website, but considering it’s replaced full-time humans arranging your reservations by hand for a fee of $0, I’m not seeing the fees as reasonable.
It feels a lot like economic rent, with Booz Allen positioning themselves between you and your land. You pay their fee not because the user experience was great, but because it’s the only way to camp at your favorite park.
It's good to see investigative journalism still alive in small blogs like this, but at the same time it is rather sad once you realize it gets drowned in an infinite supply of ragebait and never ends up being acted upon.
One thing you should understand about the biggest Government IT contractors is that they put one of their few 'A' teams (really a 'B' team by big tech standards) on the project during the sales process, then swap out to one of their many 'D' teams after the win dinner.
Many of the people actually implementing the project wouldn't last long in the private sector and that's why you end up with results ranging from disappointing to epic disaster though bureaucrats inside the Government often do their part to make things worse.
It seems that by giving a significant take of each transaction to the contractor they were incentivized to actually do good work. This might be a feature instead of a bug except for how gross it is when dealing with public resources.
There are exceptions to this but they tend to be smaller companies working on smaller projects or subcontracting to the big guys, where performance on the contract is important to future wins.
One thing you should understand about the biggest Government IT contractors is that they put one of their few 'A' teams (really a 'B' team by big tech standards) on the project during the sales process, then swap out to one of their many 'D' teams after the win dinner.
That's not just true for big government IT contractors, it's standard practice for any large contracting/consulting firm in the private sector too. The A team does the RFP response, the C or D team does the implementation so as to protect margins.
My favourite part about this is you only need to subvert one guy and then you have a long term ongoing revenue program. The government is powerless in front of you. See Chicago parking for another example.
One day I hope to do government contracting once I have a network. Generational wealth in a repeating fashion.
My thoughts on reading this were a little bit "that's a nice lucritive contract and revenue stream that Booz Allen has exclusive access to" but mostly "if the U.S. Government were to try do do this themselves, it would have been another healthcare.gov fiasco and cost twice as much as Booz Allen is taking"
Govt contracting firm CGI built healthcare.gov then the rescue staff that would later become Presidential Innovation Fellows, 18F, US Digital Service as well as Accenture stepped in. Nowadays more than a few consulting firms keep the site going.
These days there are PLENTY of govt IT fiascos, though there’s usually a contractor behind the mess. They also don’t attract the mainstream ire the way healthcare.gov did. The biggest example that jumps to mind is the VA’s botched rollout of the Cerner/Oracle platform. Plenty of angry congressmen but not headline news outside the DMV (DC, MD, VA).
Do you not remember the launch failure of healthcare.gov? The original site was built by federal contractors, who took over 300 million dollars, and it failed on day 1. Day 2, Obama brought in private, US Tech companies to fix it.
Yes, I remember, and it was built by private companies.
"Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed.[2] The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts.[11] CGI was also responsible for building some of the state-level healthcare exchanges, with varying levels of success (some did not open on schedule).[9]"
CGI is the company that was the focus of the blame at the time.
healthcare.gov was a disaster for a combination of reasons.
However, one of the primary reasons is had such a rough start was because FAR too many people were channelled into it.
The individual states were supposed to set up their own systems that the Federal system would reimburse and channel people into. Places like California did so--and the experience was quite decent. The problem, of course, was the all the Red states refusing to set up a system and all their citizens wound up in the healthcare.gov system.
Of course, the major problem with healthcare.gov was the same problem as with all government contracts--outsourcing. All contractors basically play "chicken" with the government--they take all the money they can up front and do as little work as they can until the very last moment. If they get really lucky, the program gets cancelled and they get to keep all the money having done no work. Normally, they get yelled at at some point and have to put in work while the schedule slips and slips.
Occasionally, though, they wind up with a contract that they didn't do jack on that had a real deadline and the contractor winds up with egg on their face. This was healthcare.gov.
Maybe note this to the author: looking at this from his perspective, maybe he simply doesn't know about them, but they seem right up his alley to investigate and write about.
9000 words to say that BAH is doing a 120% transaction fee ($9 on $7) on unknown development cost to do internet based reservations to national parks especially lottery managed ones.
yeah it' annoying... but you used to do it over mail or in person. You can still do it in person easily. previously you'd mail in and find out 2 weeks before that yes you can fly in and do that 2 week trip. Not really actionable either unless you live there.
I'm not sure what they want... the real crime is that the recreation.gov site is fucking slow as shit and lacks many options for quick searching requiring you to hunt and peck through sites.
setup a non-for-profit to manage this stuff if that's your beef.
> setup a non-for-profit to manage this stuff if that's your beef.
Is there some benevolent non-profit/cooperative out there that would do these kinds of IT projects? Kinda like a credit union or mutual insurance company?
Are you sure? I was in the USA recently, and the Dunewood Campground (Indiana Dunes National Park) had signs explicitly stating that there was no in-person booking, but that recreation.gov was the only way to book sites.
Later I looked at Lake Erie State Park (New York), and they said that reserveamerica.com (or RA’s call centre) was the only way to book, no walk-ins permitted, and then the quoted $15 fee for their cheapest sites ballooned to something like $27.60 due to a reservation fee, an out-of-state-person fee, maybe some taxes…
I really don't understand why the GSA can't do this (or CISA since they seem to be taking over some of the GSA's responsibilities)?
A reservation system seems like the kind of thing that'd show up often enough at various federal, state, and local levels for there to be enough value in the GSA just building their own, providing integrations into their US Web Design System so that it's easy for orgs to add, and offering it at cost to the orgs or facilities that need it.
Does the GSA code anything? does the Govt? For all this stuff isn't it all contract? What I'd hope for in a situation like this is that it's a term contract and the code stays with the govt but really do you want to take over someone else's code?
They do..login.gov is probably the best current example and is ever expanding usage throughout federal sites. But GSA has also been under the microscope in the past couple years. Login.gov has received a lot of flak. They’re unlikely to take on another big “build it and they will come” project like a reusable reservation system. They make money off other agencies and those agreements need to be signed before the work starts..
Now all that said..contractors work on login.gov too and are prob the majority of the staff now!
login.gov is a lot better than id.me that's for sure. didn't know gsa made it. Can they help the IRS not use id.me and receive files over any mechanism but mail and fax?
this sounds like someone who is kvetching on principle because he resents private companies being involved with public services, not a legitimate complaint.
$6 isn't a lot relative to the cost of even driving to a national park for most people. comparing it to a $50 bag check or $100 in ticketmaster crap is disingenuous in the extreme.
recreation.gov is one of the very few dot gov's that doesn't make me want to put my hand through the nearest wall, precisely because it wasn't built like healthcare.gov.
the site services 23 million active users and has to handle a lot of complexity around managing limits on how many people can visit.
"Here’s how it all works at the field level. A manager at a National Park, Forest Service, BLM office, or the like decides that a user fee must be paid or that a site or trip is so popular that a paid permit or reservation is required to protect the resource and the experience. The consumer of those services—we the people—log into rec.gov and pay the designated fee or pay into a lottery to try to win a permit. That money goes to the Treasury Department. From that account, Recreation.gov pays Booz Allen for its work based off each transaction as agreed upon in the original contract, and almost all of the rest goes back to the individual agency. Over the past four years, says Delappe, 85 percent of what is charged goes back to the agencies. Recreation One Stop does not set those fees, nor does Booz Allen. But Booz Allen’s original contract did include specific fees for various transactions. It’s the managers in the field that set the prices. They of course try to cover their costs and the transaction costs for Recreation.gov."
TLDR: people be sayin shit. in this case "people" is some rando on substack and "shit" is "muh private company bad"
you're looking at this from a very narrow perspective in terms of use case... one of my favorite climbing areas near me(shelf road) became a reservation through rec.gov only campground. I used to show up on Saturday morning, pay $7 for one night to camp, and leave Sunday afternoon after my 2nd day of climbing.
as of 2 years ago rec.gov took over and kept the same $7/night rate but added an $8 service fee.
it's complete bullshit for those of us who regularly use government recreational services.
> $6 isn't a lot relative to the cost of even driving to a national park for most people. comparing it to a $50 bag check or $100 in ticketmaster crap is disingenuous in the extreme.
True: in one case we're overpaying for a service, in the other case, we're paying rent to someone else for something we own.
What exactly is the amount of rent to use land that we own would be unacceptable to you?
Is there ever a case where Hacker News will argue in favor of humans instead of corporations?
