Comment by supongo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supongo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a federal employee, working as a software engineer for the Department of Defense on embedded systems which are used on aircraft.

The first few months of DOGE were complete chaos. The senior executive service received conflicting information from one week to the next. Our operations were severely impacted without any benefit. We couldn't even go to test ranges for field testing.In addition to that, the five bullet points were a major security issue due to classification by aggregation.

Although DOGE is gone, we're still experiencing the fallout. There's more red tape than ever before. Everything requires multiple levels of approval - even ordering a replacement capacitor has to go up three levels of management. We're forced to bring defense contractors to our field tests because it's a fight to bring more than one federal employee, almost doubling the cost of any trip. It took half a year for us to even be allowed to mail equipment to various depots. Now, we're effectively forced to pay contractors for tasks we could do organically.

More privatization will drive up cost in the defense industry up significantly. I.E, an unnamed military contractor wants more than 5 million dollars for a line item breakdown for a quote they gave us.

> There's more red tape than ever before.

It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.

  Deployments of critical resources, such as tactical and specialized search and rescue teams, were delayed as a result of a budget restriction requiring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to approve every purchase, contract and grant over $100,000[1]

0: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition-policy/2025/06/ab...

1: https://archive.is/Ky7d5

Government doesn't turn a profit, so the only way to get more money and prestige in the government is to have a higher headcount under you and more power. A good way to get more power is to add a bunch of red tape and also to slow down all the processes so you need more people and thus require a higher headcount which makes your management more prestigious.

All the incentives line up that this will only get worse.

> It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.

This is EXACTLY what the PE firm did to my company after acquisition to "cut costs" and make numbers go up. I used to be able to sign off on my own purchase reqs up to $2000. That allowed me to easily acquire just about anything I needed and get my work done. Now I have to have EVERYTHING signed off on by upper management. As If I was an irresponsible spendthrift throwing money away on spare parts we actually needed. It's useless performative micromanagement by incompetent people. It's honestly insulting.

"Unnamed military contractors" should be forced into competitive bids. Ditch the favoritism and let any US corporation bid on it and including bidding on the jobs where you need 3 layers of management to buy a capacitor when done by government employees. You can go out and buy a $500 Ar-15 on the private market that's about as good as an M4/M16 the military is paying thousands for -- that's the result of an actually free market for M-16/Ar-15 and the same thing can be brought to the rest of defense contracting.

Correct. The majority of "DoD waste" goes into expensive, overpriced purchases.

DOGE villainized the average federal employee rather than addressing the true waste - overpaying Defense Contractors.

Not defending DOGE, but it should be noted that much of what DoD pays for when it buys weapons is not the weapons, but reliable weapons and the logistics of supporting them under combat conditions. The apparently inflated unit costs often are given without looking at what's actually included contractually in those costs. Sure, any citizen can buy an AR-15 for $500, but that citizen isn't paying for a support structure that has to be able to deliver ammo or spare parts or spare units in a combat zone in time of war. Nor is that citizen paying for the guarantee that the contractor will be able to continue to produce all those things in the necessary quantities in time of war. Nor is the citizen paying for reliability guarantees about the weapon working under adverse conditions.

It's unfortunate that the reporting around such things doesn't actually dig into all this, but just gives quick sound bites without any real analysis.

I should have been more specific. I understand the sustainment cost of weapon systems and the like - which, while still too costly, is partially justified.

I was referring to the inflated cost the DoD pays for everyday items. I.E, having to pay double or triple the market rate for things like office chairs, computer headsets, and WIFI dongles. There's no sustainment cost. Just an inflated price.

Even those items have to meet more stringent requirements for DoD than similar items bought by private companies or individuals.

Yo, probably the best way to push through that tape is to play with another DoD entity who pays for your trams travel while you pay for theirs.

This will get you around the contractor requirement and the red tape.

I work in a DoD innovation org at the staff ;-) if you have questions let me know.

What does your last sentence mean? That a contractor charges an additional $5 million to detail what the charges in their quote are for?

I apologize in advance for not giving exact numbers - I'd rather not tie my posts to specific programs in the unlikely case that someone I work with reads my posts.

We received a quote containing two lines:

"Hardware Cost - xx million" "Software Cost - xx million"

There was no further information. No detail on how those numbers were derived, nor what we were paying for other than the "hardware and software needed for organic sustainment of the system in question. The defense contractor wanted over 5 million for any additional detail. We wouldn't know whether we receive documentation, schematics, etc without paying additional money. I don't mean that they wanted us to pay more for things like documentation or schematics. We wouldn't know what we are receiving until we pay.

We were providing engineering support for a DoD Program Office which normally deals in multi-billion dollar acquisitions. They treated ~5 million as pocket change. Over multiple system acquisitions, that adds up fast.

Isn’t this what competition solves?

We live in a post-competition economy these days. Those on top don't believe in competition, and we all pay the price.

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