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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Oh, there was an RFP to award the contract? No? Then it's corruption.

Even with the proper contract awarding process, corruption is widespread.

Decisions made at lunches and then the contract award process skewed to award the correct person, at some insane markup over real market prices for the same service.

The process is unfixable. Instead we should just look at a teams total cost and total achievement every year, and if the money they've spent doesn't look good value for money, we give them a bad performance review and their government career will be tricky to repair.

That is a far stronger incentive to get the most out of taxpayer money than ever stricter, yet super easy to game, anti corruption measures.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work either. Contracting is risk adverse and tries to avoid legal battles at all costs so even bad reviews often get scrubbed and edited until they look glowing.

The risk adverse nature of the govt needs to be fixed before the incentives align.

Do any governments employ a competitive approach to awarding contracts that isn't winner-take-all? If there were a way to build an ATC system utilizing both Verizon and Starlink we might get the benefits of price competition and redundancy.

Yes. The US does this with some larger programs ("systems of systems") if the components are sufficiently distinct. An aircraft? Not so much. A comms system? Absolutely, if it's not sold as one complete system. For instance, radios might be contracted to multiple vendors with the intent to drive down cost.

It's not universally done, though. It depends on how the program office(s) involved decide to run things.

EDIT: To expand. Look at space systems. The ground stations are not tied to specific space systems (though some space systems develop their own ground networks), that is a separate program from the satellites and SOCs. There is no one "space program". And even for a particular satellite system the SOC may be under a separate contract vehicle than the satellite itself.

Isn't the logical way to do that for a contractor to make a bid intending to use multiple subcontractors to provide a better service than any one contractor could provide alone?

That is one way it's done, yes.

>An aircraft? Not so much.

NASA did this with the commercial crew program, awarding to both SpaceX and Boeing to reduce risk.

Right, that's similar to the radio example I gave (multiple vendors so that there was no single point of failure, it mitigated risk and, in theory, reduces cost by introducing competition). What I meant by aircraft though was that for a specific aircraft, it'll be run by a specific contractor for all or nearly all its subcomponents. Though there could be exceptions. See the way that heavies (cargo, AWACS, and the like) are given multiple missions and some of the mission specific components may be separate programs rather than executed by the prime for the aircraft. But you won't have the government contract for the engine and the airframe separately.

Though you also have that done for aircraft. The F-35 was selected among several aircraft that were being developed by various contractors as the one to move forward as the JSF. This is where the lifecycle of a program comes into play. In the R&D stages you'll see multiple options quite commonly because they want to compete different vendors. Eventually it whittles down to one for things like aircraft to move forward. Though, using the JSF as an example, maybe they should select multiple. LM were the geniuses that thought you could increase software productivity by hiring more programmers and having them work in shifts.

even conceding that, letting one guy decide it using executive power is problematic. And illegal

This doesn't matter. By definition, the premise "I will step aside if there's a conflict" is itself a conflict of interest.

Probably.

Given the systemic corruption elsewhere, I can’t summon anger about this until I can verify if the utility is necessary and uniquely provided by Starlink. If so, then this is just bad optics. If not, it should be aggressively fought.

If it were “uniquely provided” by Starlink, how do you think Verizon got the award?

Were they unable to fulfill the contract?

As I said, I don’t have the full context here.

It’s a 15 year contract awarded in 2023 so it may be too early to tell. The strongest public claims that Verizon isn’t capable comes from their competitor so those claims should probably be taken with a boulder of salt until more information is made available.

This has nothing to do with Verizon.

All these arguments (and this article) come from a place of ignorance)

Care to elaborate? I think the more salient issue is the contracting process, not any particular company.

Even with an RFP it can be corruption. The RFP can be written so that only a single specific vendor can deliver cost effectively.

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