5 ms·

On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funnele

by mythz 2y ago

On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.

toolz 2y ago
Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers
- bena 2y ago
  The Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.
  - axpy906 2y ago
    Didn’t they at one point fail to account for Trillions of dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for me is unimaginable.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      How many other companies need to fund rebuilding of entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in the first place...)
    - kolbe 2y ago
      Auditors don't get access to whatever the modern equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Bahamas) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      "September 10th, 2001 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to the American public that Pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    They use auditors with clearance. I'd imagine certain programs require very specific auditors to supervise them, like how the FISA court works with specific vetted lawyers at times. The more mundane problem is things like "drive that truck over there… drive another one back" often result in the exact location of an asset being unclear fairly frequently.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Your public tax dollars picked Tesla and SpaceX as winners vs losers, through billions of dollars of subsidies.
  - zpeti 2y ago
    Those subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on those contracts. This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government. Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      > Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or ArianeSpace ... Or any of hundreds of other national space programs and companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to pay 10X the US Govt's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's current position of utter global dominance.
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-exploration-technologies-spacex https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e... | https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/ https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonp... https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-teslas-million-dollar-bureaucratic-snafu/ https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-t... “Who is John Galt?” /s He is Schrödinger's Entrepreneur: a self made man when the ego and cult calls for it, but a scrappy startup founder just trying to save the world and get to Mars when desperate for government or Capital market support and intervention.
- addicted 2y ago
  They are crowing about increasing the Pentagon’s budget.
- jedberg 2y ago
  Musk's companies fail their audits too. Tesla can't account for $1.4B of government money they received.
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    Why does this matter? Government either gives loans and demands they are paid back, or pays for deliverables. If you have to keep your fingers in the books to feel good about what's happening, it was a badly structured contract.
    - jedberg 2y ago
      Because it's my money and I want to know how it's being spent, whether it's the government or a private company spending it. I had no choice in where that money went, so I need transparency on how it's being spent. That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.
yuppii 2y ago
So you are comparing existing, actual waste with your "imaginary" waste that might or might not happen... Go easy on the kool aid.
- aqme28 2y ago
  I'm no fan of the Pentagon and certainly think it's a money sieve, but why are you asserting that this $5.1B is "actual waste" and also not imaginary?
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    They're not, they're saying that GP imagines genuine waste-saving will happen, when in fact it's more likely to be fabricated "waste" conjured up by Elmo and his army of teenagers.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - jimbob45 2y ago
    Deloitte and Accenture would be considered the worst US companies if Monsanto/Bayer and Nestlé didn’t exist. Their work is always waste.
    - searine 2y ago
      Why are they the worst? Genuinely curious.
      - _factor 2y ago
        Nestle deliberately poisoned baby formula with fake protein to fool third world countries testing it. Malnourishing infants and causing deaths on what shouldn’t have to be a regulated industry in a sane world. Their president also publicly stated water is not a human right, implying we should let people die if they can’t purchase water from capitalists. Monsanto will sue you after their “patented” seeds float onto your field and germinate, basically leaving you no options besides using their seed after their local lobbying manipulated the courts to their side. I’m sure there’s more and worse hidden away.
ethbr1 2y ago
>> The pacts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house. ... which means more work in-house. ... done by the same teams they just cut the size of. Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work itself well.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  Yeah that’s going to be the problem. The pay bands are so low they would be lucky to get people with degrees at all. Definitely not talent
  - _mlbt 2y ago
    Pay isn’t everything. Government civilian GS employees have an extremely generous benefits package and usually excellent job security. Contractors frequently take pay cuts to work directly as a government employee for these reasons.
    - hobs 2y ago
      And now they do not have job security.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      That ship has sailed now, though. The benefits and job security can no longer be counted on. Government is gonna have to compete more on salary, or accept worse candidates.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        A silver lining in all this upheaval is the reduction of price obfuscation (hopefully) by getting rid of deferred compensation schemes that make it difficult for labor sellers to evaluate the market.
      - 2y ago
kcatskcolbdi 2y ago
Yeah can't wait until our Nation's Finest are having to use Grok Spectacles to identify enemy combatants.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Eh, that might work out. https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donald-trump-death-penalty https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal... > Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
  - nonethewiser 2y ago
    What do you mean?
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      I thought that was pretty clear; I mean that Grok's "unbiased" training seems to align it with anti-Musk positions pretty regularly. As such, I'm not super fearful of it being picked to run the US government right now. Further examples: https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-grok-ai-is-turning-against-him-telling-x-users-he-spreads-misinformation https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-grok-ai-is-turning-agai... > For instance, if you ask Grok: “Who is the biggest spreader of misinformation on X?” it replies that “Based on available reports and analyses, Elon Musk is frequently identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X."
    - JPKab 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        Oh, not at all. AI goggles telling you who to kill is bad. If they wind up implememented anyways, the program being cut very short via friendly-fire against the direct perpetrator of its implementation seems like the best bad-case scenario. Like when Taliban bomb makers accidentally blow themselves up.
raincom 2y ago
Deloitte, Accenture, etc, have such bad reputations as any Indian offshore company TCS, Wipro, etc. Just add more billable hours, milk and milk.
ForHackernews 2y ago
At least that's cutting out the middleman -many big consulting firms are whitelabelling AI nonsense already.
- giarc 2y ago
  Agree - train your employees to properly use a $200 ChatGPT subscription rather than rely on a $700/hr consultant doing the same thing.
JPKab 2y ago
[flagged]
nashashmi 2y ago
I’m expecting every company to now pay less for their services because of this cut.
EasyMark 2y ago
With this administration is about destruction of all government spending in order to maximize tax cuts for the top 1% who pay for access to The Hill, it really is about that, and not about efficiency. Also please point me at all the "fraud" they've found and yet for some reason the DOJ isn't charging anyone with "fraud". It's all BS. There are well thought out cuts, and there is what DOGE and Dump are doing.

by mythz 2y ago

On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.

toolz 2y ago

Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers

bena 2y ago
The Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.
- axpy906 2y ago
  Didn’t they at one point fail to account for Trillions of dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for me is unimaginable.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    How many other companies need to fund rebuilding of entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in the first place...)
  - kolbe 2y ago
    Auditors don't get access to whatever the modern equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Bahamas) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    "September 10th, 2001 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to the American public that Pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  They use auditors with clearance. I'd imagine certain programs require very specific auditors to supervise them, like how the FISA court works with specific vetted lawyers at times. The more mundane problem is things like "drive that truck over there… drive another one back" often result in the exact location of an asset being unclear fairly frequently.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Your public tax dollars picked Tesla and SpaceX as winners vs losers, through billions of dollars of subsidies.
- zpeti 2y ago
  Those subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on those contracts. This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government. Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    > Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or ArianeSpace ... Or any of hundreds of other national space programs and companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to pay 10X the US Govt's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's current position of utter global dominance.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-exploration-technologies-spacex https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e... | https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/ https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonp... https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-teslas-million-dollar-bureaucratic-snafu/ https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-t... “Who is John Galt?” /s He is Schrödinger's Entrepreneur: a self made man when the ego and cult calls for it, but a scrappy startup founder just trying to save the world and get to Mars when desperate for government or Capital market support and intervention.
addicted 2y ago
They are crowing about increasing the Pentagon’s budget.
jedberg 2y ago
Musk's companies fail their audits too. Tesla can't account for $1.4B of government money they received.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  Why does this matter? Government either gives loans and demands they are paid back, or pays for deliverables. If you have to keep your fingers in the books to feel good about what's happening, it was a badly structured contract.
  - jedberg 2y ago
    Because it's my money and I want to know how it's being spent, whether it's the government or a private company spending it. I had no choice in where that money went, so I need transparency on how it's being spent. That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.

yuppii 2y ago

So you are comparing existing, actual waste with your "imaginary" waste that might or might not happen... Go easy on the kool aid.

aqme28 2y ago
I'm no fan of the Pentagon and certainly think it's a money sieve, but why are you asserting that this $5.1B is "actual waste" and also not imaginary?
- danparsonson 2y ago
  They're not, they're saying that GP imagines genuine waste-saving will happen, when in fact it's more likely to be fabricated "waste" conjured up by Elmo and his army of teenagers.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    [flagged]
- jimbob45 2y ago
  Deloitte and Accenture would be considered the worst US companies if Monsanto/Bayer and Nestlé didn’t exist. Their work is always waste.
  - searine 2y ago
    Why are they the worst? Genuinely curious.
    - _factor 2y ago
      Nestle deliberately poisoned baby formula with fake protein to fool third world countries testing it. Malnourishing infants and causing deaths on what shouldn’t have to be a regulated industry in a sane world. Their president also publicly stated water is not a human right, implying we should let people die if they can’t purchase water from capitalists. Monsanto will sue you after their “patented” seeds float onto your field and germinate, basically leaving you no options besides using their seed after their local lobbying manipulated the courts to their side. I’m sure there’s more and worse hidden away.

ethbr1 2y ago

>> The pacts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house. ... which means more work in-house. ... done by the same teams they just cut the size of. Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work itself well.

nothercastle 2y ago
Yeah that’s going to be the problem. The pay bands are so low they would be lucky to get people with degrees at all. Definitely not talent
- _mlbt 2y ago
  Pay isn’t everything. Government civilian GS employees have an extremely generous benefits package and usually excellent job security. Contractors frequently take pay cuts to work directly as a government employee for these reasons.
  - hobs 2y ago
    And now they do not have job security.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    That ship has sailed now, though. The benefits and job security can no longer be counted on. Government is gonna have to compete more on salary, or accept worse candidates.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      A silver lining in all this upheaval is the reduction of price obfuscation (hopefully) by getting rid of deferred compensation schemes that make it difficult for labor sellers to evaluate the market.
    - 2y ago

kcatskcolbdi 2y ago

Yeah can't wait until our Nation's Finest are having to use Grok Spectacles to identify enemy combatants.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Eh, that might work out. https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donald-trump-death-penalty https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal... > Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
- nonethewiser 2y ago
  What do you mean?
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    I thought that was pretty clear; I mean that Grok's "unbiased" training seems to align it with anti-Musk positions pretty regularly. As such, I'm not super fearful of it being picked to run the US government right now. Further examples: https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-grok-ai-is-turning-against-him-telling-x-users-he-spreads-misinformation https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-grok-ai-is-turning-agai... > For instance, if you ask Grok: “Who is the biggest spreader of misinformation on X?” it replies that “Based on available reports and analyses, Elon Musk is frequently identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X."
  - JPKab 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Oh, not at all. AI goggles telling you who to kill is bad. If they wind up implememented anyways, the program being cut very short via friendly-fire against the direct perpetrator of its implementation seems like the best bad-case scenario. Like when Taliban bomb makers accidentally blow themselves up.

raincom 2y ago

Deloitte, Accenture, etc, have such bad reputations as any Indian offshore company TCS, Wipro, etc. Just add more billable hours, milk and milk.

ForHackernews 2y ago

At least that's cutting out the middleman -many big consulting firms are whitelabelling AI nonsense already.

giarc 2y ago
Agree - train your employees to properly use a $200 ChatGPT subscription rather than rely on a $700/hr consultant doing the same thing.

JPKab 2y ago

[flagged]

nashashmi 2y ago

I’m expecting every company to now pay less for their services because of this cut.

EasyMark 2y ago

With this administration is about destruction of all government spending in order to maximize tax cuts for the top 1% who pay for access to The Hill, it really is about that, and not about efficiency. Also please point me at all the "fraud" they've found and yet for some reason the DOJ isn't charging anyone with "fraud". It's all BS. There are well thought out cuts, and there is what DOGE and Dump are doing.