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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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:23PM
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.
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(Score: 2) by gman003 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:53AM
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.