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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm incredibly naive, and there's no political will to actually make the system work.

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?

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This is what they’re doing (“incremental progress” as they say). The issue is the scale of the system.

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 By the time you implement the solution, you’re 3 years out of date.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?!”

>I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are pretty much perfect.

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.

There's no political will to actually make the system work because the system is working perfectly fine for those in charge.

Divide and conquer actually does seem to be the strategy. Each department within the DoD does its own audit, and a few of those departments actually have passed. But most of them have failed with a few still ongoing.

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.

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