^{Democracy & Technology Blog} When Politicians Get Their Mits On IT

With 50% of the federal information technology (IT) workforce eligible for retirement, according to a report from Baseline, it’s now clear to me why the government does a terrible job of keeping up with technology. That figure means most of the guys responsible for developing and supporting the technical infrastructure of our government are 65 years old or older and lived half of their lives before the microprocessor was even invented. Compare this to the private sector where most the innovators are plus or minus my age, 27, and like me started programming when we young, in my case 8. For the most part, these generations see technology and innovation very differently but the consequences are that this generational gap has made the government – and military in particular – a technical wasteland and that costs us in both lives and money.

More than 5 years ago, a report in National Journal’s Technology Daily predicted this loss of brain power. It quoted a Bush administration source who thought it was no big deal:

Mark Forman, the new Associate Director for Information Technology and e-government in the Office of Management and Budget is not worried. Where the government lacks the expertise to do a job, it can contract with the private sector to fill the position, he said. Forman noted that as much as 80 percent of the government’s IT work is already contracted out, and he framed the issue this way: If half of the remaining 20 percent of government IT workers retire, “does that matter?” His answer: “We have to get out of this notion that in order to get work done, we have to own the resources.”

The fundamental problem is that our government lacks the intellectual capital to effectively grow and manage its infrastructure. Not too long ago the CIAs Directorate of Science & Technology was a world leader in developing and implementing new technology. Now its Deputy Director isn’t even a technical person, according to Baseline.
This week the Wall Street Journal questioned whether the government is outsourcing its brain, and it noted that big contracts are “notorious for cost overruns and designs that don’t work, much of which takes place under loose or ineffective government scrutiny.”
Over the past decades the government has choked under its own bureaucracy and suffered crippling brain-drain. The logical outcome was for the government to become ever more reliant on private sector contractors to build and manage technical projects for them. Working with the private sector is in general a good thing and has yielded huge benefits as technology passes between the military and civilian domains. The problem is that there are very few people in power in our government who are capable of properly evaluating contractors and holding them to spec and budget. It’s quite possible there is not a single person in our government capable of both knowing the right solution and making the decision to buy. This results in a “worst of both worlds” scenario, and it allows the contractors to run roughshod over us. Its an environment that’s ripe for corruption and in my opinion this scandal was just a natural outcome.
A contractor that does good once makes friends and who can fault them for greasing a few palms to get a bigger deal next time around. And with no brains left in the government to actually evaluate them fairly against their competition, people take the easy out.
According to the report in Baseline a surprising portion of government contracts are awarded without full competition:

Between 1998 and 2004, the 41 defense contractors that paid fees to PMA collectively won $266 billion in contracts from the Pentagon, according to CRP. That amounts to almost 30% of the dollar value of all contracts awarded by the Department of Defense. Moreover, of this amount, $167 billion – nearly two out of three dollars – was received from contracts that were awarded without “full and open” competition. In fact, PMA clients account for 47% of all such non-competitive contracts – contracts in which the government negotiates with a single contractor – handed out by the Pentagon since 1998.

The officials in charge often don’t know enough to properly evaluate the options and typically will go with a big known company rather than take a risk on something new. Its natural of course, but this ignorance makes it far easier for one corrupt official to subvert the system. Though the private sector isn’t immune to this problem, it doesn’t suffer to the same extent the government does. I submit the reason is that a purchasing manager in the private sector better understands the technological difference between vendors. And although there’s plenty of underhanded private deals; there’s less bureaucracy to hide behind. Moreover, it is likely the purchasing manager will get fired if he or she screws up.
I suggest that if we wanted to solve this we’d first have to go all out to attract the brightest talent to government jobs (which means massive changes to the way we hire, compensate, and promote (or fire)). Second, non-technical elected officials need to be removed as far as possible from any technical decisions. This also applies well to the DOT (see Seattle viaduct and Seattle monorail for good examples of why). I’m not suggesting that there be no ethical or administrative oversight from lawmakers but lawmakers – to the extent possible – should not be allowed to influence how things get built or what vendor builds them. As much as possible, lawmakers should give general direction and leave its implementation to people who know what they’re doing.
The reason we were able to put a man on the moon and technically win the Cold War, was because the nerds ran the show – President Kennedy said land a man on the moon, he didn’t specify a vendor – at that time there was minimal influence from ignorant lawmakers. I’d also submit that’s exactly why the private sector is so ahead of the government today, it’s a fundamentally better environment for innovation. Sadly, it seems they can’t help but continue to innovate their way around ethical constraints to get government contracts.