- new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly
- you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI
- Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business
- if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay step 1
Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is actually to spend money. Most government employees are contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.
> So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed.
Why on Earth would anyone go work for an organization that thinks it's ok to "layoff 90%" under the assumption that they're all under-performing? And you're making a huge assumption by saying there's zero risk. Laying off 90% of the original air traffic controllers presents zero risk? The intelligence services? Law enforcement? The military? Payroll accounts for around 3% of the Federal budget. Layoffs aren't going to fix our spending problem.
And this completely ignores the fact that's it's illegal to fire most of these people without cause. They're going to sue and they're going to win. And we'll end up paying them salaries to have not worked for however long those lawsuits take.
- new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly
- you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI
- Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business
- if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay step 1
Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is actually to spend money. Most government employees are contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.