This sort of thing was only worse in the past and IMO this admin has actually made the largest inroads to resolving this issue which tbh lies primarily in procurement (RFO, FR20x, PA, mandates for automation, shift to COTS, etc). With any luck this will get recompeted

Project 20x looks pretty cool, we're in a similar space and there's probably a ~2y horizon to fix things before the bureaucracy falls to consultocracy. FWIW if you or anyone else building in gov need funding to get stuff off the ground there are plenty of DC-based VCs that are phenomenal, mission oriented and take big swings like this all the time.

having worked in govt tech for 15+ years...incompetence is and always has been a huge thing...its not always the vendors that are at fault, many times there are poorly written contacts, or ineffective employees and managers that stop vendors from doing their jobs, I've seen it go all sorts of ways over and over. I wish there was one singular administration to blame..but its a systemic issue

The portals of all Romanian authorities are built under the same corruption.fueled incompetence. The national land register is already down for ONE MONTH without identifiable recoveries and backups because of a hacker attack, so the US is not that bad (yet).

President Clinton tried to improve government contracting through various legislation and executive orders. One of the first things President W Bush did when he got into office was to sign an executive order that effectively negated most of the changes, particularly the one regarding "black listing" contractors who have a history of ripping off the government. The administration's response: the "black listed" contractors have improved; they promise not to rip off the government anymore. Then the Iraq War started and government contractors made billions with basically no oversight. And we all know how that went.

I don't know about this particular case, but often the tender process itself is the reason that there's no meaningful competition for these contracts. There are only a handful of companies that can realistically compete for certain types of contracts given the complexity of managing the bidding, certification, etc., and so they get most of the contracts even if they are not something they can actually accomplish, then turn around and rent some bodies from another shop that specializes in providing government-approved contract workers to do the actual work. You can imagine how disconnected the actual bids, deliverables agreements, etc. are when there are two entire private bureaucracies between even the government project manager -- themselves usually detached from the Federal workers who have to use whatever this process creates -- and the people doing the work.

Unfortunately tons of US gov contracts a) are lowest bid and b) only have one applicant

Even if it's better than Argentina's, it's still not good: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/grasping-at-paper-straws

Contracting policy/regulation is an area that accumulates the worst tendencies of government rulemaking:

1. Corruption results in hyper-specific rules being advanced.

2. It's very difficult to un-do regulation without replacing it, so rules often stay in place broadly even when whoever wanted them isn't competing in a sector.

3. Executive political initiatives that have public attention but aren't considered worth the squeeze of turning into policy often turn into "do something, anything" OMB memos that add endless specificity to contracting regs, just like the paper straws thing (but hey, they did something, anything in service to the cause of environmentalism, right? ...right?).

4. For specialist contractors (e.g. software, nuclear power, so on) the people writing the contracting regulations or reqs are often so out of touch with the specialist field that the results are nonsense.

5. Even when rulemakers/COs are trying to do the right thing, they're so overworked and under-specialized that they have a huge incentive to pick the devil they know (contractors with prior engagement history, even if their results are poor). As a result, sometimes a bid that clearly requires qualifications only possessed by one company in existence wasn't even written for corrupt reasons: it was written because that's the quickest way to get a known quantity to work. Repeat that enough, though, and you have a system guaranteed to produce poor results.

6. Both parties tend to add to the regulatory "stack" that makes finding qualified contractors quickly hard. Democrats tend to add regulation, which slows the process down for everyone. Republicans tend to try to remove regulation, but effectively often move the complexity elsewhere.

7. Even when regulatory reform really does reduce the barriers to entry, pre-existing federal decisionmakers are still around. Some of those people will make the same well-intentioned bad decisions out of overwork/missing expertise that they did before. A lot more will make bad decisions based on where they want to work after government. The number of people that will take advantage of deregulation/reform and produce notably better results than before is small.

8. The timelines (of contracting and evaluating results) are long enough that there'll likely be a reversal of the regulatory/partisan cycle before anyone can get data saying that a given regulatory effort helped or harmed government effectiveness. For example, DOGE's cost cutting program was a disaster from the start, but even if it had been executed well it would have failed in the same way and on the same timeframe, because the pace of change is necessarily slow.

9. Even when data about what works/what doesn't is available, contracting regulation and performance is incredibly uninteresting to the general public. So electeds and high-ranking feds tend not to prioritize it over the other million things they could fight for. Sure, the public loves when the government spends less money, but they glaze over when it comes to the "how" (and the elephants in the room cost so much that incremental efficiency improvements have bad optics).

10. Different agencies have different contracting practices, usually multiple generations/iterations of those. Government-wide, many people have introduced reforms/uniform or streamlined "universal processes" to secure better contractors faster. That did help somewhat, but it also harmed a la https://xkcd.com/927/

No, it could not have been titled that. There's no streamlining, there's only bumps. Not a "few" bumps.

This is just pure mismanagement, a massive reduction in following of the law, for no apparent cost savings at all. Firing people, paying their severance, and replacing them with more expensive options is actually a cost increase.

> At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, over 1,600 FOIA requests were still in OPM’s backlog, seven times more than at the end of fiscal year 2024. The average processing time for a simple request at the agency slipped to over 84 days — twice as long as the year before.

Efficiency manifest.