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Comment by wolf550e | Hacker News Reader

The military cannot pay the salaries that are required to keep qualified people of certain professions/specialties. Surgeons and hackers, but also some other things too. so they must outsource to the private sector. But they certainly can require the contractor to use military provided/mandated security oversight. Mandate and verify good security practices, not tick checkboxes.

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Why can they not pay the going rate at least in the NSA ?

Government job, government rules.

So change the rules

They're working on it. But those rules are there specifically to prevent overspending, are they not? If someone then ends up, or appears to end up, overpaid, you're going to have a different angry mob at the door. You have to be careful tearing that kind of thing out, to say the least.

As opposed to paying 3x the rate for some contractor from "Booz ma kindney" or the other usual suspects

Yes, as opposed to that. What I'm saying is that it's a hard problem. It's not one that's unique to government either; corporations have to decide when to outsource, too, with similar (but less dramatic) tradeoffs.

But unless your insane out source your core competencies and for TLA's you don't out source your cleaners as the risk is to high.

How -- conceptually -- does the military being unable to afford the salary of person A get fixed by subcontracting to hire person A through corporation B?

That literally just makes person A cost more money.

When you pay the contractor, you pay all your buddies that run and administrate the company too. It is all a staggering money grab, what better job is there than federal contractor that works on stuff so secret that congress doesn’t even really have oversight? That stuff is free money for ever. Plus I think they do it to evade rules, there are different penalties for the government breaking rules and laws than for these secretive companies. Foobar secret LLC could totally just target Muslims if they actually did work and it wouldn’t have to be a constitutional issue if they were ever caught.

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