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Comment by erikaww | Hacker News Reader

I know the joke of this is that they could have in-housed this.

But why do government agencies not always have groups focused on financial efficiency? Is it corruption or stupidity?

It's the flip flopping of liberal investment in government and public services, followed by conservative slashing of those services, followed by a condemnation of government's ability to provide after having been slashed, followed by an open bidding war for private consultancies to take over the role of the slashed service at a supposedly lower cost (that overruns in the end anyway, just like the aforementioned government service did in the first place). Rinse and repeat as every generation of politician proposes the new thing (repackaged old thing) and can then pat themselves on the back about what a good job they did. The kickbacks must be nice too I suppose ;)

I've lived in cities and states where there was never the remote political possibility of the "conservative slashing of services" yet the problems and complaints still persist. Your theory may have some gaps.

Gaps or a soap boxed size podium in some backwater forum board with bad css where they can beg the question about a liberal conservative epicycle?

Because governments (and corporations) are so brutally inefficient that they cannot implement change with their own staff. Bringing in a third party with a mandate from the top can skip entrenched red tape. It does work and is possibly the only tool they have to break the status quo. But it doesn’t help the underlying problem of organizations being so knotted that they need this short term fix for every problem.

Because it doesn't always make sense to spend a lot of money on cutting costs?

See, for example, the Paperwork Reduction Act which is the physical equivalent of the EU cookie banner.

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