Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA to replace some people who've recently left.
He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from people who are substantially lying about their experience and maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he wasn't from an approved source.
His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get herself hired as a consultant.
Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may have inaccuracies in this story.
Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.
All fine and dandy until one realizes that the pentagon's budget is measured in the trillions, and this sort of deal probably doesn't even deal with mission critical stuff.
That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt our national security readiness.
It's interesting reading conversations in this thread. Everyone wants government to hire competent individuals. Yet, when it comes to a personal choice, the very same individuals decline the lower compensation.
Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land, sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in government spending that's needed to pay for those higher salaries.
It's classic cognitive dissonance in full effect leading to a tragedy of the commons. It goes to show that tech folks are no different from regular (DEI, MAGA, other) people.
Good riddance, and hopefully they won't be missed. Here in Canada these consultants are just leeches who suck up all the tax dollars which could actually be used for something useful.
The big 3 get hired to protect managers. Hire a smaller consulting firm and the project goes sideways you both get fired. Hire a big firm and it goes sideways they get fired - until the next project.
Finally they actually cut something that should be cut.
It probably did not need DOGE to find out that these contracts where overpriced ;-)
What were these contracts for?
Networking or day to day software/application maintenance? I get they were probably bloated (I did work for a defense contractor at one point) but presumably they were doing something. I mean isn’t Deloitte a accounting firm?
I’m a little worried about the “stand down” attitude against cyber attacks.
This is where I would expect there to be a lot of waste in government budgets. Unfortunately, there are very little incentives for the work coming out of these types of contracts to build process/technology to automate themselves out of billions of dollars. We are stuck between limitations of government civilian workforce (pay/politics) and overpaying companies for work that generally can be a lot cheaper with a career employee.
Great, but it doesn’t matter too much as they’ll still vote in an increased budget that adds more debt. How about we raise taxes a bit and stop spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have each year.
I used to work at Avanade (a sister company of Accenture and Microsoft). They hired new grads and pushed them onto client projects. They live on big companies incompetence.
I'm in favor of getting consulting firms out of government, but I suspect they'll end up having to pay out these contracts while no longer getting what they were paying for, so this is likely a net lose for tax payers.
Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near DC for 50k/yr.
I thought the interesting thing was this quote from Hegseth:
> The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth said in the memo released late on Thursday.
I obviously don't know the details of these specific contracts, but the general sentiment that qualified federal employees can do better than overpriced private contractors is something I agree with, at least in broad brushstrokes.
But, that said, this would appear to be in direct opposition to DOGE and the Project 2025 playbook - here is a recent article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-pr....
This is why I hate what DOGE is doing. I could definitely get behind a coherent effort to streamline the federal government and save money - BTW, this was done rather successfully by Clinton and Gore in the 90s, who eliminated a huge portion of the federal workforce, they just didn't go on stage with chainsaws to promote it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv.... But now it's just "throwing bombs", and the overt corruption of the administration leaves me little faith that government will actually become more efficient with this current kakistocracy.
These guys are massive scammers, I worked with them over multiple projects and the only thing I remember is by the end of each one, everyone was memeing on them for how poorly made everything they did was.
Not sure why this really matters a ton if they announced a 100+ billion pentagon budget increase.
they will probably announce a new $5B contract with Palantir next week
What exactly do these two people do.
The marketing BS on their websites say alot of generic, motivational crack.
Could someone help me break down the real bread & butter of these firms and why people give them money?
Good. Government contractors usually overcharge the government and then the contractors don't do much all day. It'd be cheaper to hire internally or pick cheaper contractors. Lot's of documented fraud, waste and abuse with government contractors.
Having worked for a government contractor, I decided that the government was using the Charlie Sheen principle: not paying them to come around, but paying them to go away. I have no idea what they billed us for to the government, but I doubt we were getting paychecks equivalent to what the government folk we dealt with got. (To say nothing of benefits.) But I assume that it was far easier to let contractors go.
Actually, the friction of hiring and placing made it relatively hard to let contractors go other than through downsizing. People showed up drunk or stoned, and hung on for a month or two.
I was sitting with a D.C. lobbyist at a function dinner. Lawyer at a prominent lobbying law firm. Random seat assignments. He gets a call on his cellphone. After the call he has a shit-eating grin on his face. Tells me Biden just signed student loan forgiveness. He had lobbied on behalf of the banks that had given the loans to the students (and students weren't paying them back).
I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly.
Accenture and Deloitte pay a lot of money to lobbyists for these Pentagon contracts. After the dust has settled, they'll still get juicy contracts. We will all forget that any of this happened.
So, realistically speaking, we've seen lots of corruption protections stripped away in parts of the federal government - SEC to stop prosecuting things, Inspector Generals fired, loyalty pledges, etc.
Who would need to be on board with changes in the Pentagon to strip away protections there? I'd assume it's quite a bit more insular than other parts of the federal government.
I have first hand knowledge with large consultant companies, they are largely sales teams with minimal IT knowledge. I had to help a one of their overseas "senior cloud professional" that had issues even understanding how to navigate the cloud UI.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It's kind of amazing to me how much USGov business Accenture continued to soak up after the misfired start of healthcare.gov. Their core competency is pretty clearly acquiring contracts, not fulfilling them.
Is this like in Eastern Europe/Balkans, like when someone new comes to power they terminate the contracts(aka the grifts) signed by the previous regime, so they can give them to their own friends instead, then rinse and repeat at the next election cycle?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-hegseth-reveal-whoppi...
Trump, Hegseth reveal whopping figure they want for the next Pentagon budget $1T budget would be a 12% boost over current levels
I wonder how many of them was doing important stuff (defending vs Russian ans other foreign actors).
I understand the sentiment that quality of consultants ia very low.
Waste or not, I don't think two companies should have $5.1B government contracts.
Although I think neither that or waste is the reason for termination.
In some departments (say Social Security) they want to switch from in-house staff to contractors, and in others they want to switch from contractors to in-house staff?
The US government has been moving to privatized contractors in most of it's work for some time, across many administrations and both parties.
Based on what I know of Trump, I'd have expected that to continue. Maybe it is everywhere except for special treatment for DoD? Or maybe this is just a fake and it won't be this way for DoD either. I don't have much idea what is going on.
I always like to recommend the book When McKinsey Comes to Town in any post about Management Consulting
I'm happy with this, but cynical enough to expect $5.1B to turn into $10.2B for Palantir, X
This is a big loss for India, it's like 15:1 India- vs. US-based "consultants."
How can you just terminate a contract? What clause are they invoking to terminate it?
I signed up for linkedin with my Mobile number.
I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field to login.
That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run by medicore people at this point
Not to be a cynic, but I bet all this means is that Republican campaign contributions from Deloitte and Accenture will be down and Democratic contributions will go up and new contracts will be awarded in the future so that the wealth class (won't someone think of the poor shareholders) can continue to steal your money.
Fantastic! This is great news. Clean up the waste!
Gemini 2.5 DeepResearch new Pentagon consultant.
Finally a budget cut I can actually celebrate.
This might be the only smart "waste cutting" that the government has done so far.
Ideally, there would be a Digital Services government department, staffed with properly compensated people (to attract good quality talent) that the other government agencies would "contract" to build their services, rather than paying through the nose to Deloitte (who then offshores most of the work anyway). Then maintaining the services could be done by the contracting gov agency once completed (with support from DSA).
Oh wait, we had a Digital Services, the USDS, and they built some pretty good stuff too. Could have been a model for other work. Except that they just got gutted and taken over by DOGE goons. Wonderful.
This is going to devastate the DC area. Most of my friends work for one of the big IT contractors. It's a great gig if you can get it, very nice compensation and not a lot of responsibility. The first rule of government contracting has always been why buy something when you can buy it for three times the price. As a result these firms have become quite massive in their size and billings. This is going to cause a major overturn in people living in the DC region, and overall incomes. I would say perhaps, perhaps, it's the equivalent of a very large company leaving Silicon Valley.
Well, there goes the whole economy.
A lot of these jobs require clearance. Who can get such clearances? People with less history. So, young college graduates, young army folks, etc. There are tons of people who just have security clearances without competence. There is a huge demand for people who hold clearances. I have no problem with "make work" programs; however, these large companies are grifting 100% on top of what these people get paid.
While there's almost certainly a good amount of waste in these consulting contracts, there's also a strong possibility that these cuts were done without a clear sense of what would be lost without them.
But hey, I suppose sometimes we just deem projects too big and messy to comprehend, so we just toss it all and start over. It rarely turns out as nice or easy as we thought it would be.
until they have a $1mil dinner with Trump
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We know damn well all these stories will do is trigger "muh Trump" and "muh Elon" responses. Especially from non-Americans who have no idea how their own government works or what it's doing.
Elon is taking over! https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/5e0e6ea/2147483647/str...
Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the private sector except the most dire circumstances.