Doesn't the US outspend in terms of dollars almost every single developed country on the planet at absolutely everything, even in per capita statistics, from military, police to education and healthcare? How could it be underfunded?
In total the US executive is very well funded, but individual agencies aren't always well-funded and often lack the specific skillset to properly utilize funding even if they have it, especially wrt IT systems when that's outside their main field of expertise.
Omar a minimum we need to deduplicate insane degrees of replication. Why does virtually every government agency have dedicated law enforcement? Narrow it down, reallocate budget, eliminate the wasteful overhead.
It’s not all or nothing here. We spend too much and get too little out of it.
Law enforcement is incredibly difficult, especially with the number and types of laws on the books. You want multiple different law enforcement agencies so they can specialize based on the field of law they are in.
Currency counterfeiting is a different set of laws than interstate financial fraud, which is a different set of laws than throwing a Snickers wrapper on the ground in Yosemite.
The federal government does too much. We could simply eliminate many of those agencies and save money for taxpayers, or redirect those resources to more important functions. There is excess capacity, it's just in the wrong places.
As for IT functions, all of that should be centralized under the GSA with proper security controls. There's no benefit to having every agency maintain its own IT infrastructure. Most of those staff are redundant and could be laid off.
> As for IT functions, all of that should be centralized under the GSA with proper security controls. There's no benefit to having every agency maintain its own IT infrastructure. Most of those staff are redundant and could be laid off.
This works for email. Would you work at a company where you had to build and deploy apps on infrastructure controlled by someone in a different department and location, whose boss gave them the mandate to standardize as much as possible to reduce costs? (Hope you like Oracle…)
That was your fairly typical on-premise corporate hosting. Things have gotten better with the cloud but it's still hardly a free-for-all, use-whatever-you-want-with-no-oversight situation.
Cloud environments helped, but the kind of massively centralized environment they’re talking about in the cloud work still tends to mean “get 4 levels of approvals and you can get a t3.medium using our AMI with Java 6”. My point is just that successful IT needs people who understand the mission and share your incentives – you can outsource email and other generic services but most people here work on things which aren’t one-size fits all.
Sure, I have worked at companies that manage their IT infrastructure that way. It's fine, way more efficient and secure than letting every department do their own thing.
I worry for having a centralized IT infrastructure as that now puts every single agency at risk from a single attack. No one would call a neighborhood "secure" if every home used the same key.
It's getting centralized anyways, just not inside any federal agency. Instead they're outsourcing it to companies like MS and Google who provide hosted services. This gives the agency cover so long as they do their part (like making use of MFA, using encryption on email). Then they can offer a claim of making their best-effort and going with industry "standards" (standard as in common, not as in ISO, ANSI, or others).
You can only spend money on what your budget specifically allows. If you’re in the military, the fact that you are authorized to procure $1B aircraft doesn’t mean you can hire a $200k IT security engineer to protect your HR system and you can go to jail if you try to pay for an application upgrade out of that budget unless it’s directly linked to that program.
If you’re not in the military, the fact that someone else has a big budget doesn’t help you any more than your neighbor having a Mercedes helps pay your internet bill.
There are general budgets and people build in support costs, of course, but it’s terribly easy to find people who have been asking for budget to replace something years before its end of life but keep getting turned down in the congressional budgeting process. Politicians want to fund things their constituents like, but the unloved internal support app is just as much of a risk to have on your network.
When political candidates vow to "trim the fat" of the US government, the military is typically off limits, but the other government departments certainly aren't.
The military? Yes. They get more money than they know what to do with - I heard a story about how there's a base where all they do is build M1 Abrams tanks on an assembly line, then disassemble the tanks, and re-assemble, and then disassemble, Ad Infinium, in order to spend all the money they're allocated. It's always a political winner for Congress to give more money to the military, so their budget has become astronomical and only continues to grow.
Every other agency and branch of the US government? Absolutely not.
Look, I heard a lot of things from the guy at the street corner too, but that doesn't make it true.
We'll start with the fact that M1s aren't built on a "base", they're built at the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima. Government owned, contractor (GDLS) run, not a base.
What they do do is refurbish older tanks, which one I suppose could distort into "disassembling", if one wanted to make a rather distorted claim.
The waste contention for that base comes from an Army proposal to temporarily shut down the factory in 2013, which was supposed to save ~$1B. GDLS explained that, sure, can do, but spinning up production again is going to cost ~$1.5B, and restarting production in 2017/18 was always planned. It's not as simple as "the politicians always allocate money to the military".
I'm not sure about that particular story, but many similar stories are rooted in a very real issue of maintaining domestic supply chain expertise.
While centrally managed economies can just mandate that state-owned factories continue to exist, private markets won't do this. If you don't order tanks and missiles, the factories that make tanks and missiles will cease to exist, and the market will reallocate resources elsewhere.
Do you have any source for the claim that there is a factory with the sole purpose of assembling and disassembling M1 Abrams tanks without actually delivering or upgrading any of them?
That sounds very implausible, bordering on conspiracy theory.
It’s bullshit. I write software for autonomous tanks. Part of our contract is to have procedures for literally everything, which includes how to take apart and put back together the robot in order to be able to maintain them.
We of course run these procedures while writing and formally verifying them, before handing them to the customer, not running them would be folly.
Whatever this story is sounds like the worst kind: a small nugget of truth surrounded in a giant ball of shit.
Even more than that, a customer doesn’t just hand us a pile of money and say “talk to you again in 2 years” far from it. They literally “status the status” once or more weekly. If the answer to the question of “what is the plan this week” has the answer of “we’re out of work so we’re just charging you pad our profits” won’t play.
Also, building tanks is fucking hard, I sincerely doubt any company in the industry isn’t using every penny they have to solve problems and deliver a good product.
For those that scoff at the last bit: companies are in the business of making money, and if you deliver an inferior product, you won’t get another contract.
The US government is broadly disallowed, for political reasons, from doing anything. So they have to buy services on the open market, where they get charged through the nose.
Our state legislature recently voted down adding a new Data Analyst position to one of their departments. That department cannot function without that position, so instead it has to use it's funding to buy that same position from a 3rd party contractor for 3x the price or more.
The result is that we pay more than anyone else for basically everything we do.
I generally agree that the government often hamstrings itself. But consider also that you can't terminate state employees easily, and their benefits packages often cost more than 100% of their salary. The salary itself and the working conditions often don't attract the best talent. Thus it's not always so cut and dry in terms of what's the best outcome for the public interest.
My understanding is that regardless of funding, the US federal government has standardized pay scales that top out way below what private industry pays, so even well funded agencies can only possibly get junior developers/IT or people that are willing to take a significant (50-80%) pay reduction. The very most you can possibly make as a GS15 in 2024 is 191,900, and they have locality-adjusted pay with most localities being below that.
They might also generally still drug test? I don't even do drugs, but I'm not going to pee in a cup for someone to effectively do charity lol. Good luck recruiting a professional with decades of engineering experience when you treat them like they're a 16 year old working at Taco Bell. Even someone with 0 years doesn't have to deal with that kind of treatment in industry.
Drug testing is mostly limited (for civilians) to those with access to sensitive, secret, or TS information. In those orgs, you have higher odds of being drug tested as a contractor in the same team than as a federal civilian.
Regarding pay, it's actually pretty bad. A typical IT worker will be a GS-11 to GS-13 depending on location and degree (possibly lower in some locations, maybe higher in some high COL areas). GS-13 in many places is restricted to management and SMEs, though they're bumping up a lot of the "working level" grades because they realize they can't compete in hiring.
To pick a high COL area where you might find GS-13 working level IT folks, San Diego GS-13's max out at $153k. If they're actually GS and not another pay system (has a different pay raise method but usually maps to some GS grades, like Acqdemo) then it takes 18 years to go from GS-13 Step 1 to GS-13 Step 10. Most likely they aren't starting at Step 1 in any grade, let's say they start at Step 4, then it's 12 years to max. Once maxed, they only get the general pay increase every year. There are few technical GS-14 positions (this is changing, but not rapidly) even in high COL areas so the only "promotion" option for many is to go from a GS-13 technical role to a GS-13 management role (same pay) and then leverage that into a GS-14 management or technical role, if someone dies and a position opens up. GS-15 technical roles are pretty rare.
Charity? I sympathize somewhat, but I’m also disgusted by the utter lack of respect for government and societal service in general. That shit means something.
I wish to believe there are still people that don’t care about making Yet Another few hundred thousand and just want to actually contribute to society instead of working on ad tech or whatever bullshit.
Regardless of whether or not one personally enjoys the work one is doing, if one really is contributing to society, one should get fairly compensated for it.
Additional requirements not common in the private sector, such as rigorous drug testing, ethics codes, requirements on gift reporting, increased surveillance, etc., should come with additional benefits to compensate. Instead, government workers submit to these requirements and a substantial pay cut.
That's mostly because conservatives 1) desire tax cuts at any cost and 2) want to demolish the entire administrative state. The stability and consistency that comes with a well-funded civil servant class are an obstruction to their stated goals.
I vouched your comment, because I think you're precisely making the relevant point in the first two paragraphs.
However, I think you're wrong, at least in part, in your third paragraph. I mean, I think the word "mostly" is wrong in that paragraph. Politicians from all political factions are (quite reasonably) under pressure to lower the cost of doing the work of government, and (quite reasonably) to raise the integrity of the process. Combined with some of the dysfunction inherent in agent-principal problems, I think that's more than enough to cause the problem you're talking about. I experience this firsthand in a jurisdiction that has much less of the "demolish the entire administrative state" that afflicts the American right wing (which I'm guessing is your point of reference).
Mind you, I am not claiming that the problem is not badly worsened by American right-wing politics. I wouldn't know. I'm just claiming that the problem is semi-intrinsic to the situation, and I strongly doubt that it's "mostly" caused by those particular political issues.
I'm confused. You're complaining about the use of the word "charity"?
Background: You make an argument that at least some people should consider putting contributions to society ahead of "making yet another few hundred thousand". I agree with you, at least broadly, and I think the up-thread poster is not disagreeing.
Summary: We're discussing the act of taking a personal financial hit, for the good of society.
The word for that is "charity". That's what that word means.
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I also am sympathetic to the GP's point, about which you are so "disgusted", but I think there's room to disagree there.
I am sympathetic because professionally I do work that many people think is "good for society", I currently earn approximately median income (below mean) for my age/gender/nationality, far far below software engineer pay, and I am treated with unbelievable disrespect by my employer, the government. If I was not trapped in this job by personal circumstance (for now), the disrespect part would definitely factor into my decision making about staying in this allegedly-virtuous job. If you're gonna pay people below market, and you treat them badly, that's not a combination that gets you quality employees. Even if there's some social purpose.
Doing something out of a sense of duty should not require a vow of poverty along with it unless we plan on committing to lifetime benefits and support for the people who take that path (like providing food and housing, because the low end of the GS scales are literally below poverty rates as it is).
>Doing something out of a sense of duty should not require a vow of poverty along with it
The wages offered are hardly poverty - just not competitive with the private sector.
Besides, "doing something out of a sense of duty", when duty meant something, has also often meant doing it for free, or even doing it on one's own dime, and it absolutely meant accepting a pay cut.
If you are a GS-5 (typical entry level government roles, 5 rungs up from the actual bottom of the pay scale, since it's literally impossible to get applicants for a GS-1 role if you tried) and support a family of four you are currently at 2023 rates within 3 digits of income from the poverty line.
If we push it lower how are we not expecting that to require poverty? What legion of people in the US do you reckon even have "their own dimes" to spend on being full time volunteer public servants and can afford to serve from a sense of duty? Retirees?
Giving up 50% or more of your income can be a completely different life. It's not "only" making 300k instead of 400k. Based on the other comment saying G13 or lower is more likely, it's making 115k or less and barely being able to afford a house near not great schools where your kids will probably get a worse education than you did (after all, you presumably have a CS degree since the government fixates on degrees and credentialism).
Not all tech jobs are ads. I work in networking equipment and it pays much, much better.
Anyway, my point was they don't even give respect to the people who do that, and still treat you like their property. Same with the vaccine mandates (especially for remote workers): whether you got it isn't the point. My employers have never asked because it was never any of their business.
You'd have to look at purchase power, not dollars, to see how much they can actually do with all that spending. You get a lot further with $5 in a place where wages are $1, than with $20 in a place where wages are $15.
The US is really really big. People way underestimate how huge it is in terms of land area. You could fit Europe inside the US. So the reason Germany or France underspend the US has more to do with the area they have to cover and the number of people they have in their borders.
The argument is density. Things tend to be cheaper per capita, when density is high.
I don't buy it thought. I think the reason why the spend is less in Europe is due to higher salary equality - good people take job in government because the salary is only 50% higher in private sector (for tech, even less for other areas).
There are only a couple of US states less dense than e.g. Norway, and even in those states the vast majority of the population live in small, higher density areas.
The areas where the vast majority of Americans actually live are fairly high density.
Some cost might come down to density, but not much.
I'm guessing the poster was thinking of "Europe" as more like "the EU" or "Europe minus Russia"; 1.1 million of Russia's 6.6 million square miles are part of Europe's 3.93; take it away, and "Europe" drops to more like 2.8 million square miles, a smidge less than the contiguous US.
Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation? Alaska still isn’t quite enough to push the US up, but it’s good for another 20%-ish increase in land area over the contiguous number.
>Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation?
As a non-contiguous later addition, with a small population, where statistically nobody lives there per sq mile, and is not pertinent to the discussion of population density as related to infrastructure problems?
Except in what's holding US bureucratic efficiency down (what we were discussing), and requires spending inflated federal budgets for little returns, Alaska is a big factor relative to its size...
Doesn't the US outspend in terms of dollars almost every single developed country on the planet at absolutely everything, even in per capita statistics, from military, police to education and healthcare? How could it be underfunded?