“The federal government funneled billions in subsidies to software vendors who overstated or deceived the government about what their products could do, according to whistleblowers.(LYDIA ZURAW/KHN)”
As a former DOD Employer I can assure you that EVERY freaking software solution was immediately identified by us (the user) as having flaws. When asked to comment on the issues we would issue pages of comments and suggestions. Upper management chose to believe the vendor who would basically blow off the issues with statements like “This will be addressed in a week or so after the software implementation date.” Then it was ignored or not fixed right.
Result was employees having to run both the old and the new software (which of course did not communicate with each other) and created more workload.
Saw it dozens of times.
Sorry “Employee” not “Employer”
Government contractors have specialization. One department does nothing but respond to RFPs with Proposals. They are totally separate from the Department of the same company that implements that contract if they win the contract vs the competitors.
Of course, many sub-contractors are involved also.
For a data warehouse My government shop started with RFIs and identified 23+ potential contractors for a $100 million contract. We narrowed it down to 16, then 13, then 9, 7 and 5 and finally 2 and the 1... the winner for $100 million.
Included in the bidders were 5 or 6 companies that had existing contracts to create part of the data that would go into the new data warehouse. Included in the bidders were the companies the managed the 3 existing data warehouses that we wanted merged into 1 data warehouse that was new and improved over the existing.
One company that was the #1 supplier of informatiion to the existing data warehouses and created and managed one of the data warehouses submitted a proposal that was the worst of the top 7. Whoever wrote that proposal was incompetent.
Yet I know some of the workers in the trenches for that company who are far more competent than was revealed in their proposal.
The company whose proposal ranked #2 in quality was written by someone who really understood what we needed and wanted. It was probably written by one of their small subcontractors as the prime contractor suggested a joint venture with several sub-contractors.
So the companies with the #1 and #2 Proposals were in a bakeoff for the winner and required to answer additional questions and clarifications. Whoever was assigned to write the response to the bakeoff for Company #2 was totally incompetent. Their answers were like those of a high school sophmore.
The result was that company that had the #1 proposal won the contract. It took years to go through the “Protest Period” where any of the 7 losers could protest the process, and the substance on any real or imagined grounds. Then for the lawyers for each side to draw up the contract fine print.
Remember, this is happening while the government is changing and contradicting itself with regulations.... and technology is rapidly changing.
So May 2018 the $100 million project actually started. The winner hired a total of about 100 people. As many as 75 on the project at any one time. The single largest group was natural born Americans. But there were significant numbers on naturalized citizens and non-citizens also. (I didn’t know everybody on the project well enough to know their status.)
8 of the top 10 leaders/bosses were natural born citizens. None of the top 10 had the slightest idea how to design and build the data warehouse. None of the 10 had been involved in writing the proposal. A couple of the 10 had been on the Colorado Project earlier but apparently were unable to learn from the mistakes made on that project.
From May 2018 to Aug 2019 we tried to get the winning bidder to get it together and start designing and building the data warehouse. After 15 or 16 months we gave up and cancelled the contract.
Nobody broke the law. Nobody can go to jail. Incompetence is not illegal.
(PS of the 100 people hired there may have been 5 or 6 down in the trenches who actually were competent. But leadership did not listen to them and bluntly told them that they were not leadership and their comments not welcome.)