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Part of the problem is that the contracting rules seemingly force contracts to be split among a bunch of contractors none of whom is fully responsible for the p

Part of the problem is that the contracting rules seemingly force contracts to be split among a bunch of contractors none of whom is fully responsible for the project, so when something goes wrong, it's a circular firing squad. My experience is that contractors do get fired, but the same people end up working for the contractors that are still there (and since they are often the only people who remember what the hell is going on, this is sometimes not a bad thing).

Iftheshoefits 12y ago
That's by design: it's built-in pass-the-blame with an extra helping of spreading the bacon around. Government contracting is little more than legal, officially sanctioned nepotism and graft. The whole point is to allow Congressmen and other connected government officials to enrich their friends and family. In turn, these officials get high-paying "jobs" at the same places they helped funnel lots of money to. The people in these comments here on HN claiming that somehow that's "liberal government" at work don't know what they're talking about, at all, and I mean downvote-worthy, comically so. If we must label these antics with comparisons to American political ideologies, the government contracting system is closer to big-business, republican-style politics than anything else. Small-c-conservative and any-l-liberal are the last things I think of when I think of government contracting.