"Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.
"
Except this happens anyway.
Much like patents, people just become better at drafting.
What is currently done is not an effective mechanism for stopping cronyism and corruption at all. In fact makes it easier in a lot of cases, because it provides plausible deniability (It's not that we gave it to our friend, it's that you didn't meet the requirements!)
Right. Of course there is. That’s not my point. My point is that, before accepting any applications, the administration likely already knows who they want to give this contract to. That entity will be capable of doing the work, of course, but there’s too much politics in $10B for it to be given solely on merits.
You can't be forced to actually work with the government. So if the governmeny makes it too much of a PITA, no one will bid or they will make the contract costs incredibly high.
Government contracting is heavily incentivized to privilege companies which have close ties to government officials. Have a look at the political scandals of the last 8 years in Brazil. Nearly all of them had to do with officials getting “favors” from companies in exchange for government investment and contracting deals.
As long as the government deals in the peoples’ money instead of suffering from its own choices, you cannot compare government contracting with the open market.
Many parts of federal gov contracting process is archaic and broken. It's a lowest bidder system where the game is so heavily influenced along the way. Many federal contracting officials who are the decision makers on these contracts go with friends or places they are seeking jobs and tailor the contracts towards those companies. This is all done being legally grey and without proper oversight its incredibly hard to prove and catch. For example, They tailor the contract so that the only company that can win it is their friends company.
This isn't accidental. Despite all the rules about fair awarding of contracts it's mostly ceremony: the government agents who draft it have a contractor or small set of them in mind when they draft the proposal. It's the same thing that happens when a hiring manager wants to bring a friend in: they'll write the job description such that only their friend qualifies, while wording it in such a way as to give some cover.
That's by design: it's built-in pass-the-blame with an extra helping of spreading the bacon around. Government contracting is little more than legal, officially sanctioned nepotism and graft. The whole point is to allow Congressmen and other connected government officials to enrich their friends and family. In turn, these officials get high-paying "jobs" at the same places they helped funnel lots of money to.
The people in these comments here on HN claiming that somehow that's "liberal government" at work don't know what they're talking about, at all, and I mean downvote-worthy, comically so. If we must label these antics with comparisons to American political ideologies, the government contracting system is closer to big-business, republican-style politics than anything else. Small-c-conservative and any-l-liberal are the last things I think of when I think of government contracting.
I find these government contracts completely immoral. The government could easily hire skilled people directly for a fraction of the price. These are always really just about lining the pockets of execs.
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