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