Let me get this straight. Government contractors are concerned about the lack of transparency of 18F/USDS and also that they're developing capabilities that the

Let me get this straight. Government contractors are concerned about the lack of transparency of 18F/USDS and also that they're developing capabilities that the incumbents cannot possibly offer and are asking for more regulation? Funny considering how byzantine and convoluted myself and others have found it to start contracting for the government despite the best of our intentions that would require incredible amounts of overhead compared to even an enterprise software vendor relationship contract when you're a 2-person company (you typically wind up sub-contracted under a massive prime contractor anyway, and that removes a lot of your political weight immediately while favoring the big one). Isn't one of the best things you can do for the federal government is to be accommodating and flexible to their needs in their best interest as a guiding principle? There's some pretty serious cognitive dissonance happening. There's also a false dichotomy that people get the impression that government contractors have traditionally gotten a cushy job - this is not the full story. Smaller contractors constantly are folding or being forced to sell due to how difficult the market is to negotiate now as a small company, particularly for defense (I am shocked that the article only cites $80 Bn for government contractors pretending that defense contractors don't exist - just add up Lockheed and SAIC alone and you'd get far, far beyond that). One of the top reasons for companies folding is simply loss of budget into exploratory programs that can justify more "cutting edge" technology such as Hadoop-based or Spark-based analytics stacks and HTML5 instead of ColdFusion based user facing applications. After having worked for and alongside some great smaller contractors that just couldn't hack it, I'm pretty much done with government at this point though and would rather let the next generation of engineers that are more hopeful and nowhere near as disenchanted as myself show up. I think 18F / USDS limiting the service times is a Good Idea though because it can limit the amount of negativity that can accumulate from just a few engineers having poor experiences. Furthermore, this kind of "term limit" is a great way to prevent entrenchment by any entity working with the government. Unfortunately, many key initiatives are simply too important not to get the government entrenched and a long-term relationship to exist (granted, I'd also argue that the government should simply own these outright instead of attempting to half-ass privatize, which leads to political models closer to Mussolini's ideas of fascism).