Hardy har har! YOU’RE an astronaut?
Ain’t what they used to be, Bob. I remember when they were square-jawed American Heroes. Now we got a crazy lady driving cross-country in a diaper. And this yutz.
I should also mention our O&M contract portion of the $600M slice out of the taxpayer pie is a small fraction of that, maybe 5%, just a WAG. And we are as a shop, probably one of the, if not the smallest under-the-radar nobody-ever-heard-of operations in the entire company.
From that perspective, I suspect our worlds are more similar than different.
Speaking as a VP for a pretty decent sized Government Contractor (over $800m rev), I can say taht Nadir is often correct - the low-priced bid often, even most of the time, is of inferior quality and a disservice to the taxpayer than many of the best value, higher-priced bids. The problem always is that the Government usually doesn’t define the requirement to a great enough extent to be able to evaluate the bids on an even playing field, usually resulting in low-ball guy winning (mainly because KO’s are lazy and risk-averse). They often win by bidding insufficient labor quality (kids out of school instead of qualified engineers), or unrealistic labor prices ($25/hr for an engineer w/3 yrs experience and a clearance… good luck staffing those guys).
And Xenophon, there really isn’t any ‘no-bid’ contracts, at least not as many as those who hated the Cheney-Haliburton cabal would have you believe. Even sole source awards need to have a JOFOC built, and usually it’s because there’s really only one quality source (how many companies build carriers? How many companies could bid on the DHS St E’s relo when the Government required a past performance of $1 billion or greater to be cited?)
As for the low quality catching up to them, it’s supposed to via the CPARs - kind of a cnet or Consumer Reports for contractor past performance. But again, see statement about lazy KOs - frequently it’s not checked and/or ignored.
You understand I never said there were, right? Someone else defended the proposed no-bid sales of power utilities in Wisconsin by citing the “fallacy” of low-bid government contracts.
What I meant was, I’m nowhere NEAR aerospace.
The part of it that really burns me is that every story I hear about people half-assing low-bid contracts comes from you 9+ figure companies. Down here in the 3-5m range, if we don’t deliver we die.
I suspect patronage!
Roger, I was reacting to what you said here, where you say
There’s virtually never a ‘no-bid’ award at the federal level - someone always has to propose something, and depending on the agency and size of the deal, there’s still plenty of checks and balances (KO, competition advocate, program office, the IG, sometimes even the ALT guys, for you DOD-types).
Well, if by patronage, you mean that some guys are too big to fail so to speak, you’re probably right.
For example, take the cocksuckers at Lockheed Martin: they did about as bad a job as they could on the last DHS IT infrastructure contract, called IT NOVA. They lowballed in the ways I detailed in my last post, plus others.
And yet they aren’t debarred, they aren’t really penalized at all. They will cite other, successful past performance for other deals, and many will not bother to check their legacy of train wrecks, because hey, it’s Lockheed Martin!.
I agree with you that little guys have no such leeway - but then again, that’s usually because they don’t have a big brand, and it’s a big risk for a KO to award them anything because, well, nobody has ever heard of the Mom-n-Pop System Integration Company™.
About the only way they can demand some premium to the low-ball is when they have some uber SME, usually an ex-Govie, who is the only guy who knows how the system was built, where the bodies are buried, etc.
The problem with the really big stuff and the ultra high-tech stuff is like Mr. Smashy says: Sole source. So everybody gets lazy (government and contractor alike), things get bloated, behind schedule, yada, yada. It’s almost inevitable and reversing the trend is very difficult. We have recently seen initiatives on the acquisition side to get away from it with more performance-based and scope limiting features, but it’s always going to be an issue.
Back on topic… I wonder how the people in Madison would feel after their power plant was sold to the highest bidder who started doing things they did not approve of? Or if the O&M was outsourced to the lowest bidder who started cutting all sorts of corners to increase their profit margin? Or even failed in those efforts and went bankrupt? Do you not believe that power generation is something requiring a little more government oversight and control than your average mom 'n pop diner-type business? Might not the government’s exercise in complete discretion over these things better serve the public interest?
Can’t say for sure one way or the other, but I’d choose to err on the government’s side in this case. Guess we’re going to find out.
You kmight have to come up with a better example, no matter who owns a nuclear power plant it is extrememly regulated by the federal government.
Did it occur to you that of the 30-some odd power plants in WI, only two are nuke plants?
Low-bid contracts or high-bid takeovers do not equal low-government-oversight. Although it’s absolutely correct to say that poor government oversight is a frequent enabler of misfeasance and abuse, it doesn’t necessarily follow a low-bid process and would certainly not be precluded by arbitrary government award of a contract either.
It’s all about risk management. If you want argue the merits of one potential extreme or the other it won’t be with me.
Actually, it’s all about government accountability. The low-bid/no-bid sidetrack wasn’t introduced by “my” side of this argument. Foolish me, I helped navigate this detour though.
OK, I’ll play some more. How can Govenor Scott Walker ® WI be more accountable for something he has less control over?
The chief executive of a state nor the executive branch of that state’s government equals “the government”.
Surrendering a responsibility he was expected to fulfull?
[url=]Story here.
What was his inauguration day? Can a petition for recall be submitted that day in June, or does it have to wait a full year?