> Separate from the political issues at the top level of funding, the entire FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) is a steaming pile of reactionary bullshit, g

> Separate from the political issues at the top level of funding, the entire FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) is a steaming pile of reactionary bullshit, grown by accretion to minimize risk to bureaucrats at the expense of serving the tax payer efficiently. I don't think people understand just how much of the procurement system has been built out of risk aversion. A thing needs doing, politicians / government workers procure a solution to that, and that solution ends up going wrong somehow. Lots of egg on the relevant politician's faces, and plenty of ammo for anyone running against them. "$foo wasted millions of taxpayers money on solutions that don't even work!" So they put in a new mechanism to try to ensure that mistake never happens again. Each individual mechanism on its own generally makes sense. But over decades and decades it becomes such a complete mess that if you take a step back and look at it, it's all kinds of absurdity (There's a fun parallel there to the infrastructure and systems we tend to make as developers and sysadmins). Worse, the kind of absurdity it has become actually ends up costing taxpayers more money than if a bunch of the regulations didn't exist, cheaper things were tried and failed, and replaced with one that does work.