This article assumes that the services themselves won’t be cut, so they’ll have to use more contractors.
I think the point is that they’ll cut the services and contractors too. I’ve worked with government quite a bit at various levels and the level of messing around, pointless ideas and internal politics is astounding, as well as the lack of accountability and oversight in general.
The opinion I walked away with is that just like twitter, chunks of it could be cut away or properly digitised without affecting what people on the outside perceive or care about at all.
This assumes they’re trying to make government less effective rather than to render it impotent to resist their plundering.
Honestly, DOGE seems like a disingenuous enterprise simply based on the fact that they are not starting with the DoD.
Defense contractors simply couldn't stop accidentally electricuting people in warzones[0, 1]. They have had a major negative impact on readiness while benefitting from massive contracts[2] and . There also appears to be a situation where DoD leadership has been captured by the defense industry[4].
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32334682 [1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/another-mysterious... [2] https://www.icij.org/investigations/windfalls-war/us-contrac... [3] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/pressroom/articles/2023/0... [4] https://quincyinst.org/research/subsidizing-the-military-ind...
This article keeps talking about the legal hoops Trump would have to jump through in order to do this and is completely ignoring the fact that any time he's presented with legal hoops he has to jump through he ignores them and does what he wants anyway without consequence. I don't believe the system will stop him this time because it hasn't stopped him even when it has managed to convict him of crimes.
Now being discussed on Reddit Fednews with more examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1iq66qa/washington...
"Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it."
"That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine—including yours truly (see most recently “Memo to AOC: Only You Can Save the Government,” July/August 2021)—have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."
I work at NASA in tech development and I have found that we have a lot of poor quality support service contracts. The faceless contracting companies supply staff that technically fill roles like providing IT support services, or supporting purchasing. More often than not they are so utterly unhelpful and unknowledgeable that it's actually easier and faster to do things myself, totally defeating the purpose. The contracting mechanism seems to add significant extra communication overhead to everything making things much more sluggish, bureaucratic, disconnected, and just plain unpleasant. I actually care very much if my work gets done.
Getting a large contract in place can be a miserable slog and take a huge amount of time and effort to sort out, particularly with the cumbersome government contracting rules and laws. Good contract documents are also really challenging to write. Often times the results will be non-optimal, terms will be interpreted in ways you didn't intend, or you with you had put some more info in there. In many cases I believe the timeline to get a good contract in place can be comparable to the work that we want to perform. That's just silly.
Use of contracts for tech development creates large disconnects and significantly reduces our control and responsiveness to changing needs and ideas. If NASA employees are doing the work we can easily pivot when circumstances change and re-prioritize labor and much more quickly drop bad ideas as we learn new things. We can start investigating something without completely knowing what we're doing and figure it out as we go along. That sort of thing is harder to do with a contract. If the work is being done by a contractor, changing anything is vastly more difficult and complicated, and often not even worth the effort.
If we have a device or something developed by a contractor they often manage to contaminate it with some kind of proprietary info making it much more difficult to use and communicate the data. The tools and devices we develop internally don't have that problem and we're free to use, adapt, and communicate technical info about them as much as we want. Also, if we develop something ourselves, we inherently more deeply understand it and can more quickly make modifications or test out new ideas. That's less often the case when work is done on contract. IMO many of our most valuable developments are done internally due to the enhanced flexibility.
Not that all contracts are bad. There are plenty of cases where using contracts makes great sense and works out terrifically. However, you often just have to hope the right sort of company has decided to exist because doing it ourselves is often not an option. I have absolutely been told about a contractor: "I know they're not the best, but they're the only one interested in doing this work. If don't fund them for too long they may lose interest and then we'll have nothing".
There are plenty of other problems unrelated to contractors as well. But over-reliance on contracting is a big one.