Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

When presented with an issue that poses a real and present danger to the drinking water supply of citizens of this country your contribution is pearl clutching over notional mandates? To be clear, in your opinion "overstepping their mandate" is the bigger threat here? Here's a wild idea, how about we return to the concept of actual governance for the first time in a few decades and actually empower the EPA with both budget and enforcement rights to ensure that local and state run systems that our fellow citizens rely on aren't falling through the cracks?

View on HN

> ...your contribution is pearl clutching over notional mandates...

> Here's a wild idea, how about we return to the concept of actual governance for the first time in a few decades...

These two ideas are actually somewhat contradictory, I recommend picking one. You can't return to good governance by ignoring governance every time you think something needs to be done.

And you don't need the EPA to be involved to defend against these sort of risks. In fact, standardising the IT approach through the EPA will might increase the risk since any vulnerabilities will be more likely to be standardised. Highly heterogeneous systems are expensive and difficult to cripple. If an adversary wants to attack there is a single point of failure they can target - the EPA process.

> In fact, standardising the IT approach through the EPA will might increase the risk since any vulnerabilities will be more likely to be standardised. Highly heterogeneous systems are expensive and difficult to cripple.

This is not a safe assumption to make. As an example: Standardized patching programs are very basic and reduce a lot of this risk. Without them (or incentive/budget for them), it’s typical for most private and public orgs to end up with pretty bad security posture.

This is a known failure state that results in many known vulnerabilities that can be trivially exploited, regardless of how heterogeneous these various networks are.

Sadly, from what I’ve seen in the news and in various reports, I don’t think many regional organizations have the funding, expertise, or incentive to run effective security programs.

Clearly you need someone involved to defend against these sort of risks as they are demonstrably not being addressed currently. May as well involve the EPA, they already exist and water is already a thing they do. Given we're already discussing a diverse mix of insecure systems "heterogeneity" isn't much of a talking point. You're proposing local and state governments spend orders of magnitude more taxpayer money on duplication of effort. In a forum that generally favors efficiency this seems out of place.

They are being addressed. By the headline something like >90% of the US isn't affected.

If it was a more centralised system, there'd be a 90% chance it was all working and a 10% chance that the incompetent local officials were incompetent EPA officials instead, standardising everyone on insecure systems with nobody able to overrule them. It'd make a bad situation into an all-or-nothing gamble with substantially worse worst-case performance.

> You're proposing local and state governments spend orders of magnitude more taxpayer money on duplication of effort.

Doubt it. The expenses are going to be mostly capital and operating ones that can't be avoided.

10% of the us is like 30 million people.

Is 30 million people’s water being at risk in one of the richest countries on the planet a success? Is it even good enough?

Percentages like that aren’t as meaningful for government as they are for SaaS products.

> Doubt it. The expenses are going to be mostly capital and operating ones that can't be avoided.

This suggests to suspicion you've never worked in or with local or state government agencies and have spent zero time in a water treatment facility. I've done both so here's a couple of things that might help form a more robust picture of the situation:

1. These organizations are typically operating with budgets below the minimum requirements necessary to maintain the systems they're responsible for. This is why municipal bond initiatives are so common for water system maintenance and expansion projects.

2. Private contractors created this situation. Local and State government agencies contract out all of their IT projects and do not have personnel on staff capable of performing the work under discussion.

Point 1 isn't anything to do with economies of scale though - the municipal authorities could operate with an appropriate budget.

Point 2 is underdone, the question is basically should knowledge be in the private or public sector. Given that the private sector is generally more efficient than the public it seems a bit of an assertion to say that contracting out projects will decrease efficiencies. It could easily make the situation better. The US Federal government is absolutely known for being captured by contractors and consulting firms because it is a big, obvious & lucrative target and its bandwidth is completely overwhelmed to the point where very few people vote based on EPA policy. Odds are it'd be much more efficient to handle that at a lower level of government.

> This suggests to suspicion you've never worked in or with local or state government agencies and have spent zero time in a water treatment facility.

This is a silly point. I might as well ask "Are you one of the people who are managing water operators in the US incompetently?". If the debate is that the managers are clearly not up to the challenge, a lack of expertise is not a downside because the process the managers are using is being challenged.

I have had a lot of experience on the subject of organisational design. If you want better results, centralising into a single unaccountable bureaucracy isn't usually the way to get there. It is a bad strategy.

Private industry is even less accountable to the public than government agencies so that dog doesn't hunt.

How so? What accountability measures exist for the EPA that don't exist for the private sector?

I anticipate you saying voting, so I'll preemptively observe that voters can vote for the government to switch to a different private provider too. Voting doesn't lose any of its potency if the government uses contractors, although it runs into the same problem as always that the EPA is realistically never going to be high enough on the priority list to change an election's outcome.

There's many people who would reasonably disagree with a course like this, because there are no elected positions in the EPA.

The whole "overstepping their mandate" thing is perceived as a very real and present threat among MAGA people, for this reason specifically. This is the whole notion of "The Swamp" Trump was going to drain; unelected career bureaucrats.

That they would disagree isn't in question. That their position is reasonable is, however, very much up for debate. Career bureaucrats are literally the pool of experience and expertise that make government agencies function, to the extent that's possible given legislative hobbles. The only thing that gets drained when these people are replaced by elected officials or private industry is expertise and theoretically sane incentives.

It’s funny how it seems we care more about years of expertise for the engineers on our software teams than the people running government.

There’s a balance that needs to be struck between new blood with fresh perspectives and old guard with decades of experience navigating Washington politics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com