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Of the two recent large-scale 'revelations' in US media - the WikiLeaks effort, and this one -I think this is actually of far greater real import to ordinary Americans. Unfortunately, because it sheds light on a difficult and abstract set of problems, I imagine it was doomed to be ignored, especially when compared with the racy excitement of secret documents smuggled out of military networks.
Every major indictment made in the article is essentially true, and is common knowledge among govvies and contractors alike. Among these:
- too many people
- too inexperienced because the agencies have grown so rapidly
- too much money spent on too many contracts, many of them enormous projects that never produce anything of value (especially true for large IT projects)
- too much duplication of effort (while at the same time, the separate efforts can't benefit from each other's work)
- a prevailing sense that we're spending huge amounts of money to provide very weak answers to impossibly difficult questions. (this was always really fascinating to me. the army and other government folks seemed to feel that there were certain questions they were ill-equipped to answer but if only they could bring in contractors to work their magic, the questions would become easy. contractors are only too happy to oblige. if the customer asks whether you can do something, the answer is always yes. and if you let your conscience get the better of you and say no, there is always some other huckster willing to say, sure, we can find terrorists via twitter, or design a super-magic-data-sharing solution, or design a piece of hardware that does x, y, and z (on budget, and on time...)
- pessimism that there's really any way to get a handle on which spending/programs are effective. this is the worst charge, because it indicates that reform is essentially impossible in the near-term...
So I'm not sure this is much of a contribution to the thread, really... just an acknowledgement that these problems are real and well-known and that I've never met anyone who believes we can really solve them and that if you're a contractor that basically means stop worrying about it, preserve your sanity, work as hard as you can on the projects you're given and trust that if something nonsensical is going on, it's not your fault but the government's and how could you know whether what you're doing makes sense anyway?
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