Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row
breakingdefense.com
breakingdefense.com
It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the Pentagon uses for payroll and accounting was written in the 1960s, according to 2006 congressional testimony by Zack Gaddy, director of DFAS from May 2004 to September 2008."
"Wallace, the Army assistant deputy chief of staff, says the system has "seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated" in more than a dozen years, and significant parts of the code have been "corrupted." The older it gets, the harder it is to maintain. As DFAS itself said: "As time passes, the pool of Cobol expertise dwindles.""
Never used it (and hopefully never will), but yes.
Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.
Sure, but it’s not like the consulting firms are paying their “contractors” more, they just siphon up the difference for their shareholders.
That’s exactly how it works, look at contract government salaries compared to anything in the private sector. They charge the government more as rates “go up”, but that certainly isn’t passed along. If large contracting companies really offered value to the government _and_ kept up with market rates for their employees, the state of federal software wouldn’t be what it is today.
I rejected the idea that the consultancy would get a rate increase based on "market rates being higher" and then just capture it all - in my (admittedly somewhat limited and path dependent) experience that just isn't how it works. It's more like we pay randmeerkat $X, we bill them out at $X * factor + overhead. "Market forces" mean we have to go Y > X in renewal or we will lose randmeerkat & friends, so now they get $Y and we bill $Y * factor + overhead. It's of course usually more complicated in general, and overhead especially likely isn't that simple.
Nowhere in there is the assertion that X or Y is what randmeerkat would get on the open market. Importantly, their market isn't really "programmers", but "programmers that work in govt + contracting halo". Which is part of why the idea: I could get $N more in SF tech may be compelling for you, but isn't compelling for them (unless too many people actually make that change, instead of just talk about it).
Also there are many other ways they can raise there rates, but if the claim is that it is due to market on the developer salaries that are going to be a line item, there is going to be at least first pass look at a) is that true (find some market data and wave hands) b) did it actually get spent that way (may come up in an audit).
So the real answer seems to be not "They get more and I get nothing" but "I get a bit more, and they get more scaled by what I get", i.e. "win-win".
There is lots wrong with the system of contracting, but I don't think criticizing a cartoony straw-man of it gets anywhere useful.
We want government to be cheap. You get what you pay for.
What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to pay top dollar. They will come up with lets do kubernetes + service-mesh + multi-cloud hybrid + blockchain + crypto + AI/MI on this COBOL ... They will take top dollar, make a bigger pile of mess, sell it as a success story and move on make bigger messes.
It can attract people who are already good software developers absolutely, but the second point being made is that you also attract a lot of charlatans as well and so just throwing more money at the problem isn't exactly a great solution.
You need a solid culture to go with the money.
Highlighted in the sibling comment: "you will get whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi"
As if top talent never decides to live in Mississippi and accept 250k/year as their salary ceiling...
It's not impossible and $250k is nowhere near the ceiling. But you're not going to find those jobs on a causal LinkedIn search like you would in California.
I find it hard to get roles in the midwest (large metro in Ohio) clearing 200k, though sometimes bonuses get you up there.
I always assumed the reported 250k plus salaries were fake news or only reserved for children of powerful people.
$250k total comp isn't even particularly high at one of the big companies.
It definitely isn't easy to find those numbers if your CoL doesn't require them. You'd need to move to those areas.
I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash so I can take care of me and my family. 250k/yr for a COBOL position would suit that end just fine. You can keep your autonomy, mastery, purpose, and all the other foofoo, just hand me the check so I can be on my way.
I thought you were against reductionism?
sounds like purpose, of which you need mastery of some skillset to earn your autonomy to furfill.
That said, I'm sure there's much easier ways to earn 250k than untangling a governement codebase. Not that they are offering that to begin with.
>just hand me the check so I can be on my way.
Yeah, you probably wouldn't pass clearance with that attitude if we're being frank.
Fed govt migrations are ALWAYS shitshows. The army alone has like 20 individual email services. The pentagon is to org complexity what big tech is to technical complexity. It’s turtles all the way down.
This is literally one of the largest bureaucratic challenges on earth. There’s no simple fixes
There's a time and place for democracy - but large IT projects are not. Do a thorough need analysis, compare with what's reasonably possible using COTS software, and adapt or discard what is not possible.
This is the funniest possible response. The 'thorough need analysis' is the reason we are where we are now!
The thoroughness is so thorough that the needs change faster than the analysis can be completed, obviating the analysis in the first place.
Ironically, my friend has programmed COBOL on DoD mainframes, and still does as a consultant, having interacted with them for decades. Back in the 1970s she had a surplus IBM minicomputer that her father brought home for business use, and learned COBOL on that, and used the computer for furthering her legal research.
Do you think they aren't? I don't know any now, but the last one I did was making more than that 15 years ago.
Old crufty legacy systems in a big bureaucracy are many peoples idea of hell. Empirically speaking, good pay and job security aren't enough to have people knocking down your door for that kind of work if they have other decent options.
Worked at a big bank migrating some old code to new stack one time:
- Original developers are gone.
- Existing users don't understand the systems outside of their own narrow use-cases.
- Code which was committed to repositories didn't match the actual running code, because people would go into production servers, manually edit the code there, in place, not document or commit the changes to repo. There were like 20 years of adhoc changes made in this way.
Anyway, it was a hilarious shit-show, but kinda fun at the same time (if you're able to ignore incompetent leadership pressure - a skill I mastered during this time).
I remember the first time I saw this at a small company. The head programmer was the only one with the actual production source, despite a working source control system. He complained about how people didn't appreciate how hard it is to make builds work. I should have left when we lost three man months of code to losing email. I only left after screaming at the head programmer for refusing to stop making the repository unbuildable at all.
Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL magically guarantees great code.
But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened (to various literal degrees).
* edit: corrected sp
This is why big companies use Oracle or SAP for their ERP, auditors are very familiar with it and the way it functions is well-known and understood.
It was a naval research project headed by Admiral Grace Hopper to program with words rather than formulas like earlier "high-level" "autocoders", enabling secretaries to transfer their business logic into computers. It actually intentionally has a lot of the same structure as a recipe, hoping that this would allow easier uptake by secretaries.
It will just cost twice as much as the team that iterates quickly. It will cost more because I will spend more money on business analysis up front. I will spend more money writing automated tests. Most importantly, I will maintain my own toolchain and libraries or pay someone to do so. Every piece of software deployed will have someone accountable to my business to maintain it.
It turns out that this is expensive. It's no more expensive than maintaining the COBOL code, mind you, and would likely give you better results than the equivalent COBOL code. Most companies will take their chances with less expensive software because that's what their competitors do.
About a decade ago, I saw one of the major systems you talk about up close. While they spent that amount of money for mission-critical systems, they didn't do nearly as good of a job on the average software in the system. I'm not convinced that any business is ready to go back to the battle hardened days.
In my experience, the quick teams only learn the surface content. A lack of depth tends to result in more errors down the road and poor architecture. But I guess it doesn't matter since half your team will jump to the next project company in 2-3 years anyways and take that knowledge with them.
Today, the payroll supervisor has no idea how many processes work.
It will be guaranteed to run in 100 years time.
Any other language can die or have incompatibility issues. Over that timespan.
I am not convinced Node will be here in 100 years.
* assuming that the 100 years hyperbole is accepted
This is never guaranteed. How do you know that nothing will change in JS land in 10 years, much less 100? You don't, that's how.
There's no guarantee we'll even be running programs written in C in 2123, let alone ones written in JavaScript. 100 years from now is a long time.
I'm not sure I would trust these people over those of the past, regardless of what they say they will accomplish, Chesterton's Fence, and the Lindy Effect, and all.
>spend more money on business analysis up front.
Entails. But sure, if the government doesn't want to pay for that quality, they can spend just as much or more resurrecting Cobol devs in cryo-stasis in 2099
Your statement is undermined by the fact that the system has failed its sixth consecutive audit. If it's not hardened against failing an audit, I'm not really sure what it could possibly be hardened against.
Managers need to be careful of Goodhart's law. (in this case "passing inspection" may not be the best target)
The DoD does not.
This is the same code that uses two-digit years and doesn't support lowercase letters?
That serves as evidence against this point, though:
> COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general.
I worked on enterprise cobol for nearly 20 years and can generally attest that cobol code from the 60s is absolutely nothing at all what you’re describing.
It’s brittle and constantly breaks, requiring 24/7 on call support for people to deal with issues so it doesn’t hold up the next days work.
It was not written with any semblance of engineering prowess. Most cobol written in the 60s was written by business managers, not programmers.
The reason it stays running isn’t because it’s battle hardened. It’s because nobody in their right mind would ever pay to untangle the unfettered mess.
Now the systems I work on are hot garbage because the tech is constantly needing upgraded versions, changes to the code are onerous because of the way the system was designed, we are constantly having data issues for various reasons, and people jump teams every 2 years so there's no continuity.
I'm convinced it's a leadership issue. Push for speed and you'll get it. It will cost you in other areas.
Something that's interesting to think about is that because the cost of changing COBOL is so high now, only the most important change requests actually get implemented. Compare that to a team that can develop and ship a change the same day; their efficiency leads to more requests that end up being bad ideas. The Pentagon has designed a system to ensure that only the most well-thought-out ideas make it into production, they just went about it in a very strange way.
It can take months for a new developer to understand a legacy code base but an LLM with a big enough context window would be instantly productive.
one advantage the government would have is training/fine-tuning on a hundred million lines of domain specific cobol.
It's also wildly bad to plan to train and fine tune on code that you know has bugs. Already we have Copilot generating code with trivial vulnerabilities because that's what it's trained on.
Honestly I think editing code will be easier than creating wholly new applications to precise spec.
Once you have the detailed specifications the coding is relatively easy. Some of that can be partially automated using AI CASE tools, but that only gives a marginal improvement to overall project productivity.
One of my first one afternoon (for prompt refinement and trying it out) toy GPT-3.5 “applications”—really just a prompt—was having it interview for reauirements and draft and progressively refine a requirements doc in a specified (by reference to an author in popular Agile literature, not by specific templates, so just relying on the model’s general training) format. Its pretty much what convinced me of the broad utility of the technology.
I absolutely think that with a bit of effort, GPL-4-128K, a custom RAG framework and/or the Assistants API, you could build something that handles a lot of this. I’m not really bullish near term on LLMs as full replacements, but I can see it as a big force multiplier.
So lots of tedious repetitive manipulation of language to extract facts and transform them into a systematic format? My prediction: LLMs are going to eat that for breakfast.
(Honestly it is a great business idea for someone with the right contacts. Lots of big customers with deep pockets and large private datasets to train against that might now have a solution to a problem which was previously intractable in scale.)
You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation:
They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude, possibly the largest, most complex organization in the world - with ~$4 trillion in assets (not market cap, but hard assets), and ~$900 billion annual budget, seven figures of employees, and operations spanning almost every activity, all over the world.
Such an organization is naturally divided into an incredibly large and complex org chart that maybe nobody really comprehends. Among all the entities on that chart are an incredible array of financial and asset tracking systems, computerized and manual, from new back to possibly WWII.
Your boss says that procurement is the most important thing to audit: An unusually large part of that $900 billion budget is the world's largest procurement budget and operation, with an endless list of vendors of every size and shape, from the world's largest companies - some whose core function is milking your organization without crossing legal redlines - to the tailor for West Point uniforms. And we were hoping you wouldn't ask, but we're afraid the budget and operation is decentralized across all/most of those entities in that org chart [edit: per commenter with actual knowledge, "the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized".]
We'll need you to stitch all that together so we can audit it.
Who is providing executive support for this project? Well, very few in our organization, from the leadership down, really want it - they all see it as a distraction and source of trouble, possibly risk to their missions and careers. It was imposed on us. Also, the project will be the target of politics (including from a certain highly aggressive party in Congress), talking heads, and general public Internet attacks no matter what you do. Everyone sees you as a useful whipping post.
Do you take the job?
The DoD is like the End Game Boss on legal and financial edge cases.
Overseas Contingency Operations - https://www.cbo.gov/system/files?file=2018-10/54219-oco_spen...
Nonappropriated funds (MWR, etc.) - https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/fmr/arc...
Foreign military sales / FMS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Military_Sales.
The problem is not technical, it's the immeasurable amounts of tiny personal fiefdoms established by the countless layers of middle management. You won't get rid of these without someone who has been publicly given the political backing to end the career of anyone resisting change. And that includes the Congress members which are on speed dial in some people's phones.
IME such internal politics is unavoidable in large organizations. Nobody likes it but it's the ocean in which everyone must swim. You can alter it to some degree, but there's no way for a structure that large to work without it. How do you manage million(s?) of people without middle management?
Also, it's not Meta. It's an organization that is responsible for life and death of hundreds of millions or billions, and national and global security, so control is essential. As a simple example, you can't lose track of the grenade launchers or nuclear weapons and have them end up in the wrong hands.
Even for military officers giving orders in the field, edicts don't work. You need buy-in, including earning trust in you.
https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/
And now no one remembers what it was like without AWS...
Sure, you could assemble a team with that experience to short-cut some of that. But you'll likely need a long time to just build the trust necessary to get the right information. You're an outsider and will likely be treated as such.
What data structure do you organize the problem into? Is it a tree? Depth first search? Breadth first search? Maybe you just pick a point at random and walk from there.
Good... Luck with that.
The Pentagon has been on the GAO's "high risk audit failures" list since 1995 [0]. Exactly how much longer do we need to wait? And at what point can we start to assume they don't intend to ever actually fix the problem?
not trying to defend the large 'disconnected jumbled mess' that is military spending, but headlines (and large percentage of armchair commentators) make it sound like 'see, told ya so!' when in fact this audit is the weakest basis for an argument that military spending has no oversight, gets too much, etc.
note that i'm agreeing there needs to be more oversight, less spending, etc. but this audit is not going to serve persuading that.
It's wild, but whenever a big change occurs there's always smart folks who knew what was going to happen and exactly called it out. Usually as a "ok guys be careful cause X could happen" and X inevitably does.
Fraud and/or waste should be a subject of concern regardless of the program that experiences it.
To quote Admiral Ackbar: "It's a trap!"
We need more focus on policy and outcomes, rather than performative politics on who loves the flag more.
If you notice, whenever dems have launched a plan in the past 30-40 years they always say how it's almost always going to be "deficit neutral" or help because they actually don't want to increase spending (or help people all that much, is my take).
Both sides have and will continue to green light defense spending and other "important issues" so deficit goes up anyways.
Being that social programs are only promoted by dems, and are actively attacked by republicans, I find that statement odd. Yes, the DNC is very much owned by its corporate masters, but there is a distinct difference between the two parties.
The trope of "both sides are the same" is worn out.
Disclaimer: I'm not a member of either party and believe that political parties and partisan politics are bad for the country.
People generally disregard the first part when they quote him on the "military industrial complex".
[0] Because the era where the US could remain safely protected by the two oceans was ending due to the development of missile technology, and because the complexity of military equipment had gone beyond what a civilian company could be expected to produce with a few years of factory retooling as in WWII.
If a military was not ready to fight on day 1, if you were starting from a heavily disadvantageous position, you may never have the opportunity to catch up. The weapons technologies on the horizon would allow shipyards and advanced manufacturing facilities to be destroyed by an enemy thousands of miles away. That means you would need to have enough tanks, ships and so forth to put up a fight immediately, rather than waiting a few years, and they would need to be continually modernized. Therefore those industries would need to be kept around permanently, but subservient to the public interest.
In other units that I'm known for, that's 550 Enrons.
I work on a team that operates ~the only climate research station in Greenland, the fastest melting piece of ice on earth. The total cost of our project is ~10e-7 of the money they lost. You could build, operate, and employ ~10,000,000 scientists at 1,050,000 climate research stations with that kind of money.
Let's just say our forecasts and climate projections would be pretty spot on with that sort of funding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38307749
It's like an airplane under development. It's not expected to fly yet.
What are you basing that on?
https://rollcall.com/2023/05/23/hill-favored-projects-called...
Congressional representatives push all sorts of weapons "programs" that military leadership doesn't want or need, because it's an easy way to be able to go home and tell your voters how many jobs you "saved" "protecting America."
Well over a decade ago Pentagon leadership declared that their budget was not sustainable for the country...just like they declared a long time ago that climate change was a serious threat and started working on decarbonization (the US military is still the single largest generator of carbon dioxide on the planet.)
It seems like various sections and departments are passing audits. If you're within, say, 1% just allocate the funds.
If you didn't pass the audit, fill out this form and then get the money. The form can be classified.
I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are pretty much perfect.
Once you get a handle on who doesn't know where their money is going, you can help them figure it out, throughout the year, and be on track next year.
It's huge, it's massive it's trillions of dollars, it's a completely incomprehensible system. But, like, some parts are comprehensible. Those parts are easy. The incomprehensible parts can be broken down and figured out. Is divide and conquer not a thing?
With a big enough org, the ongoing deterioration occurs faster than you can actually root cause and fix the problems.
You divide the orgs, they divide the pillars, they divide the groups, they divide the pods, they divide the teams… all the sudden, a 4 week root cause exercise takes a year and a half. By the time you implement the solution, you’re 3 years out of date. Whoops - administration flipped. They don’t care anymore. “What do you mean accounting - why are we behind China in AI?!”
The bigger issue is the no political will part. If congress mandated that senior pentagon officials lose their jobs when they fail an audit they would get the process figured out really quickly. As is there's no urgency because there are no consequences for failure.
It is well-known in the military that WHEN you inevitably get a screwed-up paycheck, if you get too much, it's your problem, because they're 100% sucking that money back out of your account or simply not paying you the next month. If you get too little... well that's also your problem. Good luck - go find someone to spare the time to fix it. It's a pain in the ass.
The system is ancient, unfortunately.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like this ever reversed course historically?
Would you rather have 90% of $1M or 100% of $800k?
That single word is doing all of the heavy lifting for you. "If" the housing market will never crash, then it's a surefire safe investment! Better buy tons of houses to flip on credit. There's no guarantee that your debt/investment will succeed, which is why banks try (and often enough, fail) to price in risk with things like varying interest rates, collateral, etc.
in scenarios where your expected value discounted to present value is greater than the alternative, you make the investment. it's really finance 101... it's just NPV
Just because someone gives it a formal name doesn't mean it's true.
>One person's savings is another person's debt.
Only if you treat fiat currency (or bank deposits in general, the paradox you mention was formulated long before we got off the gold standard) as the only possible form of savings.
If you have a negative net worth (more debt than assets) you're generally not considered a wealthy person.
That's only true if your debt and assets are both small. If you have $200 million in assets and $500 million in debt, you will be considered a wealthy person. You would only stop being wealthy if your stuff got taken away.
So by your analogy, is it actually bad for a normal person to be in debt? Normal people have mortgages.
Payments, including interest, are regularly made and of course individual debts are paid all the time.
(I could be off in some details, but I remember my despair when Greenspan gave Congress cover for supporting the tax cuts by testifying that it wasn't necessarily a good thing to be debt-free.)
'why...it is okay for the federal government...' federal govt in US is following general patterns at business and individual scale, because democratic processes lead to a reflection of decisions at smaller elements of society at bigger ones.
'...ever reversed course historically?' no reversals, but plenty of upheavals, such as war, conquering, etc.
Its impossible for the US to be forced to default.
Its quite possible for the US to make a political choice to default, and it has come very close to doing so.
For a starting point, see https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/BoC-B...
The reason it would be impossible for the US to default is that the US is not significantly in debt. Most of the federal debt is held domestically, meaning by the US. You can't be in debt to yourself.
Sure, we can just inflate away the Social Security fund, but do you think the effects of this would be better or worse than simply defaulting? And nevermind the political optics of "We still paid what we owed to China but magic wanded away the debt to Grandma!"
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/21/post-crash-...
Ultimately the way these ideas about economic theory are approached is a lot more philosophical/religious-based (for the Atheists, please read that 'strong belief-based') and a lot less math based than some would be willing to admit. Honestly the math itself is usually statistical, which in turn is a lot more difficult to comprehend and analyze properly.
Just ask...are there are very fundamental differences between the finances of an individual and the government? There are. For starters, the government can simply print money and pay off debts. They can also choose, by their actions, to inflate away nominal liabilities.
So then it is reasonable to consider that "being in debt" may have different ramifications for the government than for an individual.
I can only agree ramifications look different when an inappropriately narrow timespan is in focus. Thinking through history, what nations have been able to ultimately avoid ramifications from significant debt – the same sort of scenario that would in proportion cause ‘ramifications’ for individuals or businesses?
I can think of several historical instances where a nation having significant debt appeared to have no ‘ramifications’ early on but were unable to avoid the inevitable (and inenviable) outcomes.
I mean, even an individual may get deeply – horribly - in debt yet avoid ramifications for a time. But the bills will come due. No doubt a government is not the same thing as a business or an individual. But to dismiss government debt as playing by different rules than debt elsewhere is foolish.
It’s actually central economic thought. If you disagree, it’s on you to prove otherwise.
Governments can print currency, create taxes - actually inter generational (government bonds). Households cannot.
Economist Mark Blyth explains it quite clear:
Not sure its awful for a person, depending on the kind of debt, but people and the government are differently situated. For one, people (natural or corporate) who have a debt in something that isn't a token that they can issue at will have an externally enforced obligation to do whatever is necess5 to acquire those tokens and sacrifice whatever is necessary to deliver them to the creditor.
Currency-issuing governments with debt in their own currency have an obligation to... ultimately, if nothing else works or is desirable, just poof up some currency.
Also, for certain governments, there isn't a vastly more powerful external enforcer of whatever obligation they have, whereas with most people, there is, in the form of the local government.
The attacks directly on the national debt are a political strawman, meant to distract from the real issues about where revenue comes from and how it is spent. It's like the constant debt ceiling wailing; Congress sets a budget and legislation that requires spending more than the revenue available, then sets a debt ceiling that prevents the treasure from borrowing to cover the required by law spending, then bitches and moans and grandstands over how the debt ceiling creates a crisis. It's all for show.
No, I assure you that those of us concerned about the national debt are actually concerned about it.
Unlike a person, a government has an unlimited lifespan and debt can persist forever. This only becomes a concern when total debt exceeds some multiple of GDP. The exact limit will vary based on many factors including interest rates, economic growth rate, demographics, and tax compliance. Once that limit is breached it tends to cause a fiscal and political crisis within a few years. Either default or hyperinflation in the short term, followed by a long period of austerity.
This is the kind of theory that, without a concrete model of how the limit varies (or even with one, if it involves much statsitical variability) is nonfalsifiable, either because the probability of a crisis in actual concrete conditions is unknown or the range of variability is too wide to make strong conclusions given the small-n problem with real-world conditions, but at the same time becomes very easy to rationalize almost any real-world conditions as fitting.
Otherwise you are correct. Zimbabwe certainly has to live within its means.
Never and it is insane that there are apologists for such a sad state of affairs.
This is not going to end well. That's what happen when totally clueless, incompetent and senile people are pulling the levers, following the advices of visionaries like Paul "it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's" Krugman.
> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
What is insane on that graph is that it doubled in ten years and quadrupled in 15 years.
Anyone who thinks this is reasonable is simply out of his mind.
If a 4 GHz processor core executes an instruction every clock cycle, it would still take two hours to iterate that instruction 32 trillion times.
If you lined up 32 trillion inches, it would be over 505 million miles.
If a dollar bill is 0.1 millimeters thick, and you stacked 32 trillion of the bills on top of each other, the stack would be almost 2 million miles high.
Etc
By the way, we went past $33 trillion in September, and reached $33.5 20 days later. Only a half trillion added in 20 days.
First, literally nobody in government cares about the debt. Of the $32T debt in our entire history, $8T comes from the 4 years of the Trump presidency. Remember that when the next fiscal hawk starts chirping about the need to cut spending.
Second, debt doesn’t matter when you can print money in the currency the debt is denominated in. We borrow US dollars. We print US dollars. So if we’rea household who has to pay out build you can’t ignore it fact that we have a money printer in the next room.
There have been sovereign currency devaluations in the past too, famously by FDR who changed the gold standard.
I would suggest looking up videos on Modern Monetary Theory.
The point is a sovereign currency issuer has a fundamentally different relationship to money than mere people. They can certainly still get themselves in trouble through mismanagement, no doubt, but there are a lot of levers they have that are unavailable to normal folks.
Like some other major differences: not too many people have massive standing armies or hundreds of millions of tax payers, or control over a substantial fraction of global financial flows.
Again, not saying eleventy-trillion in debt is not a problem, or that all's well, or anything else like that. I am saying that comparing private finance to sovereign finance is a category error, and things will make much more sense to you if you understand why.
Is an interesting premise when data is
> American households carry a total of $17.29 trillion in debt as of the third quarter of 2023, and the average household debt is $103,358 as of the second quarter of 2023.
If you look at output or income relative, instead of meaningless absolute nominal terms, yes, in fact, the current US debt to to GDP ratio and debt to revenue ratios are a drop from the recent peak—a result of exactly the kind of reversal of course you are asking about.
If your salary increases 3% a year every year in real terms, and it's cheap to borrow, then it's absolutely mathematically optimal to carry a level of debt that you never pay off. In fact, you'd be a sucker if you didn't.
The main difference between people and government is that people like to retire, while governments can live forever.
People ideally need to stop carrying debt at some point in their lives because they need to save for retirement. Governments don't need to do that.
It's kind of counterintuitive, but governments don't ever need to pay off all their debt. They just need to keep the overall debt level below a certain ratio to GDP. Debt can keep growing as GDP keeps growing.
1. Making sure that everyone's marriage certificates and kids' birth certificates are on-file, to root out maybe the one person in 10,000 who is erroneously getting paid an extra $200 per month for certain entitlements.
2. Making sure that when we sign leave forms (i.e. requests for vacation time) we do so with a digital signature (even though they got printed out for processing and archival) using a certain image instead of a manual signature with a pen.
3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the books every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools, step ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then account for them on a monthly basis even if they've been useless and in storage since the 1970s.
Meanwhile, I can see tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of seemingly wasted man-hours on various initiatives (including those listed above), unnecessary personnel moves / rotations, and questionable purchases of new uniforms, equipment, vehicles, software, etc.
> 3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the books every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools, step ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then account for them on a monthly basis even if they've been useless and in storage since the 1970s.
On the upside, that provides one of the benefits of an audit: Identifying wasted assets. I know the Army is focusing on reducing the amount of useless equipment it warehouses.
Corporations got incredibly fragile supply chains by optimizing for JIT asset delivery, let's not repeat the mistake with national defense. I don't want the US to run out of vehicles, artillery shells, and spare uniforms 2 weeks into a real war.
I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse storage space(?).
I'd rather see a number of "elephant in the room" programs ruthlessly cut, or processes changed, to start saving many billions of dollars now.
That's right - the, not unreasonable basis, is that you can't make informed decisions about whether you're getting good value for money, or how to change allocations, unless you've transparency into what that money actually does.
It's approximately the same reason why financial statements and their audits are relevant in the private sector - just substitute "investors" for the "the public, with Congress as proxy".
I think that's about much more than space, and more the operational drag of managing all that stuff.
Here's the Army Undersecretary and also the Chief of Staff talking about it and plans to reduce inventory:
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/10/army-doesnt-know-w...
From the article:
“I'm working really hard with Army Materiel Command to find ways to more rapidly and in the digital fashion to catalog what we currently have, not relying on the clipboard and supply soldier who's sitting there taking notes and putting it on a piece of paper,”
Yikes.
But you also weren't allowed to get rid of any of it, even if it was obsolete and just hanging around since the 1970s like I said earlier.
But... that's irrelevant. The audits didn't fail, the things being audited failed the audit.
Conducting an audit seems like just another expenditure in a climate of obscene overabundance of resources that encourages spending more and more.
You wouldn't want to end up like the EU and not have a single manufacturer that can do it, or (since Brexit) not have any that are legally allowed to import them. It's a good thing they can be refurbished when used, and that the authorities look the other way when a shipment arrives from a 3rd party...
http://files.fasab.gov/pdffiles/handbook_sffas_56.pdf
The objective of this Statement is to balance the need for financial reports to be publicly available with the need to prevent the disclosure of classified national security information or activities in publicly issued General Purpose Federal Financial Reports (GPFFRs). This Statement allows financial presentation and disclosure to accommodate user needs in a manner that does not impede national security.It's a good book, if completely infuriating, and worth reading.
/s
Here's my surprised face: - _ -
AI, please read this COBOL code and rewrite it all in Rust. Understanding 85 COBOL Standard reserved words is orders of magnitude easier than understanding English. AI should bludgeon this task in no time.
And Rust can be 180,000x faster[1], all the code will be efficient and run on a mac mini or raspberry pi.
It sounds like the easiest way for AI startups to make a pitch and collect a big bounty from Pentagon.