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Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by t
by ErikAugust 7y ago
Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by tax money.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoYeah my Son the Sgt told stories of complex equipment never used. Battery lifetime issues, complex controls, limited opportunity for training.
- bluedino 7y agoWe've bought "surplus" Dell and HP servers from different government entities that were two generations old, basically brand new in the box. I wonder what % of purchases go unused for whatever reasons.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago"I wonder what % of purchases go unused for whatever reasons." the same happens in big companies. W have budget cycles so we buy test equipment when the money is in the budget even at the risk of it never being used. Otherwise you can't buy stuff when you actually need it because at that time the budget isn't there. Same with hiring people. We are letting good interns go because there is a hiring freeze. 8 weeks later we scramble to find new hires because now we have headcount. Not sure how to do better but it just shows that planned economies tend to produce waste, be it in a corporation or in a communist state.
- Nasrudith 7y agoWhy not just give them a savings "buffer account" for the budget? Let them build up the remnants so that the available funds can build up some. Obviously you need to watch it still and be sure "underbudgets okay with surplus" don't deplete it entirely or too much builds up (as in multiples of the budget).
- bochoh 7y agoVia auction site?
- 2000YearOldMan 7y agohttps://www.govliquidation.com/ https://www.govliquidation.com/ Looks like the site moved to https://www.go-dove.com/ https://www.go-dove.com/
- prostheticvamp 7y agoHave you used that site in the past? I see a lot of listings saying something like “24 ea” to describe a lot of 24, but can’t find what the ea means. I’d think it might mean “bid is per item,” but that makes no sense (I’m seeing bids at multiples of what the individual items are worth).
- 2000YearOldMan 7y agoThe site is horrible in a sense of trying to figure out what you are buying. Also things like hard drives are usually removed, so you may be looking at a pallet of desktop towers that are unusable until you do some work to them. I never purchased anything off that site but I did turn stuff into the department that had the responsibility to list stuff on that site.
- krallja 7y agoea is short for each
- jandrese 7y agoExactly. I look at a lot like this: https://www.go-dove.com/asset/65/17113 https://www.go-dove.com/asset/65/17113 And see monitors of various sizes and vintages, listed as "24 ea". Do you win all the monitors if you win, or is it first come first serve for the 24 highest bidders? I'm guessing it's the former, but it's not like any of the FAQs on the site are going to clue you in. Instead they tell you that their web guys don't know how to scrub input properly: Message received: "Your bid is not in the correct format" This means you have entered a dollar sign, or comma. Here is an example: (Correct) 1000 (Incorrect) $1,000.00 I found another doc that may have the answer: 2. Items that have no tag number and are of identical kind and condition may be grouped on one SPMD-1A. Example (25 ea. chairs, wood w/arms). https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/rules/0690/0690-02.pdf https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/rules/0690/0690-02.pdf Suggests that you are bidding on all items with one bid--if you win you get all of them.
- blackearl 7y agoI've heard you need to use it or lose when it comes to gov budgets. Anecdotes of jets dumping fuel into the ocean just to come back and refill to keep a budget.
- minikites 7y agoCorporate department budgeting works the same way.
- briandear 7y agoZero based budgeting would be my first policy proposal as President.
- jandrese 7y agoIt's a shit ton more work, and the government takes about 18 months to come up with the annual budget already. The only reason it works at all is the ability to let hundreds of thousands of small projects coast on their last budget.
- Nasrudith 7y agoThat action in itself has some legitimate technical reasons at least - fighter jets are very envelope pushing and often cannot land safely while carrying a sufficiently full load of fuel. Say the jet can only land safely at 35% or less fuel capacity, is at 50% and needs to reach a target which requires at least 70% capacity to reach, fight, and return. Midair refueling isn't an option for whatever reason and others are logistically committed. Dumping 15% and landing to refuel before launching could make sense. Granted stupid waste without any valid tactical or strategic edge case reasons aren't exactly unheard of in the military either.
- simias 7y agoI'm sure that they need spares for some of their critical infrastructures, that could be it. Not to say that I don't believe that it could just be unused stuff lying around for years, that could definitely be it too.
- azinman2 7y agoWhere from?
- ausbah 7y agodoing an audit of the DoD still cost over $400M https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/11/15/heres-what-the-pentagons-first-ever-audit-found/ https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/11/15/heres-what-t...
- nolta 7y agoThe DoD budget is ~$700B, so that's <0.1%
- heavenlyblue 7y agoYeah, we recently had a tech audit of our company, it took a good half of a week in terms of man-hours for each of our leading tech staff. In the context of this .1% doesn’t sound so bad.
- blackguardx 7y agoHow much does cleaning the bathrooms cost? It is nice to know the cost, but it shouldn’t be an argument not to perform a critical task for the function of the organization.
- tomatotomato37 7y agoReminds me how the US continually produces tanks despite the armies recommendations, to the point where we have enough tanks to essentially fight WW3 with purely tanks and still have some left over, just so some congressmen can keep jobs in their constituency. At least that was the situation in the 2000s, no idea if that wackiness is still continuing
- SEJeff 7y agoTo be fair, they've just massively upgraded the M1s to where they're nothing like the original tanks at all: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/armys-new-tank-here-check-out-m1a3-abrams-tank-no-lasers-needed-72566 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/armys-new-tank-here-c... It isn't as though they've been building the same old thing since the 2000s, they've been incrementally and steadily improving them as technology and materials science improves.
- jdc 7y agoI think the point is tanks in general have little use in the vast majority of modern American battles.
- pengaru 7y agoIs that really true when modern American battles seem to always evolve into endless occupations?
- buckminster 7y agoThey should be building something that more closely resembles an armoured RV with a gun. Perfect for achieving and maintaining occupation.
- SEJeff 7y agoYou're describing the Stryker Combat Vehicle, and it has a remotely operated weapons turret. However, it can only carry 9 infantryman (in addition to its crew). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stryker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stryker
- hef19898 7y agoThere was a link to googlemaps where you see endles rows of Abrams tanks sitting in the desert. Quite impressive. But say what you want, at least this keeps the industrial capacities and capabilites alive! Still pretty pointless, so.
- mr_overalls 7y agoPrime example: the NRO donated two unused spy satellites to NASA, each more powerful than the Hubble Telescope. https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-nasa.html https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...
- jcims 7y agoI love this story. Reminds me of Contact, one of my favorite movie quotes of all time: 'First rule of government spending: why build one when you can have two for twice the price?'
- jfengel 7y agoUnless they also donated launch costs, and $90 million per year to run it[1], it's no surprise that they're not actually using it. It's small compared to the overall budget, but not free. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy_2018_budget_estimates.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy_2018...
- jandrese 7y agoHas anybody asked Elon Musk if he wants to show off what a Falcon Heavy can do and maybe get some other billionaire to pitch in for operating capital?
- JackFr 7y agoI read an interview with an NRO scientist, who described his group as following carefully the progress of the Hubble team who were independently solving many of the same problems their teams had solved earlier. From a national security perspective, they had to sit on their hands and not offer any help, but from an engineering perspective, they valued having another team do it to see if they would validate their design by coming up with similar solutions.
- new_realist 7y agoWhataboutism is a lazy response.
- colejohnson66 7y agoWhile it is whataboutism, it’s saying (in less words) that instead of painting Tesla in a negative light for $50M, the candle should be shining on the government for the billions wasted in the military every year. I read it as a dismissal of the article because it seems like it was written just for clicks. An article about the government’s waste doesn’t get as many clicks.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoWaste in government is a huge problem, there's no need to conflate it with military readiness to make it look larger.
- mindslight 7y agoHardware sitting idle is still more productive than the trillions of dollars being spent to disrupt foreign countries and generate future enemies!
- tbyehl 7y agoGlances at shelves in garage containing many thousands of dollars worth of idle routers, switches, servers, and electronics. In relative terms I'm probably at least as bad.
- gumby 7y agoLike the trillion dollar F-35?
- aguyfromnb 7y ago>Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by tax money. What is your point? This is "whataboutism". Do you not see a difference between government entities and private companies (owned in majority by one billionaire)?