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from the Meet-your-goals-by-moving-the-goalposts dept.
From NPR:
The audit found that as of Oct. 1 CBP had paid Accenture Federal Services approximately $13.6 million of a $297 million contract to recruit and hire 7,500 applicants, including Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents, and Air and Marine Interdiction agents. But 10 months into the first year of a five-year contract Accenture had only processed "two accepted job offers," according to the report.
[...] When it became clear the company would miss a 90-day deadline to reach the "full operation phase" outlined in the agreement, the agency modified the contract granting Accenture another three months to ramp up operations to meet the terms of the contract.
CBP also allowed the company to use the government agency's applicant tracking system when Accenture failed to deploy its own, leading to another contract revision.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday December 17 2018, @12:59PM (6 children)
The bureaucracies bloat to the point that they cannot do their jobs. So they outsource even simple activities, like hiring new people. But the contracting process itself is an opportunity for cronyism. I wonder who got a new, high-paying job at Accenture, a few months after this contract was awarded? That's almost always how it goes...
Our governments are marvelous machines, but we need to retrofit one feature from private industry: removing deadwood. In private industry, when a company becomes too inefficient, it stops making money, and a clean-up takes place. Government doesn't have this kind of mechanism.
How could we build it in?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @02:24PM (1 child)
You cant. The right thing is to have the government responsible for only those things related to its legitimate use of aggression (police, borders, military etc) and keep it out of everything else. Second best to leaving it out is to have any other tasks run by smaller local governments so there is competition and people can move.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @06:53PM
yeah, iow like it was designed and expressed in the constitution. the federal gov is not supposed to be doing 95-98% of the things it does now but once they started educating/raising the children somehow nobody knows this anymore.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Monday December 17 2018, @04:43PM (1 child)
As long as people continue to be bamboozled into electing the rich, the laws and the bureaucracies they spawn and bolster will be mechanisms to make the rich, richer. It's what they do; it's typically how they got where they are, financially speaking. To expect such people to change their spots is absurd.
I'm not saying it would be easy to keep the middle class and/or poor from trying to line their pockets if they landed in such roles; it wouldn't be. But they're a damn sight more likely to have the interests of the majority in mind than any rich person is, at least as they begin these kinds of public service roles. A short term limit seems like a very good idea to me. For all legislators, the presidency, and judges. That goes for the current status quo as well.
--
Ignorance is weakness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @07:49PM
Clearly, wealth is the problem here. Let's abolish wealth and beuracracy will fix everything!
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 17 2018, @09:02PM (1 child)
the reason it's hard to remove deadwood in government exists for a reason, though: The main alternative to the systems of civil service protections that exist in many civilized countries is the "spoils system", where the new leader of the government executive determines who gets to keep their jobs based on whether those employees declare loyalty to that leader and/or their party (and are seen as loyal to the leader's faction within said party as well). This in turn leads to serious problems:
- All government departments are in complete chaos right after an inauguration, and even after the dust settles the new people who just came in only kinda know how to do their jobs competently. (Of course, there was probably chaos and incompetence before this, but the spoils system absolutely guarantees it.)
- All government employees are now strongly incentivized to keep the incumbent and their party in office, up to and including using their power as government bureaucrats to coerce people into voting for the incumbent. That motivation is so strong that this is now more of a priority than doing the job they're supposed to be doing, whatever that is. As a simple example, your postal carrier might quietly throw out all mailed campaign material from the opposition party, knowing that they'll lose their job if the opposition wins. (Again, something that can happen now if the government employee collaborated with the politician on some illegal act, which sometimes happens.)
- You now have a large number of angry civil servants who just lost their job because of perceived disloyalty to The Party or The Leader. Do you think they're going to just take that lying down? For reference, this kind of disagreement led to the assassination of US President James Garfield in 1881.
Even in a civil service system, there are ways of firing people (I know a guy who was fired from the US Mint, for instance, over a disagreement of methodology used in their metallurgy lab). However, deadwood can accumulate because a boss who has reached their level of incompetence finds it easier to allow the deadwood to just sit there than to go through the process of firing someone.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @09:06PM
This seems like a good thing to me. The system is being made robust against "chaos".