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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 10 2015, @04:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the excellent-ROI dept.

If there's one thing politicians of all stripes can agree on, it's this: The immigration system is broken. What's less obvious is the extent to which that's physically true. An online system that was supposed to automate the processing of green cards and other immigration benefits has struggled to function properly since at least 2009. Now Jerry Markon writes at the Washington Post that, the US government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated paper approach to managing immigration and a decade into the project, all that officials have to show for their effort is a single form that's now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper. The project called ELIS, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it's now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation's immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats. "You're going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we're still a paper-based agency,'' says Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. "It's a huge albatross around our necks.''

Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the mammoth problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency. When the project began, DHS was only two years old, cobbled together after the Sept. 11 attacks from myriad other government agencies, and the department was still reeling. "There was virtually no oversight back then,'' says a former federal official. "DHS was like the Wild West on big acquisitions." "The biggest problem is that the holes that were in the system that allowed the terrorists to come in—for 9/11, the Times Square bomber, all of those people—came through USCIS" and the flaws in the system remain, says a USCIS manager who departed within the past year and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation that could affect future employment. "They don't have any real-time validation of any of the documents" from banks and higher education schools. The long-delayed website has burned through more than a billion dollars, mainly from refugees, asylum seekers and other foreigners who fund the system through application fees. It now faces an influx of more than 5 million petitioners under Obama's executive actions on immigration—if ELIS ever becomes capable of handling the relevant forms.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by gman003 on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:08PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:08PM (#261360)

    Whenever anyone says "whenever someone says ____ I write them off instantly as a complete and utter moron", I mentally flag them as an extremist who may be correct within the subject they've chosen to focus on but has no concept of the big picture, and whose evidence and conclusions cannot be accepted as objective. "Only the Sith deal in absolutes", as it were.

    The government fucks up (see: the F-35, the Ebola epidemic response). The government does not always fuck up (see: the Apollo program, eradicating smallpox). Private industry fucks up (see: the Surface RT, OS/2). Private industry does not always fuck up (see: Tesla, the iPhone).

    Besides, isn't this particular instance one of a government contractor fucking up? If you're going to generalize from an anecdote, shouldn't it at least be one that *supports* your claim? I mean, IBM really ought to be able to put out more than three forms (two of which are broken) in a decade of work. Some of the blame surely falls on the government but the real failure here seems to be private industry.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by tathra on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:23PM

    by tathra (3367) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:23PM (#261367)

    The government fucks up (see: the F-35)

    the F-35 is another instance of private contractors milking the government for all its worth, Lockheed Martin in this case. The government's fault is not cutting off the moneyflow, but keeping the cash flowing despite endless years of incompetence and outright fraud is the entire point of privatization. seriously, has there ever been a single instance since we started privatizing government and government functions of a contract winner having their contract stripped from them for their failure to deliver and constant over-budget-behind-schedule-ness?

    • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:48PM

      by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:48PM (#261383)

      Fair enough. Although the government is partly to blame for setting the requirements the way they did, that really was more of a Lockheed Martin problem.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @07:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @07:24PM (#261391)

    Read Britcher's "The Limits of Software People Projects and Perspectives" 1999

    This government IS to blame.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:23PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:23PM (#261437) Journal

    To reiterate what tathra said but change it a bit... there is no fuck up on either the government side or the industry side when it comes to the F-35. That's what the military industrial complex is all about: a revolving door between government and contractors allowing money to be funneled to your friends. When you are done in govt, you cash in your connections.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:53AM

      by gman003 (4155) on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:53AM (#261547)

      I think that's a distinct, but related, issue.

      The "military-industrial complex" problem is about the positive feedback loop - the military needs new stuff, so industry expands, then the expanding industry needs to keep sales up so they push more product on the military, then the military needs to fight to justify their new stuff, and so on and so forth. It actually doesn't even need individuals to be moving between the two sides, although that certainly increases the rate.

      The military-industrial complex can, and has, produced perfectly serviceable new materiel that we simply did not need. The Joint Service Small Arms Program is a good example - we ended up replacing the M1911 (an old, but still useful, pistol) with the M92, whose only real advantage was that it used the same ammunition the rest of NATO uses. Nothing wrong with it (at least, not that wasn't wrong with basically every other pistol at the time), and it did have some advantages over the old Colt, but it had an equal number of drawbacks. It was just a new gun for the sake of having new guns. We're already looking to replace them once again.

      These complete failures of massive programs are often found in military requisitions, but with the Department of Defense being a quarter of our national budget, that's pretty expected. The F-35 program is going completely off the rails, but the MRAP program bought tens of thousands of vehicles on-time and on-budget (the most expensive part was actually getting them to Iraq quickly enough to be useful). I can point to a number of failures in the civilian part of the government - like NASA's SLS project, which is a rocket we don't need to do stuff we don't need to do that costs more than we can afford and despite being made mostly of old Shuttle components still hasn't flown after ten years. I expect you could do a study and find the military's rate of debacle is in line with every other department, relative to their budget.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:21AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:21AM (#261499)

    The government fucks up (see: the F-35, the Ebola epidemic response).

    Both recent events.

    The government does not always fuck up (see: the Apollo program, eradicating smallpox).

    Both decades in the past.

    Private industry fucks up (see: the Surface RT, OS/2).

    One old, one new.

    Private industry does not always fuck up (see: Tesla, the iPhone).

    Both recent. Jury is still out on Tesla, if the company goes toes up in 3-4 years it's a failure.

    My point? Hellifino. Just the examples you chose struck me as having an odd pattern.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:47AM

      by gman003 (4155) on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:47AM (#261513)

      I noticed that too, but I couldn't think of any recent government successes that nobody could argue against, the way the Moon landings or smallpox were. I'm not sure if that's because there haven't been any, or if we're just too close to realize how effective they were. I wanted to use two different states' ACA market sites as examples but couldn't be assed to look up which ones were which.

      There's definitely a sampling bias towards recent events, though, simply because they're fresh in memory. I mean, I could have pulled up Versailles as an epic government fuckup, but didn't because it was so long ago.

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:10AM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:10AM (#261536)

        I wanted to use two different states' ACA market sites as examples but couldn't be assed to look up which ones were which.

        That's invalid because those are state, not federal. There's plenty of things that state governments are doing decently well even today, such as several states finally stopping the drug war within their borders and legalizing marijuana.

        The bottom line is that the federal government is totally broken and can't do anything right any more. It used to do some good things, like Apollo and eradicating smallpox, but those were a LONG time ago. I guess you could argue that NASA still does some good work with its landers and probes (like the New Horizons probe that just gave us a shitload of data about Pluto/Charon, plus the Mars rovers), but that still pales in comparison to the scope of what they achieved with Apollo, especially when you consider the vast difference in technology between then and now.

      • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday November 12 2015, @12:21AM

        by Snotnose (1623) on Thursday November 12 2015, @12:21AM (#261990)

        I noticed that too, but I couldn't think of any recent government successes

        Therein lies the problem. There are no recent government success stories.

        --
        Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:06AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:06AM (#261534)

    The government fucks up (see: the F-35, the Ebola epidemic response). The government does not always fuck up (see: the Apollo program, eradicating smallpox). Private industry fucks up (see: the Surface RT, OS/2). Private industry does not always fuck up (see: Tesla, the iPhone).

    There are trends here.

    Notice your examples of the government fucking up are both very recent (well, the F-35 has been going on for a while, but still it's less than 15 years old I think). However, your examples of the government not fucking up are ancient (pre-1975). Basically, this means that after the Nixon age, and along with Reagan, everything has gone to hell with the government. What has the government done right in the last 15 years? Anything at all?

    As for private industry, there's some trends there too: the fuckups are from monopolists, and the non-fuckups are not (Apple still isn't quite a monopolist as Android is more popular, though less profitable, than iPhone, but back in 2006 when iPhone came out, Apple wasn't nearly as large and powerful).