When this administration is gone I think we need to have a new class of systems that do not allow this type of incompetence.
I have been working on this https://opm.dev/programs - its obviously not something that can get funding or will be a huge popular thing but it has been incredibly fun and i have gotten to learn a lot about Gov., agents EVAL's etc..
Note: This is one of 5 portals, same codebase mostly but the others are more developed and a few have some programs that have a 90+ % success rate.
Note: Here https://big-sandy-usp.bop.doj.dev/program/66366-sick-call is a much more developed example program that has been completed 6 times by inmates at Big Sandy. Super proud of this since I was locked up w/ 2 of the guys and dont know the other 4.
having worked in govt tech for 15+ years...incompetence is and always has been a huge thing...its not always the vendors that are at fault, many times there are poorly written contacts, or ineffective employees and managers that stop vendors from doing their jobs, I've seen it go all sorts of ways over and over. I wish there was one singular administration to blame..but its a systemic issue
This sort of thing was only worse in the past and IMO this admin has actually made the largest inroads to resolving this issue which tbh lies primarily in procurement (RFO, FR20x, PA, mandates for automation, shift to COTS, etc). With any luck this will get recompeted
Project 20x looks pretty cool, we're in a similar space and there's probably a ~2y horizon to fix things before the bureaucracy falls to consultocracy. FWIW if you or anyone else building in gov need funding to get stuff off the ground there are plenty of DC-based VCs that are phenomenal, mission oriented and take big swings like this all the time.
I made a mistake, i assumed that this admin was the crux of the issue and I was wrong. I looked into what you said here and I want to thank you. Moving forward I will not make this mistake.
TY for taking a look, right now I am digitizing all of the federal gov programs and all of the state gov programs, I would really love to connect with anyone just to talk, learn, show them what i'm doing etc...
Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to take a look and comment. It really means a lot. Gov Tech is not "sexy" part of tech where people flock and love to engage.
The portals of all Romanian authorities are built under the same corruption.fueled incompetence. The national land register is already down for ONE MONTH without identifiable recoveries and backups because of a hacker attack, so the US is not that bad (yet).
President Clinton tried to improve government contracting through various legislation and executive orders. One of the first things President W Bush did when he got into office was to sign an executive order that effectively negated most of the changes, particularly the one regarding "black listing" contractors who have a history of ripping off the government. The administration's response: the "black listed" contractors have improved; they promise not to rip off the government anymore. Then the Iraq War started and government contractors made billions with basically no oversight. And we all know how that went.
It seems like there has been a real back and forth that really does not benefit anybody. My approach is probably not going to work but I have been able to see real results e.g.: Getting people housed, helping with medical cases etc.. and I think thats because I did it as a true total outsider. I really think the fix here has to come from a group of people that just want to see things get better for everyone and I am not sure if that is something that the "frontier labs" or FANG's really embrace.
Medicare, DHS, DOJ - these systems are not actually that complex; taking a first principals approach; they are really just complex multi party workflows that need to follow policy based on jurisdiction etc... All of the back and forth you describe above is a distraction that has stopped people from just doing the thing but I have found that it is possible to just do the thing. Especially since its all documented so well, you can use AI to translate legislation into specs fairly easily.
The author was involved and knowledgeable in the FOIA processes that existed, and had an understanding of navigating a quagmire of redundant government employees. A cost-reducing restructuring has been going on that seems to funnel all requests to a single place, the "Federal FOIA Portal". Once they submitted to the portal, their request was confirmed as entered. They also had an issue with the new portal, submitted the error, and it was escalated and fixed.
This article could just as well been written as "New FOIA Portal: Streamlined, but Still a Few Bumps".
> At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, over 1,600 FOIA requests were still in OPM’s backlog, seven times more than at the end of fiscal year 2024. The average processing time for a simple request at the agency slipped to over 84 days — twice as long as the year before.
I don't know how it is in the US, but in Argentina, if anyone thinks they can do better, they can compete in the public tender when this contract renews. And potentially, you can impugn the incumbent's offer alleging they have failed to comply with the contract and therefore they have demonstrated they don't have the capacity to comply with the requirements in the future.
Fwiw, the US public tender process is probably 10 times better and more mature than the Argentina process, so I don't doubt this avenue and many more are available to compete.
I don't know about this particular case, but often the tender process itself is the reason that there's no meaningful competition for these contracts. There are only a handful of companies that can realistically compete for certain types of contracts given the complexity of managing the bidding, certification, etc., and so they get most of the contracts even if they are not something they can actually accomplish, then turn around and rent some bodies from another shop that specializes in providing government-approved contract workers to do the actual work. You can imagine how disconnected the actual bids, deliverables agreements, etc. are when there are two entire private bureaucracies between even the government project manager -- themselves usually detached from the Federal workers who have to use whatever this process creates -- and the people doing the work.
Contracts sometimes have minimum bid clauses, where a minimum number of distinct entities need to bid for the contract to go through. We have lost projects before because no one else bid them. Which sounds dumb, but I suppose the idea is to keep some competition.
B) is easy to fix, apply for it, if you don't you have little recourse.
A) Are you sure? In my country I see a lot that are merit based. Where the evaluation takes into account the total value provided. So for example a SaaS solution that costs 10K per month may be ranked lower than a HW based solution that costs 15K per month but provides permanent licenses and hardware.
In any case, if you can argue the lower bid doesn't or cannot comply with ANY of the requirements, you may be able to impugn their bid.
B is absolutely not easy to fix, if the government does not offer the bid for public application, and pre-selects the one bidder that they plan to award the contact to, and only invites that one contractor to submit a bid.
I think that you have a naive view of the level of corruption at play in this country. This is how you end up with an incompetent swimming pool contractor destroying a national monument for profit. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/company-trump-donor-cafaro-refl...
Even if they pretend the bid is open, they will write the contract requirements in such specific detail that only a single (unofficially pre-selected) vendor can feasibly bid on it.
Contracting policy/regulation is an area that accumulates the worst tendencies of government rulemaking:
1. Corruption results in hyper-specific rules being advanced.
2. It's very difficult to un-do regulation without replacing it, so rules often stay in place broadly even when whoever wanted them isn't competing in a sector.
3. Executive political initiatives that have public attention but aren't considered worth the squeeze of turning into policy often turn into "do something, anything" OMB memos that add endless specificity to contracting regs, just like the paper straws thing (but hey, they did something, anything in service to the cause of environmentalism, right? ...right?).
4. For specialist contractors (e.g. software, nuclear power, so on) the people writing the contracting regulations or reqs are often so out of touch with the specialist field that the results are nonsense.
5. Even when rulemakers/COs are trying to do the right thing, they're so overworked and under-specialized that they have a huge incentive to pick the devil they know (contractors with prior engagement history, even if their results are poor). As a result, sometimes a bid that clearly requires qualifications only possessed by one company in existence wasn't even written for corrupt reasons: it was written because that's the quickest way to get a known quantity to work. Repeat that enough, though, and you have a system guaranteed to produce poor results.
6. Both parties tend to add to the regulatory "stack" that makes finding qualified contractors quickly hard. Democrats tend to add regulation, which slows the process down for everyone. Republicans tend to try to remove regulation, but effectively often move the complexity elsewhere.
7. Even when regulatory reform really does reduce the barriers to entry, pre-existing federal decisionmakers are still around. Some of those people will make the same well-intentioned bad decisions out of overwork/missing expertise that they did before. A lot more will make bad decisions based on where they want to work after government. The number of people that will take advantage of deregulation/reform and produce notably better results than before is small.
8. The timelines (of contracting and evaluating results) are long enough that there'll likely be a reversal of the regulatory/partisan cycle before anyone can get data saying that a given regulatory effort helped or harmed government effectiveness. For example, DOGE's cost cutting program was a disaster from the start, but even if it had been executed well it would have failed in the same way and on the same timeframe. I would know.
9. Even when data about what works/what doesn't is available, contracting regulation and performance is incredibly uninteresting to the general public. So electeds and high-ranking feds tend not to prioritize it over the other million things they could fight for. Sure, the public loves when the government spends less money, but they glaze over when it comes to the "how" (and the elephants in the room cost so much that incremental efficiency improvements have bad optics).
10. Different agencies have different contracting practices, usually multiple generations/iterations of those. Government-wide, many people have introduced reforms/uniform or streamlined "universal processes" to secure better contractors faster. That did help somewhat, but it also harmed a lahttps://xkcd.com/927/
When this administration is gone I think we need to have a new class of systems that do not allow this type of incompetence.
I have been working on this https://opm.dev/programs - its obviously not something that can get funding or will be a huge popular thing but it has been incredibly fun and i have gotten to learn a lot about Gov., agents EVAL's etc..
Note: This is one of 5 portals, same codebase mostly but the others are more developed and a few have some programs that have a 90+ % success rate.
Note: Here https://big-sandy-usp.bop.doj.dev/program/66366-sick-call is a much more developed example program that has been completed 6 times by inmates at Big Sandy. Super proud of this since I was locked up w/ 2 of the guys and dont know the other 4.
having worked in govt tech for 15+ years...incompetence is and always has been a huge thing...its not always the vendors that are at fault, many times there are poorly written contacts, or ineffective employees and managers that stop vendors from doing their jobs, I've seen it go all sorts of ways over and over. I wish there was one singular administration to blame..but its a systemic issue
This sort of thing was only worse in the past and IMO this admin has actually made the largest inroads to resolving this issue which tbh lies primarily in procurement (RFO, FR20x, PA, mandates for automation, shift to COTS, etc). With any luck this will get recompeted
Project 20x looks pretty cool, we're in a similar space and there's probably a ~2y horizon to fix things before the bureaucracy falls to consultocracy. FWIW if you or anyone else building in gov need funding to get stuff off the ground there are plenty of DC-based VCs that are phenomenal, mission oriented and take big swings like this all the time.
I made a mistake, i assumed that this admin was the crux of the issue and I was wrong. I looked into what you said here and I want to thank you. Moving forward I will not make this mistake.
TY for taking a look, right now I am digitizing all of the federal gov programs and all of the state gov programs, I would really love to connect with anyone just to talk, learn, show them what i'm doing etc...
Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to take a look and comment. It really means a lot. Gov Tech is not "sexy" part of tech where people flock and love to engage.
The portals of all Romanian authorities are built under the same corruption.fueled incompetence. The national land register is already down for ONE MONTH without identifiable recoveries and backups because of a hacker attack, so the US is not that bad (yet).
President Clinton tried to improve government contracting through various legislation and executive orders. One of the first things President W Bush did when he got into office was to sign an executive order that effectively negated most of the changes, particularly the one regarding "black listing" contractors who have a history of ripping off the government. The administration's response: the "black listed" contractors have improved; they promise not to rip off the government anymore. Then the Iraq War started and government contractors made billions with basically no oversight. And we all know how that went.
It seems like there has been a real back and forth that really does not benefit anybody. My approach is probably not going to work but I have been able to see real results e.g.: Getting people housed, helping with medical cases etc.. and I think thats because I did it as a true total outsider. I really think the fix here has to come from a group of people that just want to see things get better for everyone and I am not sure if that is something that the "frontier labs" or FANG's really embrace.
Medicare, DHS, DOJ - these systems are not actually that complex; taking a first principals approach; they are really just complex multi party workflows that need to follow policy based on jurisdiction etc... All of the back and forth you describe above is a distraction that has stopped people from just doing the thing but I have found that it is possible to just do the thing. Especially since its all documented so well, you can use AI to translate legislation into specs fairly easily.
The author was involved and knowledgeable in the FOIA processes that existed, and had an understanding of navigating a quagmire of redundant government employees. A cost-reducing restructuring has been going on that seems to funnel all requests to a single place, the "Federal FOIA Portal". Once they submitted to the portal, their request was confirmed as entered. They also had an issue with the new portal, submitted the error, and it was escalated and fixed.
This article could just as well been written as "New FOIA Portal: Streamlined, but Still a Few Bumps".
> At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, over 1,600 FOIA requests were still in OPM’s backlog, seven times more than at the end of fiscal year 2024. The average processing time for a simple request at the agency slipped to over 84 days — twice as long as the year before.
Efficiency manifest.
I don't know how it is in the US, but in Argentina, if anyone thinks they can do better, they can compete in the public tender when this contract renews. And potentially, you can impugn the incumbent's offer alleging they have failed to comply with the contract and therefore they have demonstrated they don't have the capacity to comply with the requirements in the future.
Fwiw, the US public tender process is probably 10 times better and more mature than the Argentina process, so I don't doubt this avenue and many more are available to compete.
I don't know about this particular case, but often the tender process itself is the reason that there's no meaningful competition for these contracts. There are only a handful of companies that can realistically compete for certain types of contracts given the complexity of managing the bidding, certification, etc., and so they get most of the contracts even if they are not something they can actually accomplish, then turn around and rent some bodies from another shop that specializes in providing government-approved contract workers to do the actual work. You can imagine how disconnected the actual bids, deliverables agreements, etc. are when there are two entire private bureaucracies between even the government project manager -- themselves usually detached from the Federal workers who have to use whatever this process creates -- and the people doing the work.
Contracts sometimes have minimum bid clauses, where a minimum number of distinct entities need to bid for the contract to go through. We have lost projects before because no one else bid them. Which sounds dumb, but I suppose the idea is to keep some competition.
Unfortunately tons of US gov contracts a) are lowest bid and b) only have one applicant
B) is easy to fix, apply for it, if you don't you have little recourse.
A) Are you sure? In my country I see a lot that are merit based. Where the evaluation takes into account the total value provided. So for example a SaaS solution that costs 10K per month may be ranked lower than a HW based solution that costs 15K per month but provides permanent licenses and hardware.
In any case, if you can argue the lower bid doesn't or cannot comply with ANY of the requirements, you may be able to impugn their bid.
B is absolutely not easy to fix, if the government does not offer the bid for public application, and pre-selects the one bidder that they plan to award the contact to, and only invites that one contractor to submit a bid.
I think that you have a naive view of the level of corruption at play in this country. This is how you end up with an incompetent swimming pool contractor destroying a national monument for profit. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/company-trump-donor-cafaro-refl...
Even if they pretend the bid is open, they will write the contract requirements in such specific detail that only a single (unofficially pre-selected) vendor can feasibly bid on it.
Even if it's better than Argentina's, it's still not good: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/grasping-at-paper-straws
Contracting policy/regulation is an area that accumulates the worst tendencies of government rulemaking:
1. Corruption results in hyper-specific rules being advanced.
2. It's very difficult to un-do regulation without replacing it, so rules often stay in place broadly even when whoever wanted them isn't competing in a sector.
3. Executive political initiatives that have public attention but aren't considered worth the squeeze of turning into policy often turn into "do something, anything" OMB memos that add endless specificity to contracting regs, just like the paper straws thing (but hey, they did something, anything in service to the cause of environmentalism, right? ...right?).
4. For specialist contractors (e.g. software, nuclear power, so on) the people writing the contracting regulations or reqs are often so out of touch with the specialist field that the results are nonsense.
5. Even when rulemakers/COs are trying to do the right thing, they're so overworked and under-specialized that they have a huge incentive to pick the devil they know (contractors with prior engagement history, even if their results are poor). As a result, sometimes a bid that clearly requires qualifications only possessed by one company in existence wasn't even written for corrupt reasons: it was written because that's the quickest way to get a known quantity to work. Repeat that enough, though, and you have a system guaranteed to produce poor results.
6. Both parties tend to add to the regulatory "stack" that makes finding qualified contractors quickly hard. Democrats tend to add regulation, which slows the process down for everyone. Republicans tend to try to remove regulation, but effectively often move the complexity elsewhere.
7. Even when regulatory reform really does reduce the barriers to entry, pre-existing federal decisionmakers are still around. Some of those people will make the same well-intentioned bad decisions out of overwork/missing expertise that they did before. A lot more will make bad decisions based on where they want to work after government. The number of people that will take advantage of deregulation/reform and produce notably better results than before is small.
8. The timelines (of contracting and evaluating results) are long enough that there'll likely be a reversal of the regulatory/partisan cycle before anyone can get data saying that a given regulatory effort helped or harmed government effectiveness. For example, DOGE's cost cutting program was a disaster from the start, but even if it had been executed well it would have failed in the same way and on the same timeframe. I would know.
9. Even when data about what works/what doesn't is available, contracting regulation and performance is incredibly uninteresting to the general public. So electeds and high-ranking feds tend not to prioritize it over the other million things they could fight for. Sure, the public loves when the government spends less money, but they glaze over when it comes to the "how" (and the elephants in the room cost so much that incremental efficiency improvements have bad optics).
10. Different agencies have different contracting practices, usually multiple generations/iterations of those. Government-wide, many people have introduced reforms/uniform or streamlined "universal processes" to secure better contractors faster. That did help somewhat, but it also harmed a la https://xkcd.com/927/