12 ms·

Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

514 points by oldprogrammer2 1y ago

jpgvm 1y ago
Finally they actually cut something that should be cut.
- jimmydoe 1y ago
  I'll believe it when they cut Palantir contracts
  - EasyMark 1y ago
    This right here tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money. Which companies pay the most in lobbying/trips and Venn diagram that with those who got cut and you won't find much overlap. I'm not sure why reporters aren't tapping into these stories that write themselves. Also Thiel is in tight with this administration
- gregoriol 1y ago
  The cut in the current context, and future consequences, are likely going to cut much more than the contracts though.
- rel2thr 1y ago
  A correlary to the Gelman effect, with govt spending , it all sounds important and reasonably priced unless the spending is in your circle of expertise
  - ibejoeb 1y ago
    Exactly. Gell-Mann Amnesia. The first thing that came to mind.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Well... unless it's for temporary projects, government should just create the capacity in-house. Having to bring in consulting for everything because there is no know-how left is pointless.
  - mikeyouse 1y ago
    Is there a reciprocal Gelman where ignorant outsiders assume things are unreasonable and wasteful but anyone with expertise knows better? (Examples come to mind of Sarah Palin ridiculing fruit fly genetics work or DOGE’s press conferences about children receiving social security when they were just receiving survivors benefits)
    - giantrobot 1y ago
      Authentic frontier ignorance?
  - nitwit005 1y ago
    I don't see that in practice. The headlines have historically been pretty blunt on a lot of wasteful spending. They openly discuss obvious waste in congress: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells-congress-to-stop-buying-equipment-it-doesnt-need.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell... https://reason.com/2025/01/12/materiel-loss/ https://reason.com/2025/01/12/materiel-loss/
- nxm 1y ago
  Plenty of USAID wasteful spending was already cut as well
  - aqme28 1y ago
    Which USAID spending? I haven't seen anything that I would say is both wasteful and significant.
    - stackedinserter 1y ago
      It's hard to track, because it's all nice websites with generic messages like "we make life better" and pictures with obligatory diversity faces. E.g. $4.5 billion here chemonics.com. Or $3 billion here devalt.org. Where did these money go? How can we measure the ROI? USAID is a corrupt wasteful sinkhole, good riddance to it.
      - miltonlost 1y ago
        USAID looking for an ROI???? THat's NOT the purpose of aiding other countries. You don't need to look for a return on an investment. USAid was feeding children in places. You're looking for an ROI on saving human lives. Learn empathy.
        Smeevy 1y ago
        Empathy seems to be in rare supply these days. I've made the mistake of talking to these people about the human collateral of these decisions and it's waved off like I'm bringing up an unpleasant experience in a checkout line.
        seivan 1y ago
        [dead]
        EasyMark 1y ago
        Musk has said empathy is why democratic western countries are failing.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  "randomly made cuts without any thought, precision, or weighing of pros and cons". The only cons here are the ones authorizing the cutting.
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
Is this like in Eastern Europe/Balkans, like when someone new comes to power they terminate the contracts(aka the grifts) signed by the previous regime, so they can give them to their own friends instead, then rinse and repeat at the next election cycle?
- eej71 1y ago
  Unfortunately that's the direction we are likely headed in. However, I suspect that in this case, the contracts were overpriced and faced an endless series of delays and extensions. Of course, the next set of contracts will probably have the same issue. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
- icegreentea2 1y ago
  I mean, there's certainly some of that happening right now (and has probably always happened to some degree even in America). That being said, I think these specific cuts have a real possibility of being genuine. I believe this because: * They actually do align with long-term thinking. In general, the DoD (and the federal government... and really all North American government as a whole) has been on a multi-decade slide of out sourcing more and more capabilities to consultancies. This HAS made us all worse at governing. Hegseth (for better and worse) has the cover to make this type of cut while riding out whatever bumps might come out of this. * Hegseth also needs to create cover. He's probably about to get a giant budget increase (~900billion to an even trillion). Actions like this allow him to backup his claim that yes - America is spending more on defense, but we're doing so better. That said, who knows how this specific case will end up.
codingbot3000 1y ago
It probably did not need DOGE to find out that these contracts where overpriced ;-)
- pelagicAustral 1y ago
  ...but it took DOGE to actually get them cut.
  - hagbarth 1y ago
    I don't think the article mentions DOGE
    - selfhoster 1y ago
      https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/pentagon-cuts-5bn-it-contracts-accenture-deloitte-pete-hegseth-125041100377_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/pentagon-cuts-5... "This latest announcement follows a March 20 declaration from Hegseth, where he detailed $580 million in cuts to various programmes, contracts, and grants. The overall reduction now amounts to nearly $6 billion as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, which aims to streamline Pentagon expenditures and focus resources on warfighting capabilities."
    - pelagicAustral 1y ago
      Doesn't mean to say it's not related: >> The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration to implement Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies. [0] [0] https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-it-services-consulting-contracts-doge/ https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-it-serv... or: > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/doge-pentagon-defense-spending https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/doge-p...
- EasyMark 1y ago
  I doubt of DOGE had anything to do with this, these companies simply weren't paying enough kickbacks in the form of lobbying and gifts to not earn the ire of Trump and his sycophants
mythz 1y ago
On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.
- toolz 1y ago
  Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers
  - bena 1y ago
    The Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.
    - axpy906 1y ago
      Didn’t they at one point fail to account for Trillions of dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for me is unimaginable.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        How many other companies need to fund rebuilding of entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in the first place...)
      - kolbe 1y ago
        Auditors don't get access to whatever the modern equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Bahamas) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...
      - jcranmer 1y ago
        AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.
NickC25 1y ago
All fine and dandy until one realizes that the pentagon's budget is measured in the trillions, and this sort of deal probably doesn't even deal with mission critical stuff. That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt our national security readiness.
- ibejoeb 1y ago
  The '24 budget was $842 billion.
  - PaywallBuster 1y ago
    0.61% with just a few contracts
    - supplied_demand 1y ago
      Were these one-year contracts?
      - btucker 1y ago
        I'm sure PaywallBuster has reviewed these and confirmed they were one-year spending before making their statement.
    - josephg 1y ago
      It might be a small percentage of the pentagon’s budget. But it’s still $5.1bn of taxpayer money being reigned in here. It’s $13 per person in the country. You could do an awful lot of good with that kind of money - from space programs to science funding.
      - cma 1y ago
        The article doesn't say the length of the contract or really anything about what it was for.
jhickok 1y ago
Not sure why this really matters a ton if they announced a 100+ billion pentagon budget increase.
- mlinhares 1y ago
  Cos now that money can now go straight to more Starlink for the pentagon.
- ibejoeb 1y ago
  There have been multiple errors posted in this thread, and I don't know where those numbers are coming from since the budget is public record. The '25 budget has not yet been approved, but the request is $8 billion more last year, not $100 billion.
  - icegreentea2 1y ago
    You're right that Trump's original request for 2025, and what Congress has been working on was not bumping up to a trillion. People are reacting to https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04/08/trump-promises-1-trillion-in-defense-spending-for-next-year/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04... This would be for the 2026 budget.
h1fra 1y ago
they will probably announce a new $5B contract with Palantir next week
- splitrocket 1y ago
  It will not be announced. Fun fact: the current Republican administration was pushing a budget that substantially increased the federal deficit. The one that was finally approved is still a massive budget deficit increase. Obama reduced the deficit by nearly half during his presidency, the current FY2025 budget has authorized a $1.9 trillion deficit (6.2% of GDP), with reconciliation instructions potentially allowing for a staggering $3.3-5.8 trillion in additional deficit increases over the next decade. * Obama's final deficit (2017): $666 billion * Current 2025 projected deficit: $1.9 trillion This represents an increase of approximately $1.23 trillion, or about 185% higher than Obama's final deficit. The current deficit is nearly triple what it was at the end of the Obama administration. Republicans have mastered the art of fiscal hypocrisy: campaigning against deficits to win elections, then ballooning them with tax cuts for the wealthy, only to leave Democrats with the thankless job of fiscal cleanup—for which voters reliably punish them at the polls.
  - stuartjohnson12 1y ago
    For the unenlightened soul, where is lion's share of that money being spent? (preferably in more detail than just "tax cuts")
    - icegreentea2 1y ago
      There isn't a single Republican budget yet - the house and senate have their own versions of the budget they need to reconcile. That said, the house budget (which just passed yesterday) I believe hews more closely to the Whitehouses' proposal. There's a whole report you can read here: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy2025-house-budget-reconciliation-and-trump-tax-proposals-effects https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy202... But as a summary, you can probably look at Table 1. The values given are over 10 years, so divide every by 10 to get a sense of per year. As written it looks like: * Overall decrease 170 billion per year in spending (overall Federal spending is about 7 trillion per year). There are cuts across the board except in DoD, DHS, and DoJ. * Tax cuts decreasing revenue by ~450 billion per year. There is a section in the report identifying all of the different tax cuts. This decrease in tax revenue includes the effect of locking in Trump's first term tax cuts which are currently set to expire.
nelblu 1y ago
Good riddance, and hopefully they won't be missed. Here in Canada these consultants are just leeches who suck up all the tax dollars which could actually be used for something useful.
- josephg 1y ago
  Same here in Australia. Over the last decade we’ve systematically reduced the number of civil servants and increased the number of consultants in government by many times. The result is we’ve ended up paying through the nose for worse government. The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They should be used as little as possible.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  A good portion of Federal Government is just a bunch of leeches whose KPI is literally how much money they waste. SO works there, in a team of great dedicated people, and they are all good and professional, but the whole department can be wiped out and nobody will notice.
- timacles 1y ago
  You guys are way too optimistic, they’re just going to pass these contracts to trump, musk and Peter theil buddies. Charge more money and also introduce some nepharious bullshit like AI data scraping
ibejoeb 1y ago
Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
- foota 1y ago
  I think part of it's probably that the military is the largest discretionary spending in the US, and it's not especially popular, unlike say NASA or the NPS.
  - jghn 1y ago
    Yes, the scale is a huge part of it. If some program has a $1mil budget and you were to tell me that 25% of it was wasted. Well who cares? $250k in the US budget is a rounding error on a rounding error. But if you were to tell me that 25% of the Pentagon's budget was waste? That's a big deal. Yet somehow a certain segment of our population tends to focus on the small fries.
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      25% waste on single million is not bad. 25% waste on all millions spend is very bad... And that 25% is likely under estimated in many cases. Or at least some more from 75% is inefficiently used. I admit probably not 25% of all millions is wasted. But even if that is half that would be 12.5% wasted... Or fourth 6.25%. Fixing of which would still be huge long term effect. So my take is that this needs to be fixed on all levels and on all places.
      - jghn 1y ago
        Sure. But the point is that the people who advocate cutting the waste never propose going after the big wins first. Instead we cut all the little things that actually helps people and use arguments to the effect that the waste was adding up in the aggregate. OR, we could just not spend a trillion dollars on the military.
acomjean 1y ago
What were these contracts for? Networking or day to day software/application maintenance? I get they were probably bloated (I did work for a defense contractor at one point) but presumably they were doing something. I mean isn’t Deloitte a accounting firm? I’m a little worried about the “stand down” attitude against cyber attacks.
- m3kw9 1y ago
  Week long meetings charging 300/hour etc
- wil421 1y ago
  If you didn’t know all the accounting firms have massive IT consulting practices then do you really know about them? I think Deloitte makes about half of their US revenue from various consulting projects. https://www.projectworks.com/blog/2024-the-big-4s-revenue https://www.projectworks.com/blog/2024-the-big-4s-revenue
- ghc 1y ago
  At least one contract appears to be for the air force's effort to move secure workloads to a multi-cloud environment. Based on publicly available slides, I think Accenture is acting as a middleman to avoid dependence on Azure or AWS technical support creating lock in to their clouds. IMHO firing Accenture is probably a good move in this case. I bet they were extracting money at every opportunity just so the gov't could nominally avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  with the current pattern by DOGE, I would say that it's likely they monitor grift and do audits of various departments. DOGE and Trump has been gutting many government oversight groups that are set up to prevent grift and fraud. I suspect 10 years down the road we'll find tons of grift under this administration after it's no longer in control
VoodooJuJu 1y ago
[dead]
Group_B 1y ago
Great, but it doesn’t matter too much as they’ll still vote in an increased budget that adds more debt. How about we raise taxes a bit and stop spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have each year.
- normie3000 1y ago
  I think taxes on imports just got raised a bit.
  - throwaway173738 1y ago
    I thought that got paused by tweet yesterday.
    - EasyMark 1y ago
      still 25% on a lot of countries/industris, 10% across the board on everyone (at least) and 145% on China, our largest manufacturing trading partner.
apercu 1y ago
Not to be a cynic, but I bet all this means is that Republican campaign contributions from Deloitte and Accenture will be down and Democratic contributions will go up and new contracts will be awarded in the future so that the wealth class (won't someone think of the poor shareholders) can continue to steal your money.
callamdelaney 1y ago
Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.
- sepalous 1y ago
  I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
  - sumedh 1y ago
    > The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.
  - callamdelaney 1y ago
    Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be an additional political roadblock.
  - koolba 1y ago
    > The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.
TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
[flagged]
overstay8930 1y ago
These guys are massive scammers, I worked with them over multiple projects and the only thing I remember is by the end of each one, everyone was memeing on them for how poorly made everything they did was.
esbranson 1y ago
We know damn well all these stories will do is trigger "muh Trump" and "muh Elon" responses. Especially from non-Americans who have no idea how their own government works or what it's doing.
MangoCoffee 1y ago
I used to work at Avanade (a sister company of Accenture and Microsoft). They hired new grads and pushed them onto client projects. They live on big companies incompetence.
nova22033 1y ago
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-hegseth-reveal-whopping-figure-want-next-pentagon-budget https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-hegseth-reveal-whoppi... Trump, Hegseth reveal whopping figure they want for the next Pentagon budget $1T budget would be a 12% boost over current levels
JPKab 1y ago
[flagged]
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
I thought the interesting thing was this quote from Hegseth: > The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth said in the memo released late on Thursday. I obviously don't know the details of these specific contracts, but the general sentiment that qualified federal employees can do better than overpriced private contractors is something I agree with, at least in broad brushstrokes. But, that said, this would appear to be in direct opposition to DOGE and the Project 2025 playbook - here is a recent article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-privatize-government-usps-trump/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-pr.... This is why I hate what DOGE is doing. I could definitely get behind a coherent effort to streamline the federal government and save money - BTW, this was done rather successfully by Clinton and Gore in the 90s, who eliminated a huge portion of the federal workforce, they just didn't go on stage with chainsaws to promote it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinventing_Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv.... But now it's just "throwing bombs", and the overt corruption of the administration leaves me little faith that government will actually become more efficient with this current kakistocracy.
- 1024core 1y ago
  The Government _can't_ be streamlined because the right incentives are not in place, and human beings respond to incentives. For example: if a bureaucrat does not use up their budget, it is (often) reduced proportionately in the next iteration. So these people have an incentive to use up the entire budget, if they want to have any hope of getting their requests next year. As a result, they will often do wasteful spending. I know this from experience, because in my previous life as code monkey in a small-ish government contractor, my boss had made it an art form to figure out who had extra money left over near the end of the fiscal year and pitch them ideas. A few 100K here, a few 100K there and the company was making decent money just mooching off of the leftovers from Federal budgets. If you want to fix the Federal government, you have to incentivize the officials to be rewarded for saving money.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
_JamesA_ 1y ago
The big 3 get hired to protect managers. Hire a smaller consulting firm and the project goes sideways you both get fired. Hire a big firm and it goes sideways they get fired - until the next project.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  Sounds like the contracts are not written correctly then.
  - arbor_day 1y ago
    Yup, sort of the whole point. There's a lot of cost plus contracts floating around here, which is a terrible incentive.
- pmontra 1y ago
  Or: you both get fired but they hire you because of all the money they made anyway.
dfedbeef 1y ago
Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near DC for 50k/yr.
- icedchai 1y ago
  I know some solid gov (some ex-gov now) tech folks in DC. These are experienced, staff+ engineer types who want meaningful work. The pay isn't that low. Is it FAANG level? No. But they're still making solid six figure salaries.
  - dfedbeef 1y ago
    Yes; and they're also making an effort to get rid of the full time government workers. This is my point. You don't get to have it both ways.
swsieber 1y ago
So, realistically speaking, we've seen lots of corruption protections stripped away in parts of the federal government - SEC to stop prosecuting things, Inspector Generals fired, loyalty pledges, etc. Who would need to be on board with changes in the Pentagon to strip away protections there? I'd assume it's quite a bit more insular than other parts of the federal government.
knowitnone 1y ago
until they have a $1mil dinner with Trump
heisenbit 1y ago
Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the private sector except the most dire circumstances.
- tw04 1y ago
  The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing. Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.
  - CityOfThrowaway 1y ago
    The data on hostile takeovers by "corporate raiders" very much does not support the characterization here. The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company is heading towards oblivion one way or another. Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets wind up as net job creators on a 5-10 year time horizons. That's despite the fact that they do usually start by divesting assets that don't make sense and laying off non-productive employees. But divested assets aren't generally killed – they are usually sold to somebody else who often does something better with it. Also, companies conduct massive downsizing and rationalization all the time when in distress, and not only when they are taken over by a "corporate raider". In the private markets, these actors are definitely distasteful. They do cleanup work that feels bad, and they often get rich doing it. But they also serve a necessary role in the markets. Companies that are egregiously misusing capital and resources are a drag on the economy. It's a bad thing for there to be a bunch of zombie companies holding onto assets that could be used in better ways. A more generous framing would be something like a home flipper. They buy properties that are a mess, clean it up real good, throw out the old stuff for recycling, install some modern appliances, and sell it to somebody else. One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission. I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.
gsky 1y ago
I signed up for linkedin with my Mobile number. I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field to login. That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run by medicore people at this point
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Yep. Mobile version of reddit is basically unusable on my se2. Page hangs and doesn’t finish loading, only shows like 1 or 2 comments and no child replies vs the whole thread. Old.reddit.com loads instantly of course, except if I am coming from a mobile reddit link then it will hang and require a browser restart as closing the tab and using a new one isn’t even enough. Remind me their valuation again to produce a junk product and ride on the coattails of an otherwise simple and reliable website that they’d rather not exist again?
aaurelions 1y ago
Gemini 2.5 DeepResearch new Pentagon consultant.
Molitor5901 1y ago
This is going to devastate the DC area. Most of my friends work for one of the big IT contractors. It's a great gig if you can get it, very nice compensation and not a lot of responsibility. The first rule of government contracting has always been why buy something when you can buy it for three times the price. As a result these firms have become quite massive in their size and billings. This is going to cause a major overturn in people living in the DC region, and overall incomes. I would say perhaps, perhaps, it's the equivalent of a very large company leaving Silicon Valley.
Suppafly 1y ago
I'm in favor of getting consulting firms out of government, but I suspect they'll end up having to pay out these contracts while no longer getting what they were paying for, so this is likely a net lose for tax payers.
johnbellone 1y ago
This is where I would expect there to be a lot of waste in government budgets. Unfortunately, there are very little incentives for the work coming out of these types of contracts to build process/technology to automate themselves out of billions of dollars. We are stuck between limitations of government civilian workforce (pay/politics) and overpaying companies for work that generally can be a lot cheaper with a career employee.
glitchc 1y ago
It's interesting reading conversations in this thread. Everyone wants government to hire competent individuals. Yet, when it comes to a personal choice, the very same individuals decline the lower compensation. Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land, sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in government spending that's needed to pay for those higher salaries. It's classic cognitive dissonance in full effect leading to a tragedy of the commons. It goes to show that tech folks are no different from regular (DEI, MAGA, other) people.
- SamuelAdams 1y ago
  The narrative around fed jobs has changed recently too. A fed job used to be a lower salary, but much stronger job security. Now with the new administration government job security is gone, so federal jobs overall are simply not as attractive anymore.
  - glitchc 1y ago
    I don't think this applies. According to the stories here, folks were choosing out of Fed jobs even when gold-plated pensions were the norm.
    - l2silver 1y ago
      Government organizations aren't very good at accounting for true inflation, so right now the salary + golden handcuffs combination is way lower than industry compensation, if you're competent. If you're not competent, and you're not doing anything, then you might as well stay.
  - rockemsockem 1y ago
    It's been almost 3 months. Just maybe there haven't been any new fundamental long-term trends established in that time
- bluecalm 1y ago
  The argument "cutters" are making is that there is enough money but also too much waste. Case in point are consulting firms discussed here: they charge you 3x rate of their employees. You could have been paying 2x to get better employees and savings at the same time.
raincom 1y ago
A lot of these jobs require clearance. Who can get such clearances? People with less history. So, young college graduates, young army folks, etc. There are tons of people who just have security clearances without competence. There is a huge demand for people who hold clearances. I have no problem with "make work" programs; however, these large companies are grifting 100% on top of what these people get paid.
erichocean 1y ago
This is a big loss for India, it's like 15:1 India- vs. US-based "consultants."
languagehacker 1y ago
I always like to recommend the book When McKinsey Comes to Town in any post about Management Consulting
deleted 1y ago
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zusammen 1y ago
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Arubis 1y ago
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It's kind of amazing to me how much USGov business Accenture continued to soak up after the misfired start of healthcare.gov. Their core competency is pretty clearly acquiring contracts, not fulfilling them.
zzzbra 1y ago
Finally a budget cut I can actually celebrate.
jrochkind1 1y ago
In some departments (say Social Security) they want to switch from in-house staff to contractors, and in others they want to switch from contractors to in-house staff? The US government has been moving to privatized contractors in most of it's work for some time, across many administrations and both parties. Based on what I know of Trump, I'd have expected that to continue. Maybe it is everywhere except for special treatment for DoD? Or maybe this is just a fake and it won't be this way for DoD either. I don't have much idea what is going on.
idrios 1y ago
Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA to replace some people who've recently left. He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from people who are substantially lying about their experience and maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he wasn't from an approved source. His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get herself hired as a consultant. Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may have inaccuracies in this story.
- windex 1y ago
  > a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, Your friend could go through her firm then.
- exe34 1y ago
  he should just hire some high school script kiddies, they already have access to the highest level of government!
  - gscott 1y ago
    Put in that persons first name as 'Big' last name 'Balls'. No one will question the hire, change the persons name later to their actual name.
- 98codes 1y ago
  Getting onto the allowed vendor list for the US Government is a dire process even for the largest of global service companies, by design by the folks already on the list. I was able to work as an individual as a subcontractor for a subcontractor for a company on the list. Rates aren't as high, but with federal regulations (for now) mandating that subcontractors be paid as soon as the primary contract holder was paid meant that there was 0 chasing after invoices which is actually very nice.
devrandoom 1y ago
Waste or not, I don't think two companies should have $5.1B government contracts. Although I think neither that or waste is the reason for termination.
silexia 1y ago
Fantastic! This is great news. Clean up the waste!
passwordoops 1y ago
I'm happy with this, but cynical enough to expect $5.1B to turn into $10.2B for Palantir, X
insane_dreamer 1y ago
This might be the only smart "waste cutting" that the government has done so far. Ideally, there would be a Digital Services government department, staffed with properly compensated people (to attract good quality talent) that the other government agencies would "contract" to build their services, rather than paying through the nose to Deloitte (who then offshores most of the work anyway). Then maintaining the services could be done by the contracting gov agency once completed (with support from DSA). Oh wait, we had a Digital Services, the USDS, and they built some pretty good stuff too. Could have been a model for other work. Except that they just got gutted and taken over by DOGE goons. Wonderful.
fracus 1y ago
How can you just terminate a contract? What clause are they invoking to terminate it?
b8 1y ago
Good. Government contractors usually overcharge the government and then the contractors don't do much all day. It'd be cheaper to hire internally or pick cheaper contractors. Lot's of documented fraud, waste and abuse with government contractors.
michaelteter 1y ago
While there's almost certainly a good amount of waste in these consulting contracts, there's also a strong possibility that these cuts were done without a clear sense of what would be lost without them. But hey, I suppose sometimes we just deem projects too big and messy to comprehend, so we just toss it all and start over. It rarely turns out as nice or easy as we thought it would be.
cafard 1y ago
Having worked for a government contractor, I decided that the government was using the Charlie Sheen principle: not paying them to come around, but paying them to go away. I have no idea what they billed us for to the government, but I doubt we were getting paychecks equivalent to what the government folk we dealt with got. (To say nothing of benefits.) But I assume that it was far easier to let contractors go. Actually, the friction of hiring and placing made it relatively hard to let contractors go other than through downsizing. People showed up drunk or stoned, and hung on for a month or two.
max_ 1y ago
What exactly do these two people do. The marketing BS on their websites say alot of generic, motivational crack. Could someone help me break down the real bread & butter of these firms and why people give them money?
- Havoc 1y ago
  They provide some analysis. Which may or may not be helpful. It also acts as CYA - if a venture goes wrong and the CEO can say the consultants supported it then that can take some of the heat off
mrkramer 1y ago
Elon is taking over! https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/5e0e6ea/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3429x2286+0+0/resize/599x399!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.apnews.com%2Fb4%2F91%2F46e2230884242f385e9a1302a2c1%2F0a94a385742c482baa6f88e6b8100620 https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/5e0e6ea/2147483647/str...
boredpeter 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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rvba 1y ago
I wonder how many of them was doing important stuff (defending vs Russian ans other foreign actors). I understand the sentiment that quality of consultants ia very low.
profsummergig 1y ago
I was sitting with a D.C. lobbyist at a function dinner. Lawyer at a prominent lobbying law firm. Random seat assignments. He gets a call on his cellphone. After the call he has a shit-eating grin on his face. Tells me Biden just signed student loan forgiveness. He had lobbied on behalf of the banks that had given the loans to the students (and students weren't paying them back). I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly. Accenture and Deloitte pay a lot of money to lobbyists for these Pentagon contracts. After the dust has settled, they'll still get juicy contracts. We will all forget that any of this happened.
- selfhoster 1y ago
  "I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly." Excellent point.
  - phonon 1y ago
    How much in Federal income taxes does someone making $26,000 a year pay? Single, no child, no subsidized savings...around $1,000. 1 Child...negative several thousands dollars. That's assuming all income is being reported.
    - profsummergig 1y ago
      Your point is fair, and a valid perspective for analyzing the issue. Here's another valid perspective: the Federal money that went to subsidize the Law student's degree... it could have gone to infrastructure in a way that could have materially improved the waitress's life. Or it could have increased her child credit. Or it could have been used to incentivize her (in various ways) to seek an educational or skills upgrade.
acyou 1y ago
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250411151614/https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-terminate-51-billion-it-contracts-with-accenture-deloitte-others-2025-04-11/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250411151614/https://www.reute...
nwmcsween 1y ago
I have first hand knowledge with large consultant companies, they are largely sales teams with minimal IT knowledge. I had to help a one of their overseas "senior cloud professional" that had issues even understanding how to navigate the cloud UI.
camilla41511 1y ago
[dead]

Finally they actually cut something that should be cut.

jimmydoe 1y ago
I'll believe it when they cut Palantir contracts
- EasyMark 1y ago
  This right here tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money. Which companies pay the most in lobbying/trips and Venn diagram that with those who got cut and you won't find much overlap. I'm not sure why reporters aren't tapping into these stories that write themselves. Also Thiel is in tight with this administration
gregoriol 1y ago
The cut in the current context, and future consequences, are likely going to cut much more than the contracts though.
rel2thr 1y ago
A correlary to the Gelman effect, with govt spending , it all sounds important and reasonably priced unless the spending is in your circle of expertise
- ibejoeb 1y ago
  Exactly. Gell-Mann Amnesia. The first thing that came to mind.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Well... unless it's for temporary projects, government should just create the capacity in-house. Having to bring in consulting for everything because there is no know-how left is pointless.
- mikeyouse 1y ago
  Is there a reciprocal Gelman where ignorant outsiders assume things are unreasonable and wasteful but anyone with expertise knows better? (Examples come to mind of Sarah Palin ridiculing fruit fly genetics work or DOGE’s press conferences about children receiving social security when they were just receiving survivors benefits)
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    Authentic frontier ignorance?
- nitwit005 1y ago
  I don't see that in practice. The headlines have historically been pretty blunt on a lot of wasteful spending. They openly discuss obvious waste in congress: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells-congress-to-stop-buying-equipment-it-doesnt-need.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell... https://reason.com/2025/01/12/materiel-loss/ https://reason.com/2025/01/12/materiel-loss/
nxm 1y ago
Plenty of USAID wasteful spending was already cut as well
- aqme28 1y ago
  Which USAID spending? I haven't seen anything that I would say is both wasteful and significant.
  - stackedinserter 1y ago
    It's hard to track, because it's all nice websites with generic messages like "we make life better" and pictures with obligatory diversity faces. E.g. $4.5 billion here chemonics.com. Or $3 billion here devalt.org. Where did these money go? How can we measure the ROI? USAID is a corrupt wasteful sinkhole, good riddance to it.
    - miltonlost 1y ago
      USAID looking for an ROI???? THat's NOT the purpose of aiding other countries. You don't need to look for a return on an investment. USAid was feeding children in places. You're looking for an ROI on saving human lives. Learn empathy.
      - Smeevy 1y ago
        Empathy seems to be in rare supply these days. I've made the mistake of talking to these people about the human collateral of these decisions and it's waved off like I'm bringing up an unpleasant experience in a checkout line.
        seivan 1y ago
        [dead]
        EasyMark 1y ago
        Musk has said empathy is why democratic western countries are failing.
EasyMark 1y ago
"randomly made cuts without any thought, precision, or weighing of pros and cons". The only cons here are the ones authorizing the cutting.

Is this like in Eastern Europe/Balkans, like when someone new comes to power they terminate the contracts(aka the grifts) signed by the previous regime, so they can give them to their own friends instead, then rinse and repeat at the next election cycle?

eej71 1y ago
Unfortunately that's the direction we are likely headed in. However, I suspect that in this case, the contracts were overpriced and faced an endless series of delays and extensions. Of course, the next set of contracts will probably have the same issue. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
icegreentea2 1y ago
I mean, there's certainly some of that happening right now (and has probably always happened to some degree even in America). That being said, I think these specific cuts have a real possibility of being genuine. I believe this because: * They actually do align with long-term thinking. In general, the DoD (and the federal government... and really all North American government as a whole) has been on a multi-decade slide of out sourcing more and more capabilities to consultancies. This HAS made us all worse at governing. Hegseth (for better and worse) has the cover to make this type of cut while riding out whatever bumps might come out of this. * Hegseth also needs to create cover. He's probably about to get a giant budget increase (~900billion to an even trillion). Actions like this allow him to backup his claim that yes - America is spending more on defense, but we're doing so better. That said, who knows how this specific case will end up.

codingbot3000 1y ago

It probably did not need DOGE to find out that these contracts where overpriced ;-)

pelagicAustral 1y ago
...but it took DOGE to actually get them cut.
- hagbarth 1y ago
  I don't think the article mentions DOGE
  - selfhoster 1y ago
    https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/pentagon-cuts-5bn-it-contracts-accenture-deloitte-pete-hegseth-125041100377_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/pentagon-cuts-5... "This latest announcement follows a March 20 declaration from Hegseth, where he detailed $580 million in cuts to various programmes, contracts, and grants. The overall reduction now amounts to nearly $6 billion as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, which aims to streamline Pentagon expenditures and focus resources on warfighting capabilities."
  - pelagicAustral 1y ago
    Doesn't mean to say it's not related: >> The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration to implement Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies. [0] [0] https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-it-services-consulting-contracts-doge/ https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-it-serv... or: > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/doge-pentagon-defense-spending https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/doge-p...
EasyMark 1y ago
I doubt of DOGE had anything to do with this, these companies simply weren't paying enough kickbacks in the form of lobbying and gifts to not earn the ire of Trump and his sycophants

mythz 1y ago

On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.

toolz 1y ago
Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers
- bena 1y ago
  The Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.
  - axpy906 1y ago
    Didn’t they at one point fail to account for Trillions of dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for me is unimaginable.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      How many other companies need to fund rebuilding of entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in the first place...)
    - kolbe 1y ago
      Auditors don't get access to whatever the modern equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Bahamas) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.

NickC25 1y ago

All fine and dandy until one realizes that the pentagon's budget is measured in the trillions, and this sort of deal probably doesn't even deal with mission critical stuff. That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt our national security readiness.

ibejoeb 1y ago
The '24 budget was $842 billion.
- PaywallBuster 1y ago
  0.61% with just a few contracts
  - supplied_demand 1y ago
    Were these one-year contracts?
    - btucker 1y ago
      I'm sure PaywallBuster has reviewed these and confirmed they were one-year spending before making their statement.
  - josephg 1y ago
    It might be a small percentage of the pentagon’s budget. But it’s still $5.1bn of taxpayer money being reigned in here. It’s $13 per person in the country. You could do an awful lot of good with that kind of money - from space programs to science funding.
    - cma 1y ago
      The article doesn't say the length of the contract or really anything about what it was for.

jhickok 1y ago

Not sure why this really matters a ton if they announced a 100+ billion pentagon budget increase.

mlinhares 1y ago
Cos now that money can now go straight to more Starlink for the pentagon.
ibejoeb 1y ago
There have been multiple errors posted in this thread, and I don't know where those numbers are coming from since the budget is public record. The '25 budget has not yet been approved, but the request is $8 billion more last year, not $100 billion.
- icegreentea2 1y ago
  You're right that Trump's original request for 2025, and what Congress has been working on was not bumping up to a trillion. People are reacting to https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04/08/trump-promises-1-trillion-in-defense-spending-for-next-year/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04... This would be for the 2026 budget.

h1fra 1y ago

they will probably announce a new $5B contract with Palantir next week

splitrocket 1y ago
It will not be announced. Fun fact: the current Republican administration was pushing a budget that substantially increased the federal deficit. The one that was finally approved is still a massive budget deficit increase. Obama reduced the deficit by nearly half during his presidency, the current FY2025 budget has authorized a $1.9 trillion deficit (6.2% of GDP), with reconciliation instructions potentially allowing for a staggering $3.3-5.8 trillion in additional deficit increases over the next decade. * Obama's final deficit (2017): $666 billion * Current 2025 projected deficit: $1.9 trillion This represents an increase of approximately $1.23 trillion, or about 185% higher than Obama's final deficit. The current deficit is nearly triple what it was at the end of the Obama administration. Republicans have mastered the art of fiscal hypocrisy: campaigning against deficits to win elections, then ballooning them with tax cuts for the wealthy, only to leave Democrats with the thankless job of fiscal cleanup—for which voters reliably punish them at the polls.
- stuartjohnson12 1y ago
  For the unenlightened soul, where is lion's share of that money being spent? (preferably in more detail than just "tax cuts")
  - icegreentea2 1y ago
    There isn't a single Republican budget yet - the house and senate have their own versions of the budget they need to reconcile. That said, the house budget (which just passed yesterday) I believe hews more closely to the Whitehouses' proposal. There's a whole report you can read here: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy2025-house-budget-reconciliation-and-trump-tax-proposals-effects https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy202... But as a summary, you can probably look at Table 1. The values given are over 10 years, so divide every by 10 to get a sense of per year. As written it looks like: * Overall decrease 170 billion per year in spending (overall Federal spending is about 7 trillion per year). There are cuts across the board except in DoD, DHS, and DoJ. * Tax cuts decreasing revenue by ~450 billion per year. There is a section in the report identifying all of the different tax cuts. This decrease in tax revenue includes the effect of locking in Trump's first term tax cuts which are currently set to expire.

nelblu 1y ago

Good riddance, and hopefully they won't be missed. Here in Canada these consultants are just leeches who suck up all the tax dollars which could actually be used for something useful.

josephg 1y ago
Same here in Australia. Over the last decade we’ve systematically reduced the number of civil servants and increased the number of consultants in government by many times. The result is we’ve ended up paying through the nose for worse government. The big consulting firms are leeches on the public purse. They should be used as little as possible.
stackedinserter 1y ago
A good portion of Federal Government is just a bunch of leeches whose KPI is literally how much money they waste. SO works there, in a team of great dedicated people, and they are all good and professional, but the whole department can be wiped out and nobody will notice.
timacles 1y ago
You guys are way too optimistic, they’re just going to pass these contracts to trump, musk and Peter theil buddies. Charge more money and also introduce some nepharious bullshit like AI data scraping

ibejoeb 1y ago

Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.

foota 1y ago
I think part of it's probably that the military is the largest discretionary spending in the US, and it's not especially popular, unlike say NASA or the NPS.
- jghn 1y ago
  Yes, the scale is a huge part of it. If some program has a $1mil budget and you were to tell me that 25% of it was wasted. Well who cares? $250k in the US budget is a rounding error on a rounding error. But if you were to tell me that 25% of the Pentagon's budget was waste? That's a big deal. Yet somehow a certain segment of our population tends to focus on the small fries.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    25% waste on single million is not bad. 25% waste on all millions spend is very bad... And that 25% is likely under estimated in many cases. Or at least some more from 75% is inefficiently used. I admit probably not 25% of all millions is wasted. But even if that is half that would be 12.5% wasted... Or fourth 6.25%. Fixing of which would still be huge long term effect. So my take is that this needs to be fixed on all levels and on all places.
    - jghn 1y ago
      Sure. But the point is that the people who advocate cutting the waste never propose going after the big wins first. Instead we cut all the little things that actually helps people and use arguments to the effect that the waste was adding up in the aggregate. OR, we could just not spend a trillion dollars on the military.

acomjean 1y ago

What were these contracts for? Networking or day to day software/application maintenance? I get they were probably bloated (I did work for a defense contractor at one point) but presumably they were doing something. I mean isn’t Deloitte a accounting firm? I’m a little worried about the “stand down” attitude against cyber attacks.

m3kw9 1y ago
Week long meetings charging 300/hour etc
wil421 1y ago
If you didn’t know all the accounting firms have massive IT consulting practices then do you really know about them? I think Deloitte makes about half of their US revenue from various consulting projects. https://www.projectworks.com/blog/2024-the-big-4s-revenue https://www.projectworks.com/blog/2024-the-big-4s-revenue
ghc 1y ago
At least one contract appears to be for the air force's effort to move secure workloads to a multi-cloud environment. Based on publicly available slides, I think Accenture is acting as a middleman to avoid dependence on Azure or AWS technical support creating lock in to their clouds. IMHO firing Accenture is probably a good move in this case. I bet they were extracting money at every opportunity just so the gov't could nominally avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
EasyMark 1y ago
with the current pattern by DOGE, I would say that it's likely they monitor grift and do audits of various departments. DOGE and Trump has been gutting many government oversight groups that are set up to prevent grift and fraud. I suspect 10 years down the road we'll find tons of grift under this administration after it's no longer in control

VoodooJuJu 1y ago

[dead]

Group_B 1y ago

Great, but it doesn’t matter too much as they’ll still vote in an increased budget that adds more debt. How about we raise taxes a bit and stop spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have each year.

normie3000 1y ago
I think taxes on imports just got raised a bit.
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  I thought that got paused by tweet yesterday.
  - EasyMark 1y ago
    still 25% on a lot of countries/industris, 10% across the board on everyone (at least) and 145% on China, our largest manufacturing trading partner.

apercu 1y ago

Not to be a cynic, but I bet all this means is that Republican campaign contributions from Deloitte and Accenture will be down and Democratic contributions will go up and new contracts will be awarded in the future so that the wealth class (won't someone think of the poor shareholders) can continue to steal your money.

callamdelaney 1y ago

Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.

sepalous 1y ago
I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
- sumedh 1y ago
  > The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.
- callamdelaney 1y ago
  Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be an additional political roadblock.
- koolba 1y ago
  > The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.

TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago

[flagged]

overstay8930 1y ago

These guys are massive scammers, I worked with them over multiple projects and the only thing I remember is by the end of each one, everyone was memeing on them for how poorly made everything they did was.

esbranson 1y ago

We know damn well all these stories will do is trigger "muh Trump" and "muh Elon" responses. Especially from non-Americans who have no idea how their own government works or what it's doing.

MangoCoffee 1y ago

I used to work at Avanade (a sister company of Accenture and Microsoft). They hired new grads and pushed them onto client projects. They live on big companies incompetence.

nova22033 1y ago

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-hegseth-reveal-whopping-figure-want-next-pentagon-budget https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-hegseth-reveal-whoppi... Trump, Hegseth reveal whopping figure they want for the next Pentagon budget $1T budget would be a 12% boost over current levels

JPKab 1y ago

[flagged]

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

I thought the interesting thing was this quote from Hegseth: > The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth said in the memo released late on Thursday. I obviously don't know the details of these specific contracts, but the general sentiment that qualified federal employees can do better than overpriced private contractors is something I agree with, at least in broad brushstrokes. But, that said, this would appear to be in direct opposition to DOGE and the Project 2025 playbook - here is a recent article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-privatize-government-usps-trump/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-pr.... This is why I hate what DOGE is doing. I could definitely get behind a coherent effort to streamline the federal government and save money - BTW, this was done rather successfully by Clinton and Gore in the 90s, who eliminated a huge portion of the federal workforce, they just didn't go on stage with chainsaws to promote it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinventing_Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv.... But now it's just "throwing bombs", and the overt corruption of the administration leaves me little faith that government will actually become more efficient with this current kakistocracy.

1024core 1y ago
The Government _can't_ be streamlined because the right incentives are not in place, and human beings respond to incentives. For example: if a bureaucrat does not use up their budget, it is (often) reduced proportionately in the next iteration. So these people have an incentive to use up the entire budget, if they want to have any hope of getting their requests next year. As a result, they will often do wasteful spending. I know this from experience, because in my previous life as code monkey in a small-ish government contractor, my boss had made it an art form to figure out who had extra money left over near the end of the fiscal year and pitch them ideas. A few 100K here, a few 100K there and the company was making decent money just mooching off of the leftovers from Federal budgets. If you want to fix the Federal government, you have to incentivize the officials to be rewarded for saving money.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago

_JamesA_ 1y ago

The big 3 get hired to protect managers. Hire a smaller consulting firm and the project goes sideways you both get fired. Hire a big firm and it goes sideways they get fired - until the next project.

franktankbank 1y ago
Sounds like the contracts are not written correctly then.
- arbor_day 1y ago
  Yup, sort of the whole point. There's a lot of cost plus contracts floating around here, which is a terrible incentive.
pmontra 1y ago
Or: you both get fired but they hire you because of all the money they made anyway.

dfedbeef 1y ago

Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near DC for 50k/yr.

icedchai 1y ago
I know some solid gov (some ex-gov now) tech folks in DC. These are experienced, staff+ engineer types who want meaningful work. The pay isn't that low. Is it FAANG level? No. But they're still making solid six figure salaries.
- dfedbeef 1y ago
  Yes; and they're also making an effort to get rid of the full time government workers. This is my point. You don't get to have it both ways.

swsieber 1y ago

So, realistically speaking, we've seen lots of corruption protections stripped away in parts of the federal government - SEC to stop prosecuting things, Inspector Generals fired, loyalty pledges, etc. Who would need to be on board with changes in the Pentagon to strip away protections there? I'd assume it's quite a bit more insular than other parts of the federal government.

knowitnone 1y ago

until they have a $1mil dinner with Trump

heisenbit 1y ago

Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the private sector except the most dire circumstances.

tw04 1y ago
The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing. Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.
- CityOfThrowaway 1y ago
  The data on hostile takeovers by "corporate raiders" very much does not support the characterization here. The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company is heading towards oblivion one way or another. Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets wind up as net job creators on a 5-10 year time horizons. That's despite the fact that they do usually start by divesting assets that don't make sense and laying off non-productive employees. But divested assets aren't generally killed – they are usually sold to somebody else who often does something better with it. Also, companies conduct massive downsizing and rationalization all the time when in distress, and not only when they are taken over by a "corporate raider". In the private markets, these actors are definitely distasteful. They do cleanup work that feels bad, and they often get rich doing it. But they also serve a necessary role in the markets. Companies that are egregiously misusing capital and resources are a drag on the economy. It's a bad thing for there to be a bunch of zombie companies holding onto assets that could be used in better ways. A more generous framing would be something like a home flipper. They buy properties that are a mess, clean it up real good, throw out the old stuff for recycling, install some modern appliances, and sell it to somebody else. One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission. I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.

gsky 1y ago

I signed up for linkedin with my Mobile number. I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field to login. That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run by medicore people at this point

kjkjadksj 1y ago
Yep. Mobile version of reddit is basically unusable on my se2. Page hangs and doesn’t finish loading, only shows like 1 or 2 comments and no child replies vs the whole thread. Old.reddit.com loads instantly of course, except if I am coming from a mobile reddit link then it will hang and require a browser restart as closing the tab and using a new one isn’t even enough. Remind me their valuation again to produce a junk product and ride on the coattails of an otherwise simple and reliable website that they’d rather not exist again?

aaurelions 1y ago

Gemini 2.5 DeepResearch new Pentagon consultant.

Molitor5901 1y ago

This is going to devastate the DC area. Most of my friends work for one of the big IT contractors. It's a great gig if you can get it, very nice compensation and not a lot of responsibility. The first rule of government contracting has always been why buy something when you can buy it for three times the price. As a result these firms have become quite massive in their size and billings. This is going to cause a major overturn in people living in the DC region, and overall incomes. I would say perhaps, perhaps, it's the equivalent of a very large company leaving Silicon Valley.

Suppafly 1y ago

I'm in favor of getting consulting firms out of government, but I suspect they'll end up having to pay out these contracts while no longer getting what they were paying for, so this is likely a net lose for tax payers.

johnbellone 1y ago

This is where I would expect there to be a lot of waste in government budgets. Unfortunately, there are very little incentives for the work coming out of these types of contracts to build process/technology to automate themselves out of billions of dollars. We are stuck between limitations of government civilian workforce (pay/politics) and overpaying companies for work that generally can be a lot cheaper with a career employee.

glitchc 1y ago

It's interesting reading conversations in this thread. Everyone wants government to hire competent individuals. Yet, when it comes to a personal choice, the very same individuals decline the lower compensation. Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land, sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in government spending that's needed to pay for those higher salaries. It's classic cognitive dissonance in full effect leading to a tragedy of the commons. It goes to show that tech folks are no different from regular (DEI, MAGA, other) people.

SamuelAdams 1y ago
The narrative around fed jobs has changed recently too. A fed job used to be a lower salary, but much stronger job security. Now with the new administration government job security is gone, so federal jobs overall are simply not as attractive anymore.
- glitchc 1y ago
  I don't think this applies. According to the stories here, folks were choosing out of Fed jobs even when gold-plated pensions were the norm.
  - l2silver 1y ago
    Government organizations aren't very good at accounting for true inflation, so right now the salary + golden handcuffs combination is way lower than industry compensation, if you're competent. If you're not competent, and you're not doing anything, then you might as well stay.
- rockemsockem 1y ago
  It's been almost 3 months. Just maybe there haven't been any new fundamental long-term trends established in that time
bluecalm 1y ago
The argument "cutters" are making is that there is enough money but also too much waste. Case in point are consulting firms discussed here: they charge you 3x rate of their employees. You could have been paying 2x to get better employees and savings at the same time.

raincom 1y ago

A lot of these jobs require clearance. Who can get such clearances? People with less history. So, young college graduates, young army folks, etc. There are tons of people who just have security clearances without competence. There is a huge demand for people who hold clearances. I have no problem with "make work" programs; however, these large companies are grifting 100% on top of what these people get paid.

erichocean 1y ago

This is a big loss for India, it's like 15:1 India- vs. US-based "consultants."

languagehacker 1y ago

I always like to recommend the book When McKinsey Comes to Town in any post about Management Consulting

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zusammen 1y ago

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Arubis 1y ago

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It's kind of amazing to me how much USGov business Accenture continued to soak up after the misfired start of healthcare.gov. Their core competency is pretty clearly acquiring contracts, not fulfilling them.

zzzbra 1y ago

Finally a budget cut I can actually celebrate.

jrochkind1 1y ago

In some departments (say Social Security) they want to switch from in-house staff to contractors, and in others they want to switch from contractors to in-house staff? The US government has been moving to privatized contractors in most of it's work for some time, across many administrations and both parties. Based on what I know of Trump, I'd have expected that to continue. Maybe it is everywhere except for special treatment for DoD? Or maybe this is just a fake and it won't be this way for DoD either. I don't have much idea what is going on.

idrios 1y ago

Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA to replace some people who've recently left. He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from people who are substantially lying about their experience and maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he wasn't from an approved source. His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get herself hired as a consultant. Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may have inaccuracies in this story.

windex 1y ago
> a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, Your friend could go through her firm then.
exe34 1y ago
he should just hire some high school script kiddies, they already have access to the highest level of government!
- gscott 1y ago
  Put in that persons first name as 'Big' last name 'Balls'. No one will question the hire, change the persons name later to their actual name.
98codes 1y ago
Getting onto the allowed vendor list for the US Government is a dire process even for the largest of global service companies, by design by the folks already on the list. I was able to work as an individual as a subcontractor for a subcontractor for a company on the list. Rates aren't as high, but with federal regulations (for now) mandating that subcontractors be paid as soon as the primary contract holder was paid meant that there was 0 chasing after invoices which is actually very nice.

devrandoom 1y ago

Waste or not, I don't think two companies should have $5.1B government contracts. Although I think neither that or waste is the reason for termination.

silexia 1y ago

Fantastic! This is great news. Clean up the waste!

passwordoops 1y ago

I'm happy with this, but cynical enough to expect $5.1B to turn into $10.2B for Palantir, X

insane_dreamer 1y ago

This might be the only smart "waste cutting" that the government has done so far. Ideally, there would be a Digital Services government department, staffed with properly compensated people (to attract good quality talent) that the other government agencies would "contract" to build their services, rather than paying through the nose to Deloitte (who then offshores most of the work anyway). Then maintaining the services could be done by the contracting gov agency once completed (with support from DSA). Oh wait, we had a Digital Services, the USDS, and they built some pretty good stuff too. Could have been a model for other work. Except that they just got gutted and taken over by DOGE goons. Wonderful.

fracus 1y ago

How can you just terminate a contract? What clause are they invoking to terminate it?

b8 1y ago

Good. Government contractors usually overcharge the government and then the contractors don't do much all day. It'd be cheaper to hire internally or pick cheaper contractors. Lot's of documented fraud, waste and abuse with government contractors.

michaelteter 1y ago

While there's almost certainly a good amount of waste in these consulting contracts, there's also a strong possibility that these cuts were done without a clear sense of what would be lost without them. But hey, I suppose sometimes we just deem projects too big and messy to comprehend, so we just toss it all and start over. It rarely turns out as nice or easy as we thought it would be.

cafard 1y ago

Having worked for a government contractor, I decided that the government was using the Charlie Sheen principle: not paying them to come around, but paying them to go away. I have no idea what they billed us for to the government, but I doubt we were getting paychecks equivalent to what the government folk we dealt with got. (To say nothing of benefits.) But I assume that it was far easier to let contractors go. Actually, the friction of hiring and placing made it relatively hard to let contractors go other than through downsizing. People showed up drunk or stoned, and hung on for a month or two.

max_ 1y ago

What exactly do these two people do. The marketing BS on their websites say alot of generic, motivational crack. Could someone help me break down the real bread & butter of these firms and why people give them money?

Havoc 1y ago
They provide some analysis. Which may or may not be helpful. It also acts as CYA - if a venture goes wrong and the CEO can say the consultants supported it then that can take some of the heat off

mrkramer 1y ago

Elon is taking over! https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/5e0e6ea/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3429x2286+0+0/resize/599x399!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.apnews.com%2Fb4%2F91%2F46e2230884242f385e9a1302a2c1%2F0a94a385742c482baa6f88e6b8100620 https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/5e0e6ea/2147483647/str...

boredpeter 1y ago

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rvba 1y ago

I wonder how many of them was doing important stuff (defending vs Russian ans other foreign actors). I understand the sentiment that quality of consultants ia very low.

profsummergig 1y ago

I was sitting with a D.C. lobbyist at a function dinner. Lawyer at a prominent lobbying law firm. Random seat assignments. He gets a call on his cellphone. After the call he has a shit-eating grin on his face. Tells me Biden just signed student loan forgiveness. He had lobbied on behalf of the banks that had given the loans to the students (and students weren't paying them back). I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly. Accenture and Deloitte pay a lot of money to lobbyists for these Pentagon contracts. After the dust has settled, they'll still get juicy contracts. We will all forget that any of this happened.

selfhoster 1y ago
"I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly." Excellent point.
- phonon 1y ago
  How much in Federal income taxes does someone making $26,000 a year pay? Single, no child, no subsidized savings...around $1,000. 1 Child...negative several thousands dollars. That's assuming all income is being reported.
  - profsummergig 1y ago
    Your point is fair, and a valid perspective for analyzing the issue. Here's another valid perspective: the Federal money that went to subsidize the Law student's degree... it could have gone to infrastructure in a way that could have materially improved the waitress's life. Or it could have increased her child credit. Or it could have been used to incentivize her (in various ways) to seek an educational or skills upgrade.

acyou 1y ago

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250411151614/https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-terminate-51-billion-it-contracts-with-accenture-deloitte-others-2025-04-11/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250411151614/https://www.reute...

nwmcsween 1y ago

I have first hand knowledge with large consultant companies, they are largely sales teams with minimal IT knowledge. I had to help a one of their overseas "senior cloud professional" that had issues even understanding how to navigate the cloud UI.

camilla41511 1y ago

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