It's possible to quickly make the technical changes, but when politicians asked the small group of people with direct knowledge of the issue, this is the answer they got.
The small group of people are not plugged into SV mentality quick iterative work. They include (for example) a Perl programmer who has had the same job for 25 years and isn't interested in learning new skills.
Keep in mind that at least in the Anglosphere, a point often raised about the government is that they are incompetent, that they need to be starved out, so usually
- they don't have the resources or backing to hire people who are up to date at competitive compensation levels
- the people left are those who have been able to survive such onslaught from their bosses, so they are presumably very jaded, cynical, and careful about new proposals
Our politicians do not empower the bureaucracy to be nimble, there is no reward for doing so. So I wouldn't expect it to be.
The incentives for government consultants are also generally not aligned to deliver quickly or competently.
Really the US military forces need an additional branch, the Civilian Core of Engineers. They would be held to high ethical standards (on the job), and all work they do for the government would become public domain. I imagine this could be combined with a New New Deal where public-works projects are generally funded, as well as a job guarantee / internship place to build a resume and gain social connections through.
"In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps
Singapore is, by a lot of accounts, a well-functioning government with competent bureaucrats.
It’s possible that people don’t have the ability to be consistent and you have to tack between the two strategies.
Money doesn't magically fix management issues caused by a lack of money; people who are not used to spending money may not know how to spend it well once they get it. Lottery winners generally fizzle out their winnings after a few years.
This is also a problem if you spend billions on consultants rather than shoring up the civil service; consultants aren't incentivized properly to deliver a good system on time.
I think the average HN-er doesn't realize just how slow/inefficient government really is. But when you read these stories it's apparent that the problem exists at an institutional level, and isn't really as simple as people think.
Not are any "new skills" needed. Just funding to do the work.
There are major impediments that are non-technical for those of us in government positions, just take a look at the bidding process for projects that are pretty much required for something the scale of "overhauling" the system backing state or federal programs. Is it necessary? Probably not. Does it happen anyway because it's required? Yes. This isn't the fault of some tenured programmer, hell, they're probably not even consulted as a knowledge worker as part of the bid process. This isn't a failure of culture, this is the failure of a byzantine beauracracy built around protecting itself instead of the people it's meant to serve. You can have all the innovation that comes out of the NIH, the NSF, DARPA and the NSA; but the amount of time even practical papers and systems that are produced by these institutions are put into practice by the government thay funded them is exceedingly slim due to the institutional rust that's in place. Many of these "SV culture" companies are actively building things that were first concepts in a government lab, but by all means, blame the underpaid, overworked technical staff that actually designed them.
The SV startup culture is a full-spectrum ownership thing. If your executive team isn't aiming at the right direction, you tell them that, and if you lose faith in the future as a result you go elsewhere. The executive team always relinquishes its power over you in order to maximize your effectiveness because that's the only thing that matters.
Government culture is different. It optimizes in a different constraint space. There has to be visibly equitable hiring, the needs of political expediency require things like "heads to roll", regression is more dangerous than lack of progression, etc. Because of this, government organizations operate differently. They're not inefficient. They're just optimizing to different constraints and they're incredible at doing so. I would hypothesize that you cannot retain SV startup culture at the government for any appreciable amount of time because of the constraint space - much of which is the result of natural law.
But a widely cited statistic (don't know if it's true of course) is that the average age of a founder of a successful startup is 45.
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...