Dept of Health and Human Services spends $146 per month per user for email [pdf]
gao.gov
gao.gov
It is a multi-billion dollar world, with its own rules, players, business cycles, customers, marketing and so on. You get to use exciting technologies such as Window Vista (still XP up until not too long ago) and RHEL 4 and 5.
Could you explain why would they do that?
http://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/contracting...
"The Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) Federal Contract program authorizes contracting officers to set aside certain federal contracts for eligible women-owned small businesses."
They get preferential terms in many government contracts.
HHS told us that HHS pays $146.64 per month per user for e-mail; that this
charge covers connect ivity, storage, and other e-mail services; and that this
charge is independent of the number of e-mails that are sent or received. HHS
also told us that the Office of the Secretary pays $10.44 per month per
telephone line, that this charge covers all featu res associated with the
lines and the phones, and that this charge is independent of the number of
phone calls made per month. Each phone call, whether local or long distance,
is charged at a unit cost of $0.014 per minute.
Some governments have legal requirements for incoming official mail - whether on paper or electronic - to be printed off and stamped with the time and date, and manually entered into a journal and archived in multiple copies in separate locations for audit and open access purposes. Others may "just" require an electronic journal, but tend to still have very strict requirements on access, and particular security mechanisms to prevent modification of the journal.
Archival requirements can easily make up the vast majority of cost of processing mail if the rules are complicated enough.
Depending on the extent of "unusual" requirements like that, it may not be that bad. In any case, without more details about exactly what is included it's not very easy to assess whether or not the cost is unreasonable...
There just isn't much accountability with these things it's a HUGE problem. I don't know what the solution is.
Not have such a massive federal government that is always spending other people's money?
When people spend their own money, they often find much more efficient use of it.
I find the assumption that 'How much stuff the government is doing is proportionate to how much time each Senator has to act as a finder and remover of waste' as an assumption based on a normative view of what Senators should be doing in the Senate, rather than what their schedules would reveal.
This image of Senators is questionable, given what Senators actually do as part of their jobs (campaigning, meeting with lobbyists, reviewing poll data with advisors to refine their message and image). In terms of the priorities of politicians keeping their jobs and raising more money, I would estimate they probably have a much higher margin of return by campaigning, meeting with lobbyists, and reviewing poll data with their advisors than they do by going page by page through the federal register and legislation to find waste. Indeed, many if not most bills get passed without even a single Senator reading its contents in entirety.
Some Senators that claim fiscal responsibility as part of their Senatorial passions pay people to do this for them from time to time. But each little bit that has to change has to go through an enormously long process, so it's far easier to just focus on the hot button issue of the day that the party leadership can whip everyone (politicians and lobbyists included) into agreement on. Typically this never results in reduced government waste, but quite the opposite given the nature of the relationship between politicians and industry lobbies.
The problems with any given piece of legislation are clear as day, but given how much skin in the game the interest-groups and lobbyists each have in their own pet bills, there's little chance the current legislative modification apparatus could successfully change 50% of it within decades, even if the accumulation of waste stopped today.
Reducing the scope of government spending requires the flick of a pen. Reducing the scope of government inefficiency requires changing human nature.
Assistance programs and just like taxes, there are so many rules and requirements all because politicians use our money to reward those who do as they are told and those who don't, well there is a rule against supporting them or supporting them not as well.
In my experience, waste is a more or less inevitable consequence of large organisations, be they public or private. In both cases, the managers aren't paying out of their own pockets.
The success rate for external/contracted projects isn't actually as high as you'd want, but it's generally more politically acceptable for something like that to fail, plus the contractor absorbs some of the de-risking up front in evaluating the bid.
I'd prefer if government had more in-house projects rather than contracting, on the explicit assumption that some of the projects (even most of them!) would be failures -- I don't see a big problem with duplicated work at the early stages, then internal-to-government competition to find the best solution, then rolling it out.
A side benefit of this would be making GS employment more attractive to great people -- it already pays well, is very stable, has great EoE, etc. If I were a minority/female/etc. engineer, and I wanted a workplace with minimal discrimination, government would be a great place -- historically, it was one of the first major employers of black people in white-collar roles in the 1960s-1980s.
The other key area would be an increase in off-the-shelf products, vs. custom implementations, and focusing on off the shelf systems which are commodity. Government is actually quite efficient at purchasing certain classes of items -- GSA gets good prices for "anything someone in 1940 could explain". It just is bad at "systems", and IT in general.
That is a story about how sensible constructs drift apart over time. Splitting costs into line items is difficult and expensive. Sometimes it isn't worth the hassle. If the HHS overpaid for email but underpaid for something else, that is okay for now. Cost-effectiveness should be calculated on the aggregate for complex contracts.
Or perhaps it hadn't been worthwhile to revisit it?
With public agencies, big companies, medics and anyone associated with higher salaries comes one thing: consultants and service providers WILL bill you until a normal person's eyes would bleed. Only that in some spheres, a) decisionmakers don't worry about money and b) they don't worry about money even more when you fill them up with tasty buzzwords.
We charge two state governments ~$10k a month each for ~200 phone lines.
They both pay well over $25k/month for Internet - and it's about 50 5Mbps DSL lines, with capped usage.
This is today.
It comes in many flavors and fashions, and is easily recast in a different image.
Any high price for HHS mailboxes is related to the fact that there are several agencies with different rates (NIH, CDC, FDA, ACF, HRSA, etc are all part of the departmental umbrella of HHS) and some likely have different (and not as competitive) rates. My guess is that the rate quoted above is from one of the smaller agencies with a less competitively negotiated rate...but that's only an educated guess because if I knew the exact numbers I wouldn't comment on them publicly.
What's worth noting here though is that HHS is well aware of their costs, and if the procurement documents referenced above are any indication, then they are working to actively address this.
http://www.hhs.gov/grants/servicecontractsfy11.html
CSV (a few mb): http://www.hhs.gov/grants/hhsfy11scinventory-c.csv
http://www.hhs.gov/about/smallbusiness/smallbusiness/pdf/cms...
Edit: It looks like the 200 million is only for IT services for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid so HHS as a whole probably spends even more on IT.
Try getting a Govt contract or two !