The complete purpose the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity was allowed to rampage by means of the federal government was that it might save literal trillions in taxpayer cash. However for an entity supposedly set as much as root out fraud and waste, run by child IT geniuses, in some way the federal authorities is on observe to spend extra on IT contracts than ever earlier than.
Heckuva job, DOGEy.
Federal companies are set to spend $50 billion within the fourth quarter alone, with general IT spending pushing $130 billion for FY 2025, a $4 billion soar from the earlier 12 months. DOGE was actually created for “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.” The administration has insisted it was essential that DOGE’s tween fascists be granted entry to databases containing essentially the most delicate details about People, all within the title of value slicing.
“DOGE” by Time Campbell
Bear in mind when Elon Musk was boasting that DOGE was going to avoid wasting the taxpayers $2 trillion? After which possibly it was going to be $150 billion? At finest, DOGE possibly saved the federal government $1.4 billion, a quantity that’s greater than offset by the price of DOGE itself, which in some way managed to burn by means of $21.7 billion in taxpayer {dollars} in simply six months.
One of the vital possible causes DOGE’s cost-cutting spree didn’t end in authorities IT contracting taking a success is that the administration continues to spend extraordinarily freely with expertise firms, together with candy no-bid contracts. Peter Thiel’s Palantir has made out like a bandit, with the corporate’s authorities income up $370 million over this time final 12 months.
In July, Palantir scored a $10 billion contract with the U.S. Military that “establishes a comprehensive framework for the Army’s future software and data needs.” The Military stated the brand new settlement would consolidate current software program contracts and result in “significant cost efficiencies across mission-critical programs.”
So, in different phrases, Palantir is getting billions to do the issues DOGE stated it might do. So environment friendly!
The administration can be desirous to throw taxpayer cash on the Massive Tech firms which have proven such fealty to Trump. The Normal Providers Administration is touting how nice it’s that, quite than develop AI applied sciences in-house, your taxpayer {dollars} will as an alternative go to Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, in order that companies can combine crappy chatbots into their workflow or no matter.
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In case that wasn’t wasteful sufficient, the Division of Protection has awarded those self same three firms as much as $200 million every to assist warfighters and leverage expertise and a bunch of different buzzwords. Elon Musk’s xAI acquired the identical candy deal.
And let’s not neglect no-bid contracts value thousands and thousands to smaller expertise firms. The federal government gave Workday, which supplies cloud-based human assets platforms, a sole-source contract, saying solely Workday might meet the federal government’s wants. In fact, the Workplace of Personnel Administration already had a profitable in-house HR platform, however why would you need to use that when you could possibly pay a personal firm as an alternative? And naturally, it’s kinda bizarre to offer a sole-source contract to Workday as an alternative of open bidding when there are large firms, like ADP, that additionally present these providers.
In the meantime, whereas Trump is shoveling authorities money out the window to personal firms as quick as he can, we additionally get the privilege of paying top-dollar authorities salaries for the little DOGE creeps who stay within the authorities. Do you know that Edward “Big Balls” Coristine is making a minimum of $125,000 a 12 months to do no matter it’s he’s nonetheless doing?
It was by no means about slicing spending, and it was all the time about reworking tax {dollars} into personal earnings. And apparently it’s going to maintain getting costlier.
