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Comment by jgalt212 | Hacker News Reader

Joe Lonsdale was on CNBC talking his book (long Palantir) the other day in the context of DoD cuts. He was confident that DoD would buy more from Palantir and other new contractors (e.g. Anduril), and DOGE would continue to cut the fat.

All of that may or may not be true, but the wrinkle not addressed is the vibes between Musk and Thiel.

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I saw someone point out that DOGE has so far been masterful at making its detractors point for them — DOGE has shown that there's surprisingly less waste an inefficiency than anyone might have thought before.

Well, not “anyone”. It was pretty well-studied and there weren’t good reasons to believe there were extreme levels of waste in government.

Anyone whose only reason for believing there was waste was because a talking head told them there was, sure.

Federal agencies pay over $65 billion to consultants each year. 98% of Booz Allen's revenues (~$11 billion) is from government consulting. I don't know what the threshold for "extreme waste" for you is, but that is a hell of a lot of money that consulting firms have been able to siphon from American taxpayers.

[1] - https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/doge-cost-cuts-zero-in-on-...

None of what you laid out actually explains why it is waste. Doing things costs money. The $65 billion spent on consultants could be providing $650 billion in value. I’m unable to read the full article linked but from the first two paragraphs it was not setting itself up for explaining why it’s waste either.

These people hear a big number going to a person they are told to hate and automatically think it's fraud and waste. Simply put, anything I don't agree with is bad and needs to be cut. That's the whole philosophy.

You didn't even address what we're getting for that money. Are we getting 65 billion worth of value? 100 billion? 20 billion?

1) I agree that it’d be a good idea to increase the federal workforce so we don’t rely on contractors so much.

2) Presumably not all of that was waste? Like screw consulting firms but presumably at least more-than-$0 of that is non-waste, and probably a fair amount of it.

3) Other sources make it clear some amount of the $65 billion is spread over multiple years (unclear exactly how it breaks down)

4) That’s the spending with the top-10 consulting firms across a large set of agencies? I’d have guessed it was higher.

If anything this is an argument for not outsourcing things to the private sector. If anything, we should grow the public sector and things become more efficient.

Which, to me, intuitively makes sense. More hops is more complexity is more friction is less efficiency.

Not to hold water for billionaires, but do you think that the U.S. government has the expertise to compete effectively with industry?

A decade ago, palantir was competing to win a contract for a system to compete directly with DCGS-A

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Common_Ground_Sy...

Read through this and it certainly paints a picture of our government spending a lot of money on a legacy tool that was less efficient. The army was trying to convert a system from 1991 to be “as easy to use as an iPad”. And the biggest complaint about palantir as a competitor is that is was “not sufficiently funded” to support a broader role.

Take a step back and I just don’t see how the Army can be expected to bring the UX of an iPad to the battlefield. That would be like asking Apple to send their SWEs to the trenches.

Consider the type of person who can acquire clearance so high that he’s trusted to program the war games. Personality-wise, this is not a lavish, profligate spender.

How much waste do you think is acceptable?

Would you like to make a guess now on how much will ultimately be saved by DOGE?

How about an amount that would cost more to find and eliminate than it would save?

It's also possible that some contracts and contractors are more wasteful than others. Perhaps Palantir delivers a lot of value, and insiders know there are much more effective places to make cuts.

Saw bits of that interview.

Lonsdale comes off as a ‘yes’ man for the wagon he’s hitched his fortunes to.

When in doubt, he’ll suggest tons of fraud, but offer no substance, and Sorkin just lets his guests speak.

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