This isn't just limited to building submarines. Ever since the Obama Administration, hundreds of billions of contracts have been thrown at consultants to study or fix issues that federal employees used to do. As you well said, systems are broken throughout the federal government. We could almost balance the budget (well, not quite, but it would be start) by getting rid of all consultants.
The point is to get rid of the redundant federal employees and allow private sector competition and innovation to supply goods and services efficiently and at low(er) cost to the taxpayer. To the extent featherbedding and gross mismanagement are endemic to the private sources of supply, government contracting processes, project oversight, and penalty assessment for mismanagement or wrongdoing are inadequate to the task.
So less paying others to do one's job than searching out and buying a better mousetrap.
With respect, that's been going on since long before I went to work as a civilian for the Navy in 1981. The theory's always been, it's easier to terminate--or not renew--a contract than to RIF civil servants. But in practice the contractors just add another layer of inefficiency and featherbedding.
This is not to say that many of them don't do a fine job. Far from it. I knew plenty of guys who were, in fact, doing the job of some no-op in the employ of the government. Indeed many of them were former uniformed or civilian government employees themselves.
But it's a systemic problem inherent to this sort of thing. I'm old enough to remember some spokesman for the Beltway Bandit community advocating that public and private civilian headcount reductions in the wake of the Cold War be required to be made on a proportional basis.
My point was, it's a categorical error to see this as a manifestation of the contemporary age. Nor did I suggest that it should continue. And to correct the problem by changing the incentives, we must first understand what those incentives are. If you have some insights on that subject, I certainly welcome a discussion.
I've seen this kind of thing come back around in a really bad way. When I worked for the Air Force as a civilian, I started a new systems engineer job in an aircraft program office in 2009. I found out pretty quick that there were component program offices that weren't capable of running their programs, or even competently initiate and run an improvement project. How did this happen? Those program offices were awash in contract money, so what they did was have two of every job. The civil service guy would make pretty PowerPoint slides to periodically brief higher ups on "how are we doing?" and track action-items. They each had a contractor counterpart that actually did the work. Whenever an issue came up, they would just draft an e-mail and pop it over to the contractor, "Hey, take care of this." It had been like this since the 1980s.
Come 2009, we had the twin fustercluck of the Bush economy going to crap and Obama shoving it further down the dumper. Additionally, Obama hated the DoD and was always doing things to f*ck with us. Result: budget cuts across the board meant that all the contract money dried up and the contractors were cut loose. Their departure resulted in a huge brain-drain for the organizations that were heavily dependent on contractors. When I came into my new job, I had 12 years under my belt and had run a good number of mod projects. I was constantly frustrated with program offices that had engineers, parts logistics people, and program managers that were just lost and couldn't perform their basic job functions. They couldn't go to their higher-ups for guidance, they had promoted up through that system and were just as clueless. Dead serious, the GS-14s and -15s didn't have the basic GS-11 level-of-knowledge of their jobs.
They eventually got the knowledge and skills back because they had to but damn was it a painful road to go down. Now we have people on this forum who are unknowingly advocating to have this happen AGAIN. I know there's some real idiocy in government but it's not everybody everywhere. For those who loudly proclaim that contractors are smarter, harder working, and just flat-out better than government, I've got two words for you: Booz Allen. They're a huge company that hasn't done anything right in a long time. Their incompetence led directly to the Navy Yard mass-shooting. The US govt. security people had a terrible backlog in investigating and granting security clearances. Booz Allen was brought onboard to work down the backlog. They did: by pencil-whipping it. They cleared people right and left that were sketchy at best and criminal at worst. The Navy Yard shooter was kicked out of the Navy for psych reasons and was coded so that he couldn't re-enlist, EVER. Booze Allen made the call that this nutjob was good to go. Life was good until he came to work with a shotgun, killed 13 people, and wounded 8. Contractors are better and do things smarter? I beg to differ.
Not surprising to anyone who was involved on the civilian side of the Iraq or Afghanistan missions, or foreign aid anywhere for that matter. Everything was outsourced to contractors.
It's a form of institutional crony corruption, perfectly legal and within the FAR.
IIRC, there was a point in the relatively near past in which all federal organizations had to cut back on their own workforce numbers and farm the work out to contractors. If and only if this is one of those moves, that is one thing. But if it is simply a way to bloat the Potomac Fleet, then, in the words of that erudite philosopher Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
It’s a revolving door. Civil servants double dipping, and being paid off with BS jobs and board positions for steering business to Big Defense. Thing is, everyone is in on the theft…easy money for nothing but a rolodex/contacts/access. The mob has more honor than these parasites.
Shortly before I left NAVAIR in 1996, I saw a chart showing DoD-funded headcount reductions in the prior five years--i.e. since Gulf War One--and while I don't remember the exact figures, it went something like this: MILPERS -30%; Contractors -20%; CIVPERS -10%.
I see that nothing has changed in the last quarter-century.
My question is how much $ in kickbacks are going to the administration officials/congressmen/senators who award these contracts? They all seem to start public life as paupers but quickly become millionaires.
I worked many years for Booz Allen Hamilton. One of their brags was their consultancy of developing the PERT Chart system to help the Navy with managing the development of the Polaris system - boat and the exploding rocket thingy. So, not new.
Look to personnel management of both the uniformed and civilian workforce. In my little cohort of retirees (Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, and Sergeants First Class) we got hired by contracting firms to do what we did as uniforms, and oft-times better paid (even before the ret'd pay) but were null sets military career-wise. The ones in our fields who went on to Colonelcies, etc, had game-playing chops, and thought the "big thoughts" but turned to us to actually get things done (including waiting out the more fanciful "big thoughts"). Those folk who were truly assets, went on to the corporate side, many of the lesser lights shifted laterally into GS13-15 positions, where they continued their mediocre system-gaming, and contracting folk like us to keep it wired. We were needed.
Why? Because their lateral shift to the GS13-15 world shut down advancement for talented GS folk, who either died on the vine, occupying space, or left to come work for us. The system selects for mediocrity. Hey. Two of my SFC buddies went on to retire as millionaires, once freed of the system. Doing great things for the warrior in terms of drone-warfare during the Endless War, and doing it in-theatre.
We have the same problem the rest of government has. A system that promotes and protects mediocrity, and values conformity over competence at the highest levels. We all know great and talented civil servants and military folk - who are rode hard, out up wet, and leave. Vice time-serving parasites like Fauci and Milley. 🤬
Prior to GWOT, officers gave up part of their retirement pay if they took a GS/GM position. After 9/11 that reduction was eliminated!
So we now have "big thought managers" with little to no worker level/tech experience doing what was done by GS 14/15 who had started at GS 5 and worked up!
We used to refer to the Joint Staff GS-15 / SES continuous expansion as "no O6 left behind". The flags went to Military Industrial Complex (TM) board positions. All of this activity is in support of the Iron Triangle: DoD, Military Industrial Complex (TM), (retirement jobs and active duty influence as retirement approaches) and, of course, the Congress (campaign contributions and district jobs). All is proceeding as these three entities have decreed is "good for the nation". The fact that it happens to be good for the "right" people's / companies bank accounts / second careers for retired senior officers / politicians campaigns is the totally accidental, unintentional cherry on top of the failed acquisition enterprise. /sarcasm off. Hard to see major positive change coming unless we really get bludgeoned in an undeniable way in a near future conflict.
“ In the civilian sector, if you have to bring in outside consultants to do what you are already staffed for, and that your leadership was hired to do in the first place, then it is usually part of a cleaning house of leadership, processes, and structures.”
….eh, at least in my IT career getting consultants was often the result of the good idea fairy hitting the C suite, or the Great Leap Forward idea of a new exec meant to make investors happy.
More than once I’ve had consultant groups come in and I’ve ended up having to do my work and theirs because they didn’t know the system, but they had a whizBang rep.
“We need you to set up the security requirements and walk us through it….”
“I was already doing that when you came in. And now I have to fix stuff you pulled the trigger on without checking. I’ll walk you through it with the sinking feeling in my heart you are getting paid double what I am…”
I know, the pendulum has swung too far the other way. When a shop guy just flat-out quits coming to work and it takes 6 months to fire him, that is really bad. When a guy who has union backing (not all jobs do, my engineering job didn't) is a complete screw-up, it takes 18 months to jettison him and you have to document things to the point of filling a notebook. BUT, I've been on the other side of it where I'm an engineer over aircraft parts going through depot overhaul and the shop boss, who is in my chain of command, is ordering me OK parts to go into supply that he knows to be bad. He's also promised that if I don't sign them off, he will have my formal evaluations docked and he will find a way to fire me.
Just suffice to say, I'd never work in a company that had Elon Musk as the CEO. Sadly, the crazy fly-by-night way that he runs a company is not that unusual in the business world anymore. Those guys don't get in that position by doing things right.
This is a Navy logisics issue with IMHO has been broken since they moved from Crystal City to their out of sight out of mind digs in central PA. First anybody who is anyone in that community works aviation logistics, subs and surface ships be damned. Secondly nearly their entire focus is spares (not to well either) and they don't own the big picture logistics including industrial base issues.
The Pentagon was large enough to fight WWII but is insufficient to manage the post Cold War era hence the need cor all those glass buildings that stretch all the way to the airport
Deloitte also does auditing work for the DOD. I wonder how tough Deloitte will be in terms of auditing when it gets such lucrative consulting contracts from the Pentagon. Anyone ever hear of ENRON and Arthur Andersen?
We’re asking why…well ought we be surprised in the least? The SecDef checks into hospital and takes a health week and doesn’t tell his boss. The 39th Commnadant of the US Marine Corps has a widow maker heart attack survives and doesn’t bother to tell anyone when he is coming back to his desk in the oldest standing structure in DC. The CNO is CNO not because of any special quality or merits but because of gender and deft handling of the DC cocktail circuit. Ships like Wasp and Boxer that can’t run true and straight and the list goes on and on and on…why wonder, maybe ask “how come?”
Ugh…
This isn't just limited to building submarines. Ever since the Obama Administration, hundreds of billions of contracts have been thrown at consultants to study or fix issues that federal employees used to do. As you well said, systems are broken throughout the federal government. We could almost balance the budget (well, not quite, but it would be start) by getting rid of all consultants.
The point is to get rid of the redundant federal employees and allow private sector competition and innovation to supply goods and services efficiently and at low(er) cost to the taxpayer. To the extent featherbedding and gross mismanagement are endemic to the private sources of supply, government contracting processes, project oversight, and penalty assessment for mismanagement or wrongdoing are inadequate to the task.
So less paying others to do one's job than searching out and buying a better mousetrap.
With respect, that's been going on since long before I went to work as a civilian for the Navy in 1981. The theory's always been, it's easier to terminate--or not renew--a contract than to RIF civil servants. But in practice the contractors just add another layer of inefficiency and featherbedding.
This is not to say that many of them don't do a fine job. Far from it. I knew plenty of guys who were, in fact, doing the job of some no-op in the employ of the government. Indeed many of them were former uniformed or civilian government employees themselves.
But it's a systemic problem inherent to this sort of thing. I'm old enough to remember some spokesman for the Beltway Bandit community advocating that public and private civilian headcount reductions in the wake of the Cold War be required to be made on a proportional basis.
I'm of a similar age and remembrance. Just because something has been going on forever does not justify its continued existence (or expansion).
It's all incentives, all the way down. Fix the incentives (and disincentives), and you fix the system.
My point was, it's a categorical error to see this as a manifestation of the contemporary age. Nor did I suggest that it should continue. And to correct the problem by changing the incentives, we must first understand what those incentives are. If you have some insights on that subject, I certainly welcome a discussion.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread...
It's about the money.
Timeless refrain here
https://youtu.be/-0kcet4aPpQ?si=GUnly-Z4--52sKNl
...and, of course,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSLscJ2cY04
I've seen this kind of thing come back around in a really bad way. When I worked for the Air Force as a civilian, I started a new systems engineer job in an aircraft program office in 2009. I found out pretty quick that there were component program offices that weren't capable of running their programs, or even competently initiate and run an improvement project. How did this happen? Those program offices were awash in contract money, so what they did was have two of every job. The civil service guy would make pretty PowerPoint slides to periodically brief higher ups on "how are we doing?" and track action-items. They each had a contractor counterpart that actually did the work. Whenever an issue came up, they would just draft an e-mail and pop it over to the contractor, "Hey, take care of this." It had been like this since the 1980s.
Come 2009, we had the twin fustercluck of the Bush economy going to crap and Obama shoving it further down the dumper. Additionally, Obama hated the DoD and was always doing things to f*ck with us. Result: budget cuts across the board meant that all the contract money dried up and the contractors were cut loose. Their departure resulted in a huge brain-drain for the organizations that were heavily dependent on contractors. When I came into my new job, I had 12 years under my belt and had run a good number of mod projects. I was constantly frustrated with program offices that had engineers, parts logistics people, and program managers that were just lost and couldn't perform their basic job functions. They couldn't go to their higher-ups for guidance, they had promoted up through that system and were just as clueless. Dead serious, the GS-14s and -15s didn't have the basic GS-11 level-of-knowledge of their jobs.
They eventually got the knowledge and skills back because they had to but damn was it a painful road to go down. Now we have people on this forum who are unknowingly advocating to have this happen AGAIN. I know there's some real idiocy in government but it's not everybody everywhere. For those who loudly proclaim that contractors are smarter, harder working, and just flat-out better than government, I've got two words for you: Booz Allen. They're a huge company that hasn't done anything right in a long time. Their incompetence led directly to the Navy Yard mass-shooting. The US govt. security people had a terrible backlog in investigating and granting security clearances. Booz Allen was brought onboard to work down the backlog. They did: by pencil-whipping it. They cleared people right and left that were sketchy at best and criminal at worst. The Navy Yard shooter was kicked out of the Navy for psych reasons and was coded so that he couldn't re-enlist, EVER. Booze Allen made the call that this nutjob was good to go. Life was good until he came to work with a shotgun, killed 13 people, and wounded 8. Contractors are better and do things smarter? I beg to differ.
Yes, the systems that throw the billions for consultation turns into billions for bribes, graft, and kickbacks.
Not surprising to anyone who was involved on the civilian side of the Iraq or Afghanistan missions, or foreign aid anywhere for that matter. Everything was outsourced to contractors.
It's a form of institutional crony corruption, perfectly legal and within the FAR.
I'm here to say I could do BlueForge's job for half what the Navy is paying them.
Pay me $1200 a month, lease me a Toyota Tacoma for the 5 years of my contract, and I'll do it cheaper.
IIRC, there was a point in the relatively near past in which all federal organizations had to cut back on their own workforce numbers and farm the work out to contractors. If and only if this is one of those moves, that is one thing. But if it is simply a way to bloat the Potomac Fleet, then, in the words of that erudite philosopher Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Inbreeding and corruption; DoD is hopelessly corrupted, and this includes enough uniformed and civil servants to allow crap like this.
It’s a revolving door. Civil servants double dipping, and being paid off with BS jobs and board positions for steering business to Big Defense. Thing is, everyone is in on the theft…easy money for nothing but a rolodex/contacts/access. The mob has more honor than these parasites.
On point.
It's a gigantic self-licking ice cream cone.
Shortly before I left NAVAIR in 1996, I saw a chart showing DoD-funded headcount reductions in the prior five years--i.e. since Gulf War One--and while I don't remember the exact figures, it went something like this: MILPERS -30%; Contractors -20%; CIVPERS -10%.
I see that nothing has changed in the last quarter-century.
My question is how much $ in kickbacks are going to the administration officials/congressmen/senators who award these contracts? They all seem to start public life as paupers but quickly become millionaires.
On the nose!
I worked many years for Booz Allen Hamilton. One of their brags was their consultancy of developing the PERT Chart system to help the Navy with managing the development of the Polaris system - boat and the exploding rocket thingy. So, not new.
Look to personnel management of both the uniformed and civilian workforce. In my little cohort of retirees (Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, and Sergeants First Class) we got hired by contracting firms to do what we did as uniforms, and oft-times better paid (even before the ret'd pay) but were null sets military career-wise. The ones in our fields who went on to Colonelcies, etc, had game-playing chops, and thought the "big thoughts" but turned to us to actually get things done (including waiting out the more fanciful "big thoughts"). Those folk who were truly assets, went on to the corporate side, many of the lesser lights shifted laterally into GS13-15 positions, where they continued their mediocre system-gaming, and contracting folk like us to keep it wired. We were needed.
Why? Because their lateral shift to the GS13-15 world shut down advancement for talented GS folk, who either died on the vine, occupying space, or left to come work for us. The system selects for mediocrity. Hey. Two of my SFC buddies went on to retire as millionaires, once freed of the system. Doing great things for the warrior in terms of drone-warfare during the Endless War, and doing it in-theatre.
We have the same problem the rest of government has. A system that promotes and protects mediocrity, and values conformity over competence at the highest levels. We all know great and talented civil servants and military folk - who are rode hard, out up wet, and leave. Vice time-serving parasites like Fauci and Milley. 🤬
Ya really need an edit function, Sal. Autocorrect is killing me here...
the three dots on the lower right of your post allow edits
Saw the same in my career in USAF acquisition.
Prior to GWOT, officers gave up part of their retirement pay if they took a GS/GM position. After 9/11 that reduction was eliminated!
So we now have "big thought managers" with little to no worker level/tech experience doing what was done by GS 14/15 who had started at GS 5 and worked up!
They need "buddy" contractors!
We used to refer to the Joint Staff GS-15 / SES continuous expansion as "no O6 left behind". The flags went to Military Industrial Complex (TM) board positions. All of this activity is in support of the Iron Triangle: DoD, Military Industrial Complex (TM), (retirement jobs and active duty influence as retirement approaches) and, of course, the Congress (campaign contributions and district jobs). All is proceeding as these three entities have decreed is "good for the nation". The fact that it happens to be good for the "right" people's / companies bank accounts / second careers for retired senior officers / politicians campaigns is the totally accidental, unintentional cherry on top of the failed acquisition enterprise. /sarcasm off. Hard to see major positive change coming unless we really get bludgeoned in an undeniable way in a near future conflict.
“ In the civilian sector, if you have to bring in outside consultants to do what you are already staffed for, and that your leadership was hired to do in the first place, then it is usually part of a cleaning house of leadership, processes, and structures.”
….eh, at least in my IT career getting consultants was often the result of the good idea fairy hitting the C suite, or the Great Leap Forward idea of a new exec meant to make investors happy.
More than once I’ve had consultant groups come in and I’ve ended up having to do my work and theirs because they didn’t know the system, but they had a whizBang rep.
“We need you to set up the security requirements and walk us through it….”
“I was already doing that when you came in. And now I have to fix stuff you pulled the trigger on without checking. I’ll walk you through it with the sinking feeling in my heart you are getting paid double what I am…”
But in the civilian world, it is say to fire someone, as opposed to the GS world.
A system where it's easy to fire people is not always a good thing.
I understand the theory behind civil service, but like many good ideas, that one has been run off the rails at high speed.
I know, the pendulum has swung too far the other way. When a shop guy just flat-out quits coming to work and it takes 6 months to fire him, that is really bad. When a guy who has union backing (not all jobs do, my engineering job didn't) is a complete screw-up, it takes 18 months to jettison him and you have to document things to the point of filling a notebook. BUT, I've been on the other side of it where I'm an engineer over aircraft parts going through depot overhaul and the shop boss, who is in my chain of command, is ordering me OK parts to go into supply that he knows to be bad. He's also promised that if I don't sign them off, he will have my formal evaluations docked and he will find a way to fire me.
Just suffice to say, I'd never work in a company that had Elon Musk as the CEO. Sadly, the crazy fly-by-night way that he runs a company is not that unusual in the business world anymore. Those guys don't get in that position by doing things right.
Parkinson's Law has seemed more and more like an inescapable rule of human society with every year that has passed since the book appeared in 1958.
This is a Navy logisics issue with IMHO has been broken since they moved from Crystal City to their out of sight out of mind digs in central PA. First anybody who is anyone in that community works aviation logistics, subs and surface ships be damned. Secondly nearly their entire focus is spares (not to well either) and they don't own the big picture logistics including industrial base issues.
The Pentagon was large enough to fight WWII but is insufficient to manage the post Cold War era hence the need cor all those glass buildings that stretch all the way to the airport
Deloitte also does auditing work for the DOD. I wonder how tough Deloitte will be in terms of auditing when it gets such lucrative consulting contracts from the Pentagon. Anyone ever hear of ENRON and Arthur Andersen?
Fat Leonard was just the tip of the iceberg. I doubt that anyone is looking very hard for other parts of the system that are rotten.
We’re asking why…well ought we be surprised in the least? The SecDef checks into hospital and takes a health week and doesn’t tell his boss. The 39th Commnadant of the US Marine Corps has a widow maker heart attack survives and doesn’t bother to tell anyone when he is coming back to his desk in the oldest standing structure in DC. The CNO is CNO not because of any special quality or merits but because of gender and deft handling of the DC cocktail circuit. Ships like Wasp and Boxer that can’t run true and straight and the list goes on and on and on…why wonder, maybe ask “how come?”
The CNO has a degree in journalism. In a serious Navy she might have made it to CHINFO.
Worse, the Maritime Administrator has a degree in French Literature which makes her qualified to be the attaché in the embassy in Chad or Luxembourg.
Remember how Al Gore reinvented government by transferring civil service jobs to the private sector?