>Terrible consultants, middlemen, and lifers making progress too hard or impossible. I can mostly only echo hearsay, however I have been tangentially involved

>Terrible consultants, middlemen, and lifers making progress too hard or impossible. I can mostly only echo hearsay, however I have been tangentially involved in government-focused projects. The big issue I see with the government getting involved in tech is that they don't know what they really want, they don't know how to filter out bullshit/upsells, and they'll frequently overpay for things they don't need and underpay for things that would be very helpful. I'm not one of those people who wants to defund the government or privatize everything, however I do think the government incentive structure needs to be redesigned and become less cushy while simultaneously becoming more lucrative, accompanied by a huge culture change. The government isn't inherently inefficient, it's only like that because we let it be, one has only to look at other countries (see: Estonia, China) to see how much more effective we could be here. Regarding actual spending, I want to measure that by its effectiveness, not by the total amount spent. The government could blow all its money on tech initiatives and EMR upgrades and have nothing to show for it, and I wouldn't call that helping people domestically. To address your examples, a lot of those grants are for defense contractors (which only indirectly helps people, at best, and is itself a pretty corrupt old-boys industry). Others are for things like direct academic research though, which I do think is decently well run in general, but isn't really a direct government relationship to tech.