I work at NASA in tech development and I have found that we have a lot of poor quality support service contracts. The faceless contracting companies supply staff that technically fill roles like providing IT support services, or supporting purchasing. More often than not they are so utterly unhelpful and unknowledgeable that it's actually easier and faster to do things myself, totally defeating the purpose. The contracting mechanism seems to add significant extra communication overhead to everything making things much more sluggish, bureaucratic, disconnected, and just plain unpleasant. I actually care very much if my work gets done.
Getting a large contract in place can be a miserable slog and take a huge amount of time and effort to sort out, particularly with the cumbersome government contracting rules and laws. Good contract documents are also really challenging to write. Often times the results will be non-optimal, terms will be interpreted in ways you didn't intend, or you with you had put some more info in there. In many cases I believe the timeline to get a good contract in place can be comparable to the work that we want to perform. That's just silly.
Use of contracts for tech development creates large disconnects and significantly reduces our control and responsiveness to changing needs and ideas. If NASA employees are doing the work we can easily pivot when circumstances change and re-prioritize labor and much more quickly drop bad ideas as we learn new things. We can start investigating something without completely knowing what we're doing and figure it out as we go along. That sort of thing is harder to do with a contract. If the work is being done by a contractor, changing anything is vastly more difficult and complicated, and often not even worth the effort.
If we have a device or something developed by a contractor they often manage to contaminate it with some kind of proprietary info making it much more difficult to use and communicate the data. The tools and devices we develop internally don't have that problem and we're free to use, adapt, and communicate technical info about them as much as we want. Also, if we develop something ourselves, we inherently more deeply understand it and can more quickly make modifications or test out new ideas. That's less often the case when work is done on contract. IMO many of our most valuable developments are done internally due to the enhanced flexibility.
Not that all contracts are bad. There are plenty of cases where using contracts makes great sense and works out terrifically. However, you often just have to hope the right sort of company has decided to exist because doing it ourselves is often not an option. I have absolutely been told about a contractor: "I know they're not the best, but they're the only one interested in doing this work. If don't fund them for too long they may lose interest and then we'll have nothing".
There are plenty of other problems unrelated to contractors as well. But over-reliance on contracting is a big one.
As a contractor, I absolutely agree with all of your points here about the downsides of contractors.
I worked for several years on a few amazing contracts where we had the freedom to pivot and respond to changing needs. My most recent one however is terrible, but I believe it's due to a much more complex set of issues.
The organization is embroiled in decades long internal turf wars, leading to a culture of independent silos. The government must be perfect, therefore, each silo must be well-managed. So you end up with bureaucratic management processes duplicated across these silos. Regulatory obligations are growing more complex all of the time, so the processes become too entropic for the small silos to handle, and then leadership deteriorates. In a place like this, 50% of a contractor's job is to be the bureaucrat's human shield for when SHTF.
Just like the adage "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" there seem to be places in government where nobody ever got fired for making things too complicated. A recalibration is long overdue, probably not for NASA, but definitely other places where the overhead really isn't worth the result.
This article assumes that the services themselves won’t be cut, so they’ll have to use more contractors.
I think the point is that they’ll cut the services and contractors too. I’ve worked with government quite a bit at various levels and the level of messing around, pointless ideas and internal politics is astounding, as well as the lack of accountability and oversight in general.
The opinion I walked away with is that just like twitter, chunks of it could be cut away or properly digitised without affecting what people on the outside perceive or care about at all.
Honestly, DOGE seems like a disingenuous enterprise simply based on the fact that they are not starting with the DoD.
Defense contractors simply couldn't stop accidentally electricuting people in warzones[0, 1]. They have had a major negative impact on readiness while benefitting from massive contracts[2] and . There also appears to be a situation where DoD leadership has been captured by the defense industry[4].
An appeal to emotion does not negate the physical constraints of nature.
One can see an issue with a society with 80 non workers and 20 workers trying to compete in the world. The fact that limits exist is obvious, so the question of what that limit should be is all that is important.
While I am sure it is much easier to say than do, I do hope that I have the fortitude to take myself out though once I become too much of a resource sink for my descendants.
Luckily, society broadly creates more than enough wealth and resources to provide for you, even when you are disabled or elderly.
In modern society, if you are a “sink,” it is solely because the system is designed to make you that way – perhaps the wealthiest among us are able to pay a bit less on taxes, in exchange for your caretaker not getting monetary support. For example. I reckon gutting social security would be very profitable to some.
The government’s job is to be useful, and supporting those who can’t support themselves – like the elderly and disabled – is very literally the most noble and useful thing it can do.
>Luckily, society broadly creates more than enough wealth and resources to provide for you, even when you are disabled or elderly.
I see no evidence to indicate this. Societies do not exist in a vacuum, they either need to import resources, or they need to defend against invaders. Therefore, the more resources that go to the non productive, the less resources there are for importing and/or defense.
Importing also includes quality of life for young, productive people, as they usually aspire for material goods rather than living life solely for the purpose of servicing the non productive.
Having large portions of society not be productive for decades, even requiring large amounts of manual, highly educated labor to sustain them, may very well cause discord and decrease global standing. Demographics and the shape of population histograms affect inputs and outputs.
The simple evidence of my claims is the continual decrease of Social Security benefits. A simple monetary wealth transfer, easily comparable over time periods, is unsustainable due to increased longevity and lower total fertility rates, resulting in multiple cuts to Social Security benefits. It is common knowledge that people paying Social Security taxes now will receive less benefits.
> I see no evidence to indicate this. Societies do not exist in a vacuum, they either need to import resources, or they need to defend against invaders. Therefore, the more resources that go to the non productive, the less resources there are for importing and/or defense.
We are not nearly in such a resource-counting phase: We produce more than enough food to feed every single person in the US several times over: we have enough empty homes to ensure every person is housed; we have enough of much everything. Thanks to innovations that have happened under Capitalism, we are less resource-constrained in this regard than ever in human history. We have great excesses that are wasted, sometimes to our detriment, and sometimes comedically (ex., the practice of burning tonnes of corn by farmers in attempt to keep prices higher).
That Social Security is unsustainable is not due to a lack of physical resources nor manpower, but capital. Money.
There is currently a cap on taxable income, for Social Security. For the first $168 000, you pay the Social Security tax; for income beyond that point, you do not.
If we lifted or even abolished the cap, Social Security would be more than above water, and no cuts whatsoever would be necessary.
Not advanced healthcare, education, and laborious tasks such as cleaning people, and working in hot or cold cramped spaces to provide utilities.
>we are less resource-constrained in this regard than ever in human history.
Some things are plentiful, but some things are scarcer. Part of it is people have more opportunity and knowledge to choose to more preferable things rather than less preferable things.
>That Social Security is unsustainable is not due to a lack of physical resources nor manpower, but capital. Money.
Money is a proxy for manpower. For sure there is lots more room to take wealth from workers and give it to non workers, but expect more and more political headwinds and long term consequences. We have already been doing it for many decades, mostly via reducing the purchasing power of the currency (which hits workers the most) and inflating price of assets. I would posit it is at the forefront of the zeitgeist of young people feeling despondent. As I wrote before, it is trivial to know that young people today will get less than they pay in (absent the development of a robot that can pretty much do all the dirty tasks humans would rather not do).
It is. But you are talking about a very specific policy: How much money goes into Social Security. The cap is arbitrary – not a calculated reflection of physical reality. It is an artificial restraint! Whether the cap is $160 000 or $500 000, you can’t just say “this is a reflection of resource-scarcity” when it is very much a policy decision made to allow the wealthy to pay less taxes.
> For sure there is lots more room to take wealth from workers and give it to non workers, but expect more and more political headwinds and long term consequences.
The goal is, in my eyes, to reduce wealth taken from workers by non-workers – the owners that increasingly make more and more money proportionally to workers. The young always got less than they put in – that’s how companies profit – but now they get even less than they used to. This is because we’ve allowed wages and salaries to stagnate, letting wealth inequality become incomprehensibly massive compared to just two generations ago. The results of this is what makes the young poorer and despondent.
Raising a tax marginally on these owners, like raising the Social Security cap such that the ultra-wealthy pay more into it, doesn’t break physical reality nor does it take money from workers. It takes money from non-workers.
FICA taxes are earned income taxes, they take from workers by design.
Land value taxes (and other forms of taxing wealth such as estate tax) take from non workers. Funnily enough, that is never on the table, only more taxes on earned income.
Regardless, even that can be exhausted. Seize all the assets from everyone in the top 10%, and you still won’t have enough to pay for all the labor to service too many old people.
The country needs to keep exporting to keep the purchasing power of the currency sufficient to incentivize people to work for the money in the first place.
> Seize all the assets from everyone in the top 10%, and you still won’t have enough to pay for all the labor to service too many old people.
We are nowhere near that point; you could perhaps make this argument for Japan (though I’d be skeptical), but for the US? No, I’m sorry. That is very, very, far off. Our age distribution is healthy enough that every older person can be taken care of just fine — and we don’t need to seize all the assets of the top 10%. I really don’t understand how you can come to the conclusion that we are in such a resource and labor crisis based solely on slight funding shortfall for Social Security (which can be remedied by raising the cap a bit). It’s just narrative, that’s all you have.
Let’s talk about letting grandma starve when it’s a real problem, alright? Stop the dehumanization of old folk. We don’t like ageism around here.
> I do hope that I have the fortitude to take myself out though once I become too much of a resource sink for my descendants.
Seriously. It’s sad to see someone preemptively throw their life away over an imaginary crisis.
I wrote that food is not the issue, keeping grandma alive after heart attack or kidney failure or other things that require a lots of resources is the issue.
It is already impossible to see a doctor, and people have to settle for an NP/PA. A large proportion of young people are already despondent that they will never earn enough money to have enough purchasing power to increase their living standards.
These things are connected. And at every point, the solution has always been to tax young people more. That’s the ageism. Old people get federal government backed asset prices, discounts on property taxes, and young people get increased earned income taxes, for benefits they will never get themselves.
> Seriously. It’s sad to see someone preemptively throw their life away over an imaginary crisis.
It’s not throwing my life away to not want my descendants to spend their resources on caring for me all the time. Obviously, I am not talking about suicide just because I need help getting groceries, but instead when I need hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep me alive for a couple months or years in a bed, I think that could be better spent elsewhere in society.
Medicare and Social Security are nothing without the people who change bedpans and people who pick fruits and vegetables and keep clean water and electricity flowing.
> What really needs to be cut is spending on old people
They've been making more noise and there's more smoke about this than usual. I did see today (yesterday?) Trump was on about them booting fraudsters off of Social Security. It made me wonder if that was the playbook. They start turning off the spigot for SS and Medicare, but publicly the story parroted by the media is that all they're doing is removing criminals, waste, fraud, etc.
While that'd be untrue, because that's the narrative being slammed down everyone's throat, even though there'll be people with individual sob stories it'd probably work.
Cutting SS, Medicare, and other support services has the dubious advantage of leaving a good number of the least able members of society with less resources and less of a voice to raise.
People barely getting by that are reliant on scant support won't be raising much of a complaint that they're not actual fraudsters once that support is gone.
The historic stance was that the right would never cut SS/Medicare because the elderly have some of the loudest political voices and would immediately switch sides. Whether or not this true, unfortunately I suspect we'll find out.
This is the obvious playbook. It might include the "illegal immigrant" narrative as well. Also, if you remember, we previously had welfare queens (which is a really disgusting phrase if you really think about it).
The problem in Tech is that they've lost their humanity (or never had any). Instead they operate from animalistic self-interest of "cull the weak to save the herd or they will drag us all down". This is the intrinsic nature of meritocracy. It derives from the fear of uncertainty.
Tech is supposed to be the best and brightest; and yet it is profoundly dumb. We propose a bunch of sophomoric solutions to human problems. I think this is due to youth, inexperience and tribalism which is reflective of a lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
I’m guessing there’s going to be cuts there, too - Musk spoke recently that drone warfare is the very clear future of war, and I’m guessing that the shift to that will involve cutting down on a lot of legacy programs.
When the right wing says they want to cut spending, they don't actually mean it. They mean they want to cut spending for certain things. The fact that those certain things are a rounding error compared to their untouchable bits is irrelevant.
This article keeps talking about the legal hoops Trump would have to jump through in order to do this and is completely ignoring the fact that any time he's presented with legal hoops he has to jump through he ignores them and does what he wants anyway without consequence. I don't believe the system will stop him this time because it hasn't stopped him even when it has managed to convict him of crimes.
Exactly this. And most of that was before he became president again... now that it has been ruled nothing Trump does as an "official act" can be illegal. Realistically the only "legal hoop" left would be the possibility of Congress impeaching and removing him, which is extremely unlikely. And even if... it might not be illegal for him to order the military to take Congress... if it's an official act.
"Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it."
"That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine—including yours truly (see most recently “Memo to AOC: Only You Can Save the Government,” July/August 2021)—have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."
Getting a large contract in place can be a miserable slog and take a huge amount of time and effort to sort out, particularly with the cumbersome government contracting rules and laws. Good contract documents are also really challenging to write. Often times the results will be non-optimal, terms will be interpreted in ways you didn't intend, or you with you had put some more info in there. In many cases I believe the timeline to get a good contract in place can be comparable to the work that we want to perform. That's just silly.
Use of contracts for tech development creates large disconnects and significantly reduces our control and responsiveness to changing needs and ideas. If NASA employees are doing the work we can easily pivot when circumstances change and re-prioritize labor and much more quickly drop bad ideas as we learn new things. We can start investigating something without completely knowing what we're doing and figure it out as we go along. That sort of thing is harder to do with a contract. If the work is being done by a contractor, changing anything is vastly more difficult and complicated, and often not even worth the effort.
If we have a device or something developed by a contractor they often manage to contaminate it with some kind of proprietary info making it much more difficult to use and communicate the data. The tools and devices we develop internally don't have that problem and we're free to use, adapt, and communicate technical info about them as much as we want. Also, if we develop something ourselves, we inherently more deeply understand it and can more quickly make modifications or test out new ideas. That's less often the case when work is done on contract. IMO many of our most valuable developments are done internally due to the enhanced flexibility.
Not that all contracts are bad. There are plenty of cases where using contracts makes great sense and works out terrifically. However, you often just have to hope the right sort of company has decided to exist because doing it ourselves is often not an option. I have absolutely been told about a contractor: "I know they're not the best, but they're the only one interested in doing this work. If don't fund them for too long they may lose interest and then we'll have nothing".
There are plenty of other problems unrelated to contractors as well. But over-reliance on contracting is a big one.
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