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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Somebody had written this with exact purpose to give this contract to Deloitte. I would be very surprised if there wasn't bribery involved.

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Geez, I thought the whole idea is that 'government is the problem. We need to let the private sector handle all these things.'

Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year. Shame the price has been so high.

Are you saying this isn't an example of "government is the problem?"

I'm sorry notmarkus, what I said was unclear. I apologize for that, I'll try harder to avoid doing that again. Too much at stake.

Well, the thing is that when the government takes tax money and allocates it to private companies via obscure and arguably corrupt procedures, you get the worst of both worlds. Inefficiency and rigidity of the government, combined with opacity and greed of the private companies.

When people say privatizing things could be a solution, they don't usually mean "take tax money and award it through a no-bid contract to a private company for laughable reasons which could be either stupid or corrupt, your choice". At least if those aren't the people who are getting no-bid contracts, those people mean exactly that.

> Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year

You sound like somebody outside CDC on purpose went and made CDC look bad. As far as I can see here, CDC did it to itself - and it's way not the only messup they had recently, they also totally bungled covid tests rollout. There seems to be serious trouble there, and if they think they will be excused because of the pandemic - they unfortunately may be right, but this only means the rot will continue.

>you get the worst of both worlds. Inefficiency and rigidity of the government, combined with opacity and greed of the private companies.

This is what is being referred to when a politician used the words "public/private partnership.'

By itself, there's nothing wrong with government buying services from private companies - in fact, it's inevitable, unless the whole economy is controlled by the government, certain services will have to be bought on private markets. It is when the unique power position of the government is leveraged to give certain companies unearned advantage, and the government acts not as mere consumer among others, even if with deep pockets and special needs, but seeks to promote some companies at the cost of suppressing others, is where the trouble lies.

Isn't the problem that the compensation structure is wrong?

By paying lump sums you are basically encouraging your contractor to screw you over. You should compensate them based on metrics that align with your goals. For example, pay $1 (random number) for each vaccinated citizen.

There are systems like that within the government, but in those scenarios the Contractor owns the system and deploys it as a service. While it can be cost effective in the early years, it does entrench the Contractor and make it difficult for the Government to switch because they own nothing.

If the governmental body is not interested in ensuring efficiency, than no matter what structure is chosen it will be abused - by inflating counts, or costs, or some other way, because people who have incentive to get money and no counter-incentive to follow the rules will cheat. Not all of them - but enough of them to cause serious damage. Look what happened in California recently - about 27% (!!!) of unemployment benefits is now thought to be fraudulent. This is what happens when people are incentivized to cheat and people who oversee the public coffers aren't incentivized to guard them. You'd expect that there would be some consequences for CDC leadership for their numerous failures - but that's not happening.

From my experience with the german government, it is more the bureaucracy that is the issue and not government per se. And that bureaucrcy, on the governmen side, wasn't that far of from what I saw in companies like Siemens back the day.

I think government is just sitting on the extreme end of bloated bureaucracy, with everthing defense related taking the cake.

And the voters will easily vote for more of such bureaucracy, wrapped in words about controlling spending, avoiding corruption, preventing money going to few private contractors, ensuring cheapest bid wins, etc. etc.

This is combined with how various voter-friendly "cheap government" initiatives go on for all kinds of internal purchases, not just big dollar projects like this.

Printers that needs servicing all the time because "cheapest bid" means you have low-quality shady consumables used.

Cars that end up constantly in service because the provider is cheap and thus couldn't do the right job servicing a Land Rover Discovery 2, taking away critical machine for reaching accident sites for aviation accident investigation.

Purchase of new cars for the same org and purpose - the freshly elected government leaked "appropriate" story to one of the newer tabloids to make it look like excess that they are curbing.

I still tell the story of SCAAI investigator buying a plane ticket for international flight because office responsible for finances in appropriate ministry refused to arrange diplomatic courier. So an investigator booked an international flight, left the plane, gave the CD full of confidential data to his local counterpart, turned 180 and went back to the same plane back.

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