politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Military specifications are often designed around specific manufacturing processes. When the commercial state of the art changes, this leaves the military as the weirdo insisting they be allowed to buy a 1970s toilet seat made out of 1970s plastic. Those can be redesigned to allow purchase of commercially available goods that pass some kind of suitability testing. This is small potatoes, under a billion dollars per year.
The use and prevalence of IDIQ could be reviewed systemically. Some of those contracts are wildly disproportionate in cost to the value they deliver. This could be a few billion dollars per year kind of stuff.
Almost all T&M contracts could be replaced with FFP, or FPLOE. The T&M contract style promotes (very obviously) inefficiency at every level of the delivery process, and this actually gets even worse with growing contract scope. This is tens to maybe a hundred billion dollars per year.
Congress, holistically, should embrace the notion that unspent money should not be deallocated in a future year. The "use it or lose it" approach to budgeting causes everyone subject to Congressional review to find a way (even a silly way) to consume every dollar they are handed. If, instead, authorized money were allowed to accrue for large expenses (the replacement of a technology system, refurbishing an office, expanding a field site - whatever that agency needs) it could reduce the mindset that unspent money means losing power among the thousands of beaurocrats that make purchasing decisions on behalf of our country. I genuinely have no idea how much money is burned unnecessarily this way.
The government should hire its own experts to deliver services to itself. The entire mantra of minimizing costs known up front has produced some of the most massive wastes in history. Almost everything a contractor can do for the government that's a total cost of more than one person's salary would be better achieved by hiring a person to do that work directly. This is most obvious (to me) in personal computers, where the government regularly buys what should be powerful, capable machines, but then forgot to specify some requirement, and is forced to purchase a machine with a spinning disk drive, or only 2GB of RAM, or a 720p display, or... Just something obviously wrong, that no one is empowered and knowledgeable to say "This is going to critically hamper the performance of every human handed one of these computers, we need to fix it". This is done (theoretically) to save sometimes just a few dollars, and adds to the general malaise of "The government doesn't care about whether its workers are productive" that's one more push for people with better options to leave government. I won't even begin to guess at the value lost through having people think of government jobs as paid daycare for those that couldn't cut it in the commercial world, let alone the way government contractors really are, or are perceived.
There's probably more, but... Wait, what's that? They're not going to be trying to remove the stranglehold of the MIC on the government purchasing apparatus? Well, maybe they can still fix that toilet seat thing.
I need to make toilet seats.