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Comment by epups | Hacker News Reader

Person A gets hired in the public sector and acquires relevant expertise on a specific topic but earns a pittance; they are then invited to join a consultancy for 2x their wage. This person's hours now cost 8-10x as before for the government, because the consulting companies are adding a ton of overhead to it. The supposed trade-off is that over the long run (30+ years) we arguably saved money, as keeping this person staffed and paying their pension would have cost even more.

One possible solution would be to have federal "consultancy" agencies for this type of project. A subway project is a one-in-a-generation thing for most cities, but not for a nation. We could also pay these federal agents handsomely, at least competitive with consultancy salaries. Each city or state would then pay for their hours to the federal government with a tiny overhead on top.

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This is my personal axe to grind: A modern government requires programs, apps, websites, etc, but have to buy those from consultancies and third party private companies. However, even the smallest states should be able to afford some sort of in house "Software Team" that could solve most government software problems, or otherwise be a solutions team for local and state government needs. Even if an individual state cannot afford it, they can probably team up with neighbor states to do the same. American federal and state governments should absolutely be doing this kind of thing.

The issue is that half the country subscribes to an ideology, or at least votes for said ideology, where the government being allowed to do anything on its own without paying a private contractor with your tax dollars as unacceptable. These same people will then complain when the garbage solution foist upon them by Tyler Technologies or similar is predictably garbage.

People hatr it because the government is more often than not quite big bloated, incompetent and corrupt. What they less often see is that much of that structure arises from the misaligned incentives like the practical necessities of machine politics when government workers aren't well compensated directly vs the power they weild and direct scrutiny on their actions, and the patronage networks that arise as a result of that environment.

Teachers, Police, IRS, social services, EPA, wtc all suffer from this.

Corporations are also corrupt and exist to siphon money into the hands of a few from the hands of many while accomplishing as little as possible. Having a "bloated" government at least mean that people get jobs instead of mass layoffs to buy back stocks

[citation needed]

Try starting from a reasonable position.

Can states like NY create an in-house consultancy whose primary purpose is the state's own projects, but also make the services available to other smaller states as needed (for a price)?

Your first paragraph is actually not really what the article is about. Rather, it's more about the government deciding to "build a subway" or whatever, and then hiring consultants to figure out what the hell that even means in reality.

I disagree, how do you think the government gets into a position where it doesn't know what the hell "build a subway" means in reality?

Those consultants need to be hired because the people with the expertise left the public sector to become those consultants, and now no one on-staff knows how to do anything.

Its only once a life time because of the expense. You can look at cities like Montreal and Toronto which more on going large-scale projects then NYC

Toronto and Montreal are both huge cities - if they were in the US they would be the 3rd and 5th largest cities in the country, respectively. Yes extremely large cities like that can be continuously building, but when you get to cities a tenth that size like say Cleveland, the number of projects you have are naturally limited and even if things were dramatically cheaper you're not going to tear up perfectly good infrastructure to replace it just as a training exercise.

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