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Comment by Fede_V | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, this is a huge failing of large federally funded projects.

Contractors (and federal agencies too, to a large extent) have long since learned that the best way to get a big contract from the US government is to spread yourself out as much as you can, over as many districts as possible, in order to maximize your political pull.

Look at the supply chains of companies like Boeing, or defense contractors, and you'll see they have this down to an art.

This then leads to more and more entrenchment - there's less funding for truly innovative research because so much gets locked into those awful projects that are sacred cows and absolutely impossible to touch.

I don't really have a good solution. I strongly believe in federally funded research. Maybe something like the base closing commission should oversee all federal contracts?

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I'm not sure if its fair to blame contractors completely in this case. The government, their customer, defined requirements for a project. Halfway through the project with ~80% of funds committed they decided that they don't need it anymore.

The US does this all the time.

For example, the Navy LCS program called for a fast ship that could patrol the coastline while traveling as quickly as a speed boat. Lockheed Martin designed the Freedom Class. They made a 378ft, 3,000 ton boat that can travel at speeds of 47 knots, or about 54 MPH. However the Navy was not very happy because they concluded that it wasn't survivable enough and that its armament was lacking. These are all things that should have been well defined at the start of the project. Especially considering that the speed requirement practically begged designers to make certain compromises in order to limit weight.

Not completely in this case.

But, take Lockheed, for instance. They are notorious for running supply chains that stretch across as many states/districts as possible so that whenever there are any possible budget cuts, their lobbyists call up several congressmen and talk about how many jobs in their district will be lost if a particular program gets cut.

There are no evil people in this system. Lockheed is doing everything it can to insure that it gets the maximum possible amount of federal funding. Each congressman is doing whatever they can to keep well paying jobs in their district. People vote for congressmen who can bring high status projects into their district.

The problem is that the interplay between the narrow interests of each individual player results in a system that's constantly stuck in shitty local minima.

The evil in the system in Congress whose members use their power to reward and punish, through tax law, funding, and directing other agencies in the government to take actions not in their own best interest; namely the military though they still seem to want to run the Post Office.

You could say this evil is a behavior politicians at all levels exhibit, the focus on bettering their position than good law or exercise thereof. It isn't just Lockheed playing the system, unions get involved too, as do the political parties. Look at all big government boondoggles, Big Dig, the bid for high speed rail in California, and such.

> There are no evil people in this system.

Plenty of corruption though, I'd count corruption as an evil.

Oh, absolutely. I'm just saying, even if everyone was doing everything within the law, you'd still get suboptimal outcomes because of how the incentives line up for all the players involved.

Being impersonally evil to people who can never hold you to account is merely the lowest-effort kind of evil to be.

I agree that if our politicians had to actually walk up to people and physically steal their wallets in order to pursue their own interests, some of them would not be willing to do it unless they had bodyguards present, so their evil does have limits.

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