What an arrogant, uniformed tool. You must be a government employee or married to one.
Should congress get involved?
- Thread starter 12375CAT
- Start date
I would say the exact opposite. It's not the people, it's the institution of government, or more generally bureaucracy. People that are otherwise perfectly fine get into government and become slugs and often corrupted.
Every time the Govt. gets involved in something , they screw it up.
You think it's a
You think it's a mess now ? (I agree). Wait until the government gets involved
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Sorry, that's just not true. Most of the government's problems are created by the government and could be solved by the government if somehow a culture of accountability was created.
There's a lot of things that shouldn't be but are. As a government employee and later, manager, I should not have been stuck dealing with problem employees that, thanks to the HR policies, laziness, cowardice, and lack of integrity, were all but impossible to fire. I could spent a month documenting lousy performance only to see those who could terminate the employee do nothing done or move the employee to another position where they continued to be dead weight. (The hope being that the new manager of the loser would understand that trying to do anything was a waste of time and energy and not bother anyone about it.) The lousy employees had nothing to fear and knew it - no motivation to change. As a manager, I should have not have had to spend 25% to 30% of my day responding to taskers and data calls from various entities that never managed to contribute anything to the overall organization's mission than writing reports and preparing briefings that rarely served any purpose other than to justify the existence of the people who wrote them. Those are the self-licking ice cream cones I was talking about; they add no value and only get bigger barring outside intervention. If it sounds like no big deal, understand that the time I spent on that nonsense was time away from things like improving my program, addressing problems, and developing subordinates. Contractors had nothing to do with any of that.
There's a saying in government that is 100% true - never try to save the government money. I had a hard a time with that for what should be obvious reasons, and when I called it a career I was still struggling with it. Here's how is plays out - they put you in charge of a program and a budget. Being a person of integrity who is trying to be a good steward of resources, you try to get the job done at best value for the least dollars. (You treat the money they gave you like you treat your personal finances.) If you succeed in saving money, the result is the money you saved is taken away and given guy who blew his budget. Moving forward, you have a smaller budget and the guy who blew his has a bigger one. The rationale isn't that you did a great job managing resources, you just had been given more than you needed. If the money is moved outside the area your management controls, you will suffer negative consequences because you just "cost" them money. The lesson: spend all the money you can and don't worry about running out; we'll just ask for more. It will probably come from some poor schmuck who thought being cost sensitive and efficient was a good thing. That's the reality, and not one entity outside the government is causing that to happen.
Moving on to contractors, I will be the first to admit that there are plenty of scumbag contractors who will look for every chance to make a buck and will be happy to take more if you give them a chance. That said, there is no shortage of ways keep them under control. There are several different contracts types, but regardless of the type, the government has most of the power. The government does the market research, writes the SOW, writes the RFP, reviews the proposals, and awards the contracts. (The source selection process in the USG is actually pretty good, IMHO.) If the contractor has written unreasonable costs or given themselves large profit margins it should be pretty obvious the source selection team. (Few contractors are dumb enough to try it as it a sure way to not get the contract. If a contractor over charges the government on a FFP or even LOE contract, it's 100% the government's fault. The govie knows the reasonable costs, so how is it that the contractor can walk in with a proposal inconsistent with that knowledge and walk out with a contract? (If you go to a car dealer and pay $50K for a car you know is worth $20K you weren't fleeced, you're stupid.) On more complex acquisitions, the best approach is to put all the profit potential in award fees - money you pay the contractor for delivering what the contract says they have to deliver on schedule and on budget. So, while there are contractors who are darn good at working the system, the contracting officer and tech rep always can demand results and not pay the award fee if they the contractor doesn't meet the requirements. The problems come when the contractor doesn't deliver and the government still pays the award fee like they did. Is it really getting "fleeced" when you pay for something you knew you didn't get? I was part of a team that gave an underperforming contractor $0 award two eval periods running; I'm not sure if I should be proud of that because we were just doing the job we were paid to do. Sadly, despite the existence of other problem contracts, no one had ever heard of that happening before - other govies decided that it was easier to just given them the money they hadn't earned. If the contractor was stealing money so were the people who were collecting a USG salary for work they weren't doing and were accessories to the contractor's misconduct.
Obviously, there are aspects of this that are more complex than either of us has expressed. I'm agnostic on government vs contractor; I have seen both excellent and awful results from both. There are things the government should always do and things that should always be done by contractors. The key is always making sure that no matter who is doing what on the taxpayer dime that there is accountable for real performance and real results. If I could wave a magic wand and put that into the DNA of the government, most of the rest of the stuff would become minor details.
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Anywhere you go, you're going to find good, bad, and people who will go along with the dominant culture. There are many people in government who work hard and want to do the right thing; they don't become slugs because it goes against the motivation that caused them to pursue a career in public service. I had several jobs from the time I was 13 until I graduated from college and started working for USG. The jobs were all with private businesses and I saw plenty of slugs. The major difference is that the private businesses couldn't and wouldn't pay people who didn't perform. Some areas of government, most notably the military, face consequences that are so dire they, too, can't afford to allow many poor performers. That's not to say there are no slugs in the military, just that many are sent home when they aren't performing. Unfortunately, there are many areas of government where the employees feel no outside pressure to perform much less excel and have no internal motivations to do it. Private businesses that stop feeling the pressure to perform fail just as quickly as the government. I would use US automakers as an example. The prevailing attitude was that US customers had no choice and if they built garbage, the public would have to buy it. Then along came Toyota... Put the motivation to perform and excel into the mix and the picture changes dramatically.
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Bad people corrupt government, it is ultimately the fault of man himself, not the government. Everyone who gets bought, allowed themselves to be bought. Every person who became complacent made a decision to be complacent. The trials of man are due to man himself. Government doesn't make them do it. They are free people with free will.
The people running our government right now are literally criminals, like literally. Look up the laundry list of accusations, cons, crimes, domestic abusers, sexual abusers, bankruptcies, etc., etc. of the folks occupying public office. These are awful people. But yeah its the fault of government itself. Get serious. The dysfunction is due to the folks in power. Which the power is a magnet for these narcissists. It ain't government, its people in leadership roles. Shit flows downhill from there.
There definitely should be an oversight branch of the government that shares equal weight with legislative, executive & judicial.....The 4 branches of government. This should evolve to coexist with the age of communication.
It should report to the people about the doings of the other 3. Almost like a police department's internal affairs in some ways.
The people running our government right now are literally criminals, like literally. Look up the laundry list of accusations, cons, crimes, domestic abusers, sexual abusers, bankruptcies, etc., etc. of the folks occupying public office. These are awful people. But yeah its the fault of government itself. Get serious. The dysfunction is due to the folks in power. Which the power is a magnet for these narcissists. It ain't government, its people in leadership roles. Shit flows downhill from there.
There definitely should be an oversight branch of the government that shares equal weight with legislative, executive & judicial.....The 4 branches of government. This should evolve to coexist with the age of communication.
It should report to the people about the doings of the other 3. Almost like a police department's internal affairs in some ways.
As someone who has worked in fed Gov contracting for more than 20 yrs, and am married to a federal contractor turned fed employee, I can say confidently that you are missing one very important piece of data.... inefficiency.
In you $100 project example, you get $50 of labor and materials, and $50 of red tape, bureaucracy, and 30yr gov employees that aren't very motivated while getting excellent benefits.
More often than not, contractors can make a profit while doing it faster and for less money. And no, getting one contract doesn't make you rich. It is a much harder biz than commercial, it's highly competitive, and margins are not very high.
I don't doubt some of that is true but let's get real here, it takes a whole lot of unmotivated, ineffective pencil pushers down at the DMV to catch up to Lockheed Martin's 2 trillion dollar mistake. In fact it takes so many they're aren't enough in the country to catch up with just one government contractor. Yes, every single "lazy complacent" government employee doesn't even touch the mistakes of just one one single contractor from a monetary standpoint. Yes, read that again.
Louis DeJoy wants the post office to fail.......and he's the one in charge of it........You can't make that shit up.
But you guys go on with trying to make points about lazy individuals ruining government, when it's a much larger industrial problem than that......proliferated by man himself.
This Country Is Spending $1.7 Trillion on Planes That Don't Work
For that money, we could have cancelled American student loan debt. All of it.
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Let's use this example real quick to define the dysfunction. Lewis DeJoy wants the post office to do all the tedious unprofitable stuff that no private business would want to touch and then farm out any of the good profitable work to some private contractor, preferably one that he's on the board of or has an ownership stake in. Then say, "look the post office isn't making money, but Fed Ex & UPS & whoever are."
That's a person problem, not a system problem.
I don't doubt some of that is true but let's get real here, it takes a whole lot of unmotivated, ineffective pencil pushers down at the DMV to catch up to Lockheed Martin's 2 trillion dollar mistake. In fact it takes so many they're aren't enough in the country to catch up with just one government contractor. Yes, every single "lazy complacent" government employee doesn't even touch the mistakes of just one one single contractor from a monetary standpoint. Yes, read that again.
But you guys go on with trying to make points about lazy individuals ruining government, when it's a much larger industrial problem than that......proliferated by man himself.
This Country Is Spending $1.7 Trillion on Planes That Don't Work
For that money, we could have cancelled American student loan debt. All of it.www.esquire.com
The article quotes Robert Reich, an idealogue who once wrote a book about how private giving to charities is bad and should be replaced by the government taking the money from individuals and giving to things it deemed appropriate. He also opposes private and home schooling and thinks the government should ban both, but then pontificates on how government programs he doesn't like are a threat to freedom and democracy. I give him the same regard as I give the people at American Thinker - none. I'm familiar with the F-35 contract and how the many blunders that lead to the problems and cost overruns; it's a complex issue that Esquire used as a prop to make a superficial argument for other things. I could go into how programs like that become the mess they are, but it's pretty clear you're not interested, so I'm not going to waste my time.
If your bottom line point is that people are basically self-serving and that will screw up anything they touch, I totally agree.
This is how they set you up. You're more worried about who has opinion on the matter than the matter itself.
Get over yourself, you don't know me and you don't what you're talking about. I not "worried' about who has an opinion, but when someone had a track record, I take that into an account. If the matter is how taxpayer dollars are spent and wasted, then I have a professional lifetime of effort to establish proof of my concern and desire to correct problems. If nothing else, that should be obvious from my posts. What you are is equally obvious from both your posts and your handle.
Bye, bye.
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The problem with the F35 was not the contractor or suppliers. It was the concept itself. The government.....Congress and the Pentagon....wanted to save money by designing a single airframe to do all instead of having several different planes covering various special defense needs. It was supposed to be the single airframe that could do everything......long range bomber, fighter, short range, electronic warfare, defensive patrol, offensive attack, do it at very high speeds and with extreme maneuverability......and more all while being extremely stealthy and do carrier takeoffs and landings. They thought it would be cheaper than having several airframes.I don't doubt some of that is true but let's get real here, it takes a whole lot of unmotivated, ineffective pencil pushers down at the DMV to catch up to Lockheed Martin's 2 trillion dollar mistake. In fact it takes so many they're aren't enough in the country to catch up with just one government contractor. Yes, every single "lazy complacent" government employee doesn't even touch the mistakes of just one one single contractor from a monetary standpoint. Yes, read that again.
Louis DeJoy wants the post office to fail.......and he's the one in charge of it........You can't make that shit up.
But you guys go on with trying to make points about lazy individuals ruining government, when it's a much larger industrial problem than that......proliferated by man himself.
This Country Is Spending $1.7 Trillion on Planes That Don't Work
For that money, we could have cancelled American student loan debt. All of it.
Turns out forcing one plane to do it all was nearly impossible and it became very expensive to meet all the design specs. It pushed beyond the known science and required a lot of new technology. Expensive technology. Even the helmets and life support system was problematic.
Esquire wanted a target to push its desired social engineering like college debt forgiveness. They could just as easily went after the massive Medicaid fraud. Or looked into why college tuition has exploded over time. Or why the quality of college education dropped significantly while the tuition exploded. Or why many universities have endowments so large that they don’t even need to charge tuition.
The conservative think-tank known as the 5 people commenting on this and every other topic like it on this board is completely triggered by the words Robert Reich. It only serves to illustrate my point. Like the corrupt adultering Clinton administration or not, Reich has some of the best statistics in the history of the secretary of labor and thats a fact. But a couple guys on this board have a more qualified opinion than him......right.....talk about get over yourselfs......omg 🤣
I have a pretty low opinion of Lockheed Martin, and there are many, many things they could have done to avoid the problems and costs of the F-35. You are correct on the initial requirements; DOD was asking a lot and LM over promised on what they could do. There were additional problems with requirements creep where DOD added new requirements well after the project was underway. If you hire someone to remodel your kitchen and, when the project is half complete, come in with a list of changes you want made, the cost will increase, in part because the people doing the work have to demo some of what was already finished to meet the new requirements. Do that several times during the remodel, and your costs skyrocket. That happened with the F-35 program.
These threads with politocal overtones always turn regrettable for me. They only serve to show how different people are seeing society these days. Which is further reason to try to find the common ground and look to people who can do just that. But that's not how it ever seems to go.
Sorry.
Peace.
Sorry.
Peace.
There is no doubt that the USPS has been set up to fail, however, USPS's problems have existed far longer than Lewis DeJoy. The part you are missing is that it's not a binary. Both of what you say can be true simultaneously. The problems at USPS is that you have Congress setting parameters that no business could succeed under...again, it's government structure and bureaucracy.
RE: the F-35, I am fairly familiar. Where to start...
1. Why would you put all of the blame on Lockheed and not the Government? By doing so, it means you don't understand how these contracts are conceived and awarded, how scope change works, or how cost+ contracts work.
2. You're first problem is going to Esquire to get info on Defense and Govt.
3. When the first sentence for judging a Defense program is mentioning the cancelling of student debt, you can pretty much judge the adversarial perspective it's coming from.
The F-35 has some problems for sure. Most of it is because it tries to do way too much. The F-35 is the Joint Strike Fighter and designed for Air Force and Navy. It's essentially a flying network node and not just a fighter.
The F-22 is a better fighter. The F-35 is not nearly as maneuverable and in a dog fight, the older F-22 would probably win. However, the F-35, if I'm remembering correctly, has capability that it could probably destroy the F-22 before the F-22 ever knew the F-35 was in the sky.
I always found that quote funny, and mostly true. I do investigation work for abandoned coal mine reclamation. I actually find myself telling people a similar statement every day I go out now. But my work is all publicly driven... They call me with problems and I see if I can help fix their problems.
Aside from whatever interference there is, the USPS is the worst run business in the country.
Nepotism is rife, and your management can't come from the union. The best thing that could happen is privatization.
Nepotism is rife, and your management can't come from the union. The best thing that could happen is privatization.
I went to an acquisitions course with an officer involved with managing the program. One of the F-35 selling points was the amount of common components that the different services' versions would have. In the end it turned out that there were far fewer common parts than were promised at the beginning and that while they call all of them F-35s, you are still essentially talking about 3 different planes, not 1, and the cost savings anticipated from using common components are not going to be realized. I fear that by trying to make the platform a jack of all trades that they ended up making it a master of none.
agree. Scope creep is a b*tch.
Whenever I see things like this, I am always reminded of the Pontiac Aztek, one of the worst automotive failures in recent history. Pontiac asked customers what they wanted and tried to be all things to all people. In the end, it meant they made something that didn't work for anyone.
