5 ms·

Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?

169 points by blueridge 3y ago

grogenaut 3y ago
9000 words to say that BAH is doing a 120% transaction fee ($9 on $7) on unknown development cost to do internet based reservations to national parks especially lottery managed ones. yeah it' annoying... but you used to do it over mail or in person. You can still do it in person easily. previously you'd mail in and find out 2 weeks before that yes you can fly in and do that 2 week trip. Not really actionable either unless you live there. I'm not sure what they want... the real crime is that the recreation.gov site is fucking slow as shit and lacks many options for quick searching requiring you to hunt and peck through sites. setup a non-for-profit to manage this stuff if that's your beef.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  > setup a non-for-profit to manage this stuff if that's your beef. Is there some benevolent non-profit/cooperative out there that would do these kinds of IT projects? Kinda like a credit union or mutual insurance company?
  - grogenaut 3y ago
    no idea... doubt it. money probbably instead goes to building enclaves around park city or making it easy to go to burning man
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    Or the government could do it at-cost in-house instead of paying a margin to BAH. I'm sure we can argue the 100 reasons why we can't/shouldn't do that, but it is a possible option, even if it's claimed to be a terrible one.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  I really don't understand why the GSA can't do this (or CISA since they seem to be taking over some of the GSA's responsibilities)? A reservation system seems like the kind of thing that'd show up often enough at various federal, state, and local levels for there to be enough value in the GSA just building their own, providing integrations into their US Web Design System so that it's easy for orgs to add, and offering it at cost to the orgs or facilities that need it.
  - grogenaut 3y ago
    Does the GSA code anything? does the Govt? For all this stuff isn't it all contract? What I'd hope for in a situation like this is that it's a term contract and the code stays with the govt but really do you want to take over someone else's code?
    - plasma_beam 3y ago
      They do..login.gov is probably the best current example and is ever expanding usage throughout federal sites. But GSA has also been under the microscope in the past couple years. Login.gov has received a lot of flak. They’re unlikely to take on another big “build it and they will come” project like a reusable reservation system. They make money off other agencies and those agreements need to be signed before the work starts.. Now all that said..contractors work on login.gov too and are prob the majority of the staff now!
      - ls612 3y ago
        What’s wrong with login.gov? I only used it to handle my Global Entry application process but it sure felt like a good SSO solution.
      - grogenaut 3y ago
        login.gov is a lot better than id.me that's for sure. didn't know gsa made it. Can they help the IRS not use id.me and receive files over any mechanism but mail and fax?
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  > You can still do it in person easily. Are you sure? I was in the USA recently, and the Dunewood Campground (Indiana Dunes National Park) had signs explicitly stating that there was no in-person booking, but that recreation.gov was the only way to book sites. Later I looked at Lake Erie State Park (New York), and they said that reserveamerica.com (or RA’s call centre) was the only way to book, no walk-ins permitted, and then the quoted $15 fee for their cheapest sites ballooned to something like $27.60 due to a reservation fee, an out-of-state-person fee, maybe some taxes…
zenbob 3y ago
As someone who frequently books campgrounds at the county, state, and national level, Recreation.gov provides by far the best user experience for browsing sites on a map and viewing calendar availability that I've encountered. Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems. Maybe I'm being naive, but it doesn't seem too important to me that Booz Allen is collecting some of its payment as a part of booking fees rather than directly from government contracts. A government website that works this well seems worthy of praise to me!
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  Look, good websites are great. I’m glad you’re happy with the experience. But building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers. Building decent websites in 2023 should be a competitive fee-for-delivery service, even for websites that have specialized functionality and large scale like auctions. Someone should pay you a (potentially large!) fee for building it and an ongoing maintenance/support fee. Nobody should be entitled to collect a huge rent amounting to any substantial fraction of all national park recreational fees just because they built some infrastructure, any more than the people who paved the roads leading to the national parks should be allowed to collect tolls on every driver passing through. If your response is that websites are so hard to build that our government can’t spec out its requirements and get it built — and therefore just need to overpay by 10,000x for the privilege of having a decent user experience, then maybe we (technologists) need to go have a long look in the mirror and ask what we’ve done to make things so terrible.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It's much more likely that the government agency in charge of this had $4.99 to build the site, not even enough for Fivver. But they have all the latitude in the world to sign "portion of the ticket price" contracts, and so they did. It's not Booz's fault; it's the situation that lead this to (apparently) be the best option for the agency. (This same crowd here wouldn't even turn over in their sleep if the same agency had contracted out building the site and ran it themselves on AWS and paid Amazon 3-5x what Booz is getting, mind you.)
matrix_overload 3y ago
It's good to see investigative journalism still alive in small blogs like this, but at the same time it is rather sad once you realize it gets drowned in an infinite supply of ragebait and never ends up being acted upon.
fortran77 3y ago
My thoughts on reading this were a little bit "that's a nice lucritive contract and revenue stream that Booz Allen has exclusive access to" but mostly "if the U.S. Government were to try do do this themselves, it would have been another healthcare.gov fiasco and cost twice as much as Booz Allen is taking"
- grogenaut 3y ago
  100% chance BAH built large parts of healthcare.gov
- plasma_beam 3y ago
  Govt contracting firm CGI built healthcare.gov then the rescue staff that would later become Presidential Innovation Fellows, 18F, US Digital Service as well as Accenture stepped in. Nowadays more than a few consulting firms keep the site going. These days there are PLENTY of govt IT fiascos, though there’s usually a contractor behind the mess. They also don’t attract the mainstream ire the way healthcare.gov did. The biggest example that jumps to mind is the VA’s botched rollout of the Cerner/Oracle platform. Plenty of angry congressmen but not headline news outside the DMV (DC, MD, VA).
- bsder 3y ago
  healthcare.gov was a disaster for a combination of reasons. However, one of the primary reasons is had such a rough start was because FAR too many people were channelled into it. The individual states were supposed to set up their own systems that the Federal system would reimburse and channel people into. Places like California did so--and the experience was quite decent. The problem, of course, was the all the Red states refusing to set up a system and all their citizens wound up in the healthcare.gov system. Of course, the major problem with healthcare.gov was the same problem as with all government contracts--outsourcing. All contractors basically play "chicken" with the government--they take all the money they can up front and do as little work as they can until the very last moment. If they get really lucky, the program gets cancelled and they get to keep all the money having done no work. Normally, they get yelled at at some point and have to put in work while the schedule slips and slips. Occasionally, though, they wind up with a contract that they didn't do jack on that had a real deadline and the contractor winds up with egg on their face. This was healthcare.gov.
prepend 3y ago
Tl:dr; lazy contracts by DOI.
ShrigmaMale 3y ago
this sounds like someone who is kvetching on principle because he resents private companies being involved with public services, not a legitimate complaint. $6 isn't a lot relative to the cost of even driving to a national park for most people. comparing it to a $50 bag check or $100 in ticketmaster crap is disingenuous in the extreme. recreation.gov is one of the very few dot gov's that doesn't make me want to put my hand through the nearest wall, precisely because it wasn't built like healthcare.gov. the site services 23 million active users and has to handle a lot of complexity around managing limits on how many people can visit. the author here is just straight-up wrong; consult this article for accurate information: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/you-may-hate-recreation-gov-it-keeps-our-parks-from-being-loved-to-death/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-b... "Here’s how it all works at the field level. A manager at a National Park, Forest Service, BLM office, or the like decides that a user fee must be paid or that a site or trip is so popular that a paid permit or reservation is required to protect the resource and the experience. The consumer of those services—we the people—log into rec.gov and pay the designated fee or pay into a lottery to try to win a permit. That money goes to the Treasury Department. From that account, Recreation.gov pays Booz Allen for its work based off each transaction as agreed upon in the original contract, and almost all of the rest goes back to the individual agency. Over the past four years, says Delappe, 85 percent of what is charged goes back to the agencies. Recreation One Stop does not set those fees, nor does Booz Allen. But Booz Allen’s original contract did include specific fees for various transactions. It’s the managers in the field that set the prices. They of course try to cover their costs and the transaction costs for Recreation.gov." TLDR: people be sayin shit. in this case "people" is some rando on substack and "shit" is "muh private company bad"
- dsauerbrun 3y ago
  you're looking at this from a very narrow perspective in terms of use case... one of my favorite climbing areas near me(shelf road) became a reservation through rec.gov only campground. I used to show up on Saturday morning, pay $7 for one night to camp, and leave Sunday afternoon after my 2nd day of climbing. as of 2 years ago rec.gov took over and kept the same $7/night rate but added an $8 service fee. it's complete bullshit for those of us who regularly use government recreational services.
macintux 3y ago
Previous discussions: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 (237 comments) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 (25 comments) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35475280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35475280 (17 comments)
xbar 3y ago
Regrettably this article fails to mention Delaware North, the prior concessionaire that was even worse.
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  Maybe note this to the author: looking at this from his perspective, maybe he simply doesn't know about them, but they seem right up his alley to investigate and write about.
alberth 3y ago
Reposts just in the past year: - 228 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 - 25 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 - 3 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834006
renewiltord 3y ago
My favourite part about this is you only need to subvert one guy and then you have a long term ongoing revenue program. The government is powerless in front of you. See Chicago parking for another example. One day I hope to do government contracting once I have a network. Generational wealth in a repeating fashion.
- jackhrt 3y ago
  BAH contractor here. hmu and I could internally recommend you.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Cheers, mate. Good offer, but not the right moment for me at this time.
reocha 3y ago
[flagged]
hn8305823 3y ago
One thing you should understand about the biggest Government IT contractors is that they put one of their few 'A' teams (really a 'B' team by big tech standards) on the project during the sales process, then swap out to one of their many 'D' teams after the win dinner. Many of the people actually implementing the project wouldn't last long in the private sector and that's why you end up with results ranging from disappointing to epic disaster though bureaucrats inside the Government often do their part to make things worse. It seems that by giving a significant take of each transaction to the contractor they were incentivized to actually do good work. This might be a feature instead of a bug except for how gross it is when dealing with public resources. There are exceptions to this but they tend to be smaller companies working on smaller projects or subcontracting to the big guys, where performance on the contract is important to future wins.
- _djo_ 3y ago
  One thing you should understand about the biggest Government IT contractors is that they put one of their few 'A' teams (really a 'B' team by big tech standards) on the project during the sales process, then swap out to one of their many 'D' teams after the win dinner. That's not just true for big government IT contractors, it's standard practice for any large contracting/consulting firm in the private sector too. The A team does the RFP response, the C or D team does the implementation so as to protect margins.
somsak2 3y ago
(2022)

169 points by blueridge 3y ago

9000 words to say that BAH is doing a 120% transaction fee ($9 on $7) on unknown development cost to do internet based reservations to national parks especially lottery managed ones. yeah it' annoying... but you used to do it over mail or in person. You can still do it in person easily. previously you'd mail in and find out 2 weeks before that yes you can fly in and do that 2 week trip. Not really actionable either unless you live there. I'm not sure what they want... the real crime is that the recreation.gov site is fucking slow as shit and lacks many options for quick searching requiring you to hunt and peck through sites. setup a non-for-profit to manage this stuff if that's your beef.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Scoundreller 3y ago
> setup a non-for-profit to manage this stuff if that's your beef. Is there some benevolent non-profit/cooperative out there that would do these kinds of IT projects? Kinda like a credit union or mutual insurance company?
- grogenaut 3y ago
  no idea... doubt it. money probbably instead goes to building enclaves around park city or making it easy to go to burning man
- PostOnce 3y ago
  Or the government could do it at-cost in-house instead of paying a margin to BAH. I'm sure we can argue the 100 reasons why we can't/shouldn't do that, but it is a possible option, even if it's claimed to be a terrible one.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
I really don't understand why the GSA can't do this (or CISA since they seem to be taking over some of the GSA's responsibilities)? A reservation system seems like the kind of thing that'd show up often enough at various federal, state, and local levels for there to be enough value in the GSA just building their own, providing integrations into their US Web Design System so that it's easy for orgs to add, and offering it at cost to the orgs or facilities that need it.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  Does the GSA code anything? does the Govt? For all this stuff isn't it all contract? What I'd hope for in a situation like this is that it's a term contract and the code stays with the govt but really do you want to take over someone else's code?
  - plasma_beam 3y ago
    They do..login.gov is probably the best current example and is ever expanding usage throughout federal sites. But GSA has also been under the microscope in the past couple years. Login.gov has received a lot of flak. They’re unlikely to take on another big “build it and they will come” project like a reusable reservation system. They make money off other agencies and those agreements need to be signed before the work starts.. Now all that said..contractors work on login.gov too and are prob the majority of the staff now!
    - ls612 3y ago
      What’s wrong with login.gov? I only used it to handle my Global Entry application process but it sure felt like a good SSO solution.
    - grogenaut 3y ago
      login.gov is a lot better than id.me that's for sure. didn't know gsa made it. Can they help the IRS not use id.me and receive files over any mechanism but mail and fax?
chrismorgan 3y ago
> You can still do it in person easily. Are you sure? I was in the USA recently, and the Dunewood Campground (Indiana Dunes National Park) had signs explicitly stating that there was no in-person booking, but that recreation.gov was the only way to book sites. Later I looked at Lake Erie State Park (New York), and they said that reserveamerica.com (or RA’s call centre) was the only way to book, no walk-ins permitted, and then the quoted $15 fee for their cheapest sites ballooned to something like $27.60 due to a reservation fee, an out-of-state-person fee, maybe some taxes…

zenbob 3y ago

As someone who frequently books campgrounds at the county, state, and national level, Recreation.gov provides by far the best user experience for browsing sites on a map and viewing calendar availability that I've encountered. Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems. Maybe I'm being naive, but it doesn't seem too important to me that Booz Allen is collecting some of its payment as a part of booking fees rather than directly from government contracts. A government website that works this well seems worthy of praise to me!

matthewdgreen 3y ago
Look, good websites are great. I’m glad you’re happy with the experience. But building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers. Building decent websites in 2023 should be a competitive fee-for-delivery service, even for websites that have specialized functionality and large scale like auctions. Someone should pay you a (potentially large!) fee for building it and an ongoing maintenance/support fee. Nobody should be entitled to collect a huge rent amounting to any substantial fraction of all national park recreational fees just because they built some infrastructure, any more than the people who paved the roads leading to the national parks should be allowed to collect tolls on every driver passing through. If your response is that websites are so hard to build that our government can’t spec out its requirements and get it built — and therefore just need to overpay by 10,000x for the privilege of having a decent user experience, then maybe we (technologists) need to go have a long look in the mirror and ask what we’ve done to make things so terrible.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It's much more likely that the government agency in charge of this had $4.99 to build the site, not even enough for Fivver. But they have all the latitude in the world to sign "portion of the ticket price" contracts, and so they did. It's not Booz's fault; it's the situation that lead this to (apparently) be the best option for the agency. (This same crowd here wouldn't even turn over in their sleep if the same agency had contracted out building the site and ran it themselves on AWS and paid Amazon 3-5x what Booz is getting, mind you.)

matrix_overload 3y ago

It's good to see investigative journalism still alive in small blogs like this, but at the same time it is rather sad once you realize it gets drowned in an infinite supply of ragebait and never ends up being acted upon.

fortran77 3y ago

My thoughts on reading this were a little bit "that's a nice lucritive contract and revenue stream that Booz Allen has exclusive access to" but mostly "if the U.S. Government were to try do do this themselves, it would have been another healthcare.gov fiasco and cost twice as much as Booz Allen is taking"

grogenaut 3y ago
100% chance BAH built large parts of healthcare.gov
plasma_beam 3y ago
Govt contracting firm CGI built healthcare.gov then the rescue staff that would later become Presidential Innovation Fellows, 18F, US Digital Service as well as Accenture stepped in. Nowadays more than a few consulting firms keep the site going. These days there are PLENTY of govt IT fiascos, though there’s usually a contractor behind the mess. They also don’t attract the mainstream ire the way healthcare.gov did. The biggest example that jumps to mind is the VA’s botched rollout of the Cerner/Oracle platform. Plenty of angry congressmen but not headline news outside the DMV (DC, MD, VA).
bsder 3y ago
healthcare.gov was a disaster for a combination of reasons. However, one of the primary reasons is had such a rough start was because FAR too many people were channelled into it. The individual states were supposed to set up their own systems that the Federal system would reimburse and channel people into. Places like California did so--and the experience was quite decent. The problem, of course, was the all the Red states refusing to set up a system and all their citizens wound up in the healthcare.gov system. Of course, the major problem with healthcare.gov was the same problem as with all government contracts--outsourcing. All contractors basically play "chicken" with the government--they take all the money they can up front and do as little work as they can until the very last moment. If they get really lucky, the program gets cancelled and they get to keep all the money having done no work. Normally, they get yelled at at some point and have to put in work while the schedule slips and slips. Occasionally, though, they wind up with a contract that they didn't do jack on that had a real deadline and the contractor winds up with egg on their face. This was healthcare.gov.

prepend 3y ago

Tl:dr; lazy contracts by DOI.

ShrigmaMale 3y ago

this sounds like someone who is kvetching on principle because he resents private companies being involved with public services, not a legitimate complaint. $6 isn't a lot relative to the cost of even driving to a national park for most people. comparing it to a $50 bag check or $100 in ticketmaster crap is disingenuous in the extreme. recreation.gov is one of the very few dot gov's that doesn't make me want to put my hand through the nearest wall, precisely because it wasn't built like healthcare.gov. the site services 23 million active users and has to handle a lot of complexity around managing limits on how many people can visit. the author here is just straight-up wrong; consult this article for accurate information: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/you-may-hate-recreation-gov-it-keeps-our-parks-from-being-loved-to-death/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-b... "Here’s how it all works at the field level. A manager at a National Park, Forest Service, BLM office, or the like decides that a user fee must be paid or that a site or trip is so popular that a paid permit or reservation is required to protect the resource and the experience. The consumer of those services—we the people—log into rec.gov and pay the designated fee or pay into a lottery to try to win a permit. That money goes to the Treasury Department. From that account, Recreation.gov pays Booz Allen for its work based off each transaction as agreed upon in the original contract, and almost all of the rest goes back to the individual agency. Over the past four years, says Delappe, 85 percent of what is charged goes back to the agencies. Recreation One Stop does not set those fees, nor does Booz Allen. But Booz Allen’s original contract did include specific fees for various transactions. It’s the managers in the field that set the prices. They of course try to cover their costs and the transaction costs for Recreation.gov." TLDR: people be sayin shit. in this case "people" is some rando on substack and "shit" is "muh private company bad"

dsauerbrun 3y ago
you're looking at this from a very narrow perspective in terms of use case... one of my favorite climbing areas near me(shelf road) became a reservation through rec.gov only campground. I used to show up on Saturday morning, pay $7 for one night to camp, and leave Sunday afternoon after my 2nd day of climbing. as of 2 years ago rec.gov took over and kept the same $7/night rate but added an $8 service fee. it's complete bullshit for those of us who regularly use government recreational services.

macintux 3y ago

Previous discussions: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 (237 comments) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 (25 comments) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35475280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35475280 (17 comments)

xbar 3y ago

Regrettably this article fails to mention Delaware North, the prior concessionaire that was even worse.

kerkeslager 3y ago
Maybe note this to the author: looking at this from his perspective, maybe he simply doesn't know about them, but they seem right up his alley to investigate and write about.

alberth 3y ago

Reposts just in the past year: - 228 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835815 - 25 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 - 3 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834006

renewiltord 3y ago

My favourite part about this is you only need to subvert one guy and then you have a long term ongoing revenue program. The government is powerless in front of you. See Chicago parking for another example. One day I hope to do government contracting once I have a network. Generational wealth in a repeating fashion.

jackhrt 3y ago
BAH contractor here. hmu and I could internally recommend you.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Cheers, mate. Good offer, but not the right moment for me at this time.

reocha 3y ago

[flagged]

hn8305823 3y ago

One thing you should understand about the biggest Government IT contractors is that they put one of their few 'A' teams (really a 'B' team by big tech standards) on the project during the sales process, then swap out to one of their many 'D' teams after the win dinner. Many of the people actually implementing the project wouldn't last long in the private sector and that's why you end up with results ranging from disappointing to epic disaster though bureaucrats inside the Government often do their part to make things worse. It seems that by giving a significant take of each transaction to the contractor they were incentivized to actually do good work. This might be a feature instead of a bug except for how gross it is when dealing with public resources. There are exceptions to this but they tend to be smaller companies working on smaller projects or subcontracting to the big guys, where performance on the contract is important to future wins.

_djo_ 3y ago
One thing you should understand about the biggest Government IT contractors is that they put one of their few 'A' teams (really a 'B' team by big tech standards) on the project during the sales process, then swap out to one of their many 'D' teams after the win dinner. That's not just true for big government IT contractors, it's standard practice for any large contracting/consulting firm in the private sector too. The A team does the RFP response, the C or D team does the implementation so as to protect margins.

somsak2 3y ago

(2022)