I have a friend who worked at a similar "elite" program in the government called the Presidential Fellows. These are a bunch of highly qualified MBAs, Programm

I have a friend who worked at a similar "elite" program in the government called the Presidential Fellows. These are a bunch of highly qualified MBAs, Programmers, and other such overachievers from the private sector who had overwhelming faith in the governments ability (and responsibility) to get things done. My friend went to DC with a lot of optimism. Halfway or more through the program, I met my friend at a wedding. My friend's take on the problems with government IT was that it wasn't resolvable by such a small team, because the problems were cultural, deep-grained, and protected by turf-guardians who had a lot to lose with reform. Without the President spending significant political capital, nothing will ever get done. The most egregious instance of wastage that could not be resolved involved an instance where a certain government department was receiving emails for archiving. Was printing out the emails. Was sending those printouts to another department by snail mail. That department was then scanning in the emails and archiving the digital images to computer storage. The stupidity of this process was manifest to everyone without mental disability, and yet nobody could change the process due to the various contractors and their patrons, and the various government employees employed in the process. Later, talking to other government IT workers (not Presidential Fellows) I came to the conclusion that Govt. human capital is not of the highest quality, and Govt. is perhaps the worst place to work unless you have a thick skin that helps you to resist demoralization at every turn.