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Tech CEOs Tell US Gov't How To Cut Deficit By $1 Trillion
alphadogg writes "The US government can save more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years by consolidating its IT infrastructure, reducing its energy use and moving to more Web-based citizen services, a group of tech CEOs said in a report released Wednesday. The Technology CEO Council's report, delivered to President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also recommends that the US government streamline its supply chains and move agencies to shared services for mission-support activities. 'America's growing national debt is undermining our global competitiveness,' said the council, chaired by IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano. 'How we choose to confront and address this challenge will determine our future environment for growth and innovation.' If the cash-strapped US government enacted all the recommendations in the advocacy group's report, it could save between $920 billion and $1.2 trillion by 2020, the group said. The federal government could also reduce IT energy consumption by 25 percent, and it could save $200 billion over 10 years by using advanced analytics to stop improper payments, the report said."
Because 1) CEOs proposed it and everyone knows they're all evil 2) The outcry of lobbyists in the industries that depend on the government wastefulness to pad their bottom line will put out the message that this is "killing private business and costing citizens their jobs."
You'll save $1.1 trillion dollars, and it'll only cost you $900B in investment! Please make check payable to IBM in capital expense dollars, not the operating expense savings that we're showing you.
It's funny how such studies show fantastic savings, but you can't actually buy the solution with those purported savings. You can't point the finger and say "these are the people you'll fire, and these are the systems that will get turned off". And the companies offering such a solution won't accept payment with the funny money savings either.
the government is already in the process of doing.
real forward thinking, dumb ass~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fewer lawyers, fewer inmates, fewer LEO, happier population. For bonus points, get rid of excessively generous government employee pensions.
Should we be suspicious when the IBM CEO thinks the U.S. needs a massive IT overhaul? I guess you could say he is qualified to know whether it can be done or not, but it would no doubt steer a lot of money to large IT corporations, such as IBM, that are large enough to handle such a large undertaking.
..tach CEOs are disinterested third parties with no ulterior motive. They're not after some ludicrously expensive contract for several years, combined with building a new terrible legacy and network effects which basically cause a lock-in for long after the original contract. Finally someone you can trust!
[squints at monitor]
Hey waitaminute. These are the guys who run companies that only make tachometers, right?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Being inefficient means that the politicians can easily hide what they're spending our money on. I seriously doubt this will gain any traction within the government. Then again, with potential cost over-runs and kick-backs to implement such a plan, who know? Political greed seems to get some things done.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
the 13 acres of hell this country went through, kicking and screaming, just to get to digital television.
Just because every CEO present for this sales pitch owns an iPhone 4, does not mean the grinding poverty of Appalachia, the intellectual bankruptcy of the deep south, or the budgetless west coast are even remotely capable of turning this page. As long as we all have grandmothers and relatives printing out taxes and mailing them with saliva greased postage stamps, the trillion dollars is about as real as the 21st century flying car i was promised.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The last thing I want to see is an efficient government. In the words of Will Rogers, "Thank heaven we don't get all the government we pay for."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/comment-page-2/
That summary seemed to be full of buzzwords.
Unfortunately, part of what is keeping our country propped up is the inefficiency of bureaucracy and that it allows a lot of otherwise useless people to remain employed. If you go through and wipe out a ton of government positions there won't be anywhere else for those people to go. Though, I suppose with all those savings we could just give everyone microloans that allow them to try and at least be productive at something they are interested in.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also recommends that the U.S. government streamline its supply chains and move agencies to shared services for mission-support activities
Sounds just like... well... all the other consultants. You know, the people who come in and say "Hey, we haven't ever worked in this organization but this seems inefficient, make it better and you'll get massive savings! What? No, we haven't bothered to find out whether there is actual some reason why you are doing it in the inefficient-seeming way in the first place. If we did find that out, we couldn't make this fancy recommendations..."
I think that the first thing where government should save is this: Stop forming entities like "Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform". Any entity with such a grand name can only come up with grand suggestions that don't relate to the real world in any meaningful way. The actual improvements stem from lower levels of organizations, occur over time and resemble babysteps towards the ideal solution. Massive remakes suggested by people from outside the organizations tend to fail miserably.
Seconded. I'll also add this:
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
Open our governments R&D dept to beyond defense and license the tech out to the private sector to pay for our infrastructure, and help create a real need for scientists.
Create regulations to stop the salary collusion that goes on in every executive board room, bring back excess taxes to discourage excessive greed.
Reform our tax structure to pay from the bottom up, instead of top down. Make my city pay to my state, who pays to the feds.
Or do more of the same for yourselves rich fuckers, eventually enough of us little guys will be pushed so far we won't care to make it better for ourselves. Our focus will be on how bad we can make it for you.
The problem I see is that the US Government contracts with companies that didn't traditionally do IT, but added it because they had a history with the Government. You know, like Northrup Grumman, because when I think on-time, on-budget I think defense contractors.
How does an i7 desktop running Linux use less power than an i7 running OS X or Windows 7?
My MacBook Pro gets worse battery life in Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 than it does in Snow Leopard.
Since the deficit is the annual difference between expenditures and revenues, reducing spending by ~$1 trillion between now and 2020 doesn't reduce the deficit by ~$1 trillion, it reduces the deficit by ~$100 billion.
Of course, this ignores the question of whether the money would actually be saved; one should be rather sceptical from a recommendation from an industry group saying that amounts to "if the government spent more money on our services, it would save money overall".
To quote Adam Smith on the attitude that should be applied to proposals of government action from groups engaged in a particular area of trade: "The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." (An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 11, emphasis added.)
but, but, then how would the low-GDP republican-dominated flyover states siphon money from the coastal blue states to pay for their social services?
That doesn't work. You're just shuffling chairs around. You've reduced the national debt by converting it into state debt, state debt which gets paid at a higher interest rate than federal bonds. With the added bonus that nearly all states have a balanced budget requirement.
Which sounds good, until you realize that there are times when deficit spending is legitimate and necessary for the good of all those that are concerned. It's just when you start wasting money on things like pointless wars and tax breaks for the rich that you start to run into trouble.
On that note, the other way we could reduce the national debt would be to go back to taxing the rich. I know that people get outraged by it, but the fact is that even if we put the tax rate on them back at say 40% it's still far lower than what it was when Reagan took office in early '81. Back thing it was 73% IIRC.
It is a commonplace that gov't is "wastefull" and "inefficient" and full of overpaid hacks,etc etc /. and dilbert ? /., is the gov't more wastefull the MS ? doesn't anyone remember the thread where there were some number of people >10 on the MS committee to figure out what was on the vista start menu ? not to implement it or anything like that, but just the list of what was on teh default menu....
But doesn't this describe most private biz, at least viewed in the eyes of
why is private jets for CEOs no less wasteful then anything the gov't does ?
You could go a long way with this, but I think it is a Myth that large publicly traded companies are, on avg, more efficient then the gov't and there is a lot of evidence to support the opposite posistion, eg look at he amt spent on admin in the social sec administration.
To give an example: I work in a biotech lab. The other day, a guy comes in with a 400 dollar piece of equipment, "free". What gives ? well, "they" through out a whole pallet (maybe 50) of these jobbers cause the name of the company changed, and they didn't want to bother changing the logo on the equipment....
yet it is gov't that gets blamed for being wasteful.
I mean come on, this is
Who's gonna enforce that fine? Mexico is gonna laugh and laugh and laugh and probably start encouraging citizens to enter the USA illegally just to spite our hubris.
Blar.
I'll bite on this one because I'm actually a Project Manager for Northrop Grumman Information Services. My views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my company, yadda, yadda, blah, blah.
First, you need to know (or remember) that huge corporations (be they defense contractor, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, whomever) are often a conglomeration of previously small companies. The company I've worked for has changed names four times as it was bought up repeatedly (twice in a three-month span one year) and is only most recently called "Northrop Grumman" but, for the most part, I still work with and for the same small group of people I hired on with nearly a decade ago. Yes, corporations add capabilities when they see opportunity. Who wouldn't?
Second, depending upon the work you do, adding all of the additional infrastructure required to meet the various regulatory requirements of a government contract is non-trivial - security clearances alone, if required, can be a nightmare. The company never says "Hey, I want to add more costs to my bottom-line and reduce my profits". Those bureaucratic requirements are driven by the government, not the contractor.
Third, often times the contracts awarded by the government require or strongly encourage the Bigs (like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.) to hire "Smalls" - smaller, perhaps more specialized corporations, that would not otherwise be able to get involved in these contracts. "Disadvantaged" small businesses, those run by minorities or other protected classes, are also highly sought after by the Bigs in order to meet various participatory quotas, etc. This type of thing allows the Big to address the regulatory and management issues while funneling funds to Smalls who might do much of the work. You learn after awhile, at least at Northrop Grumman, that you are an integrator first and a developer second - if you can reuse something someone else has built that is *much* better than building it yourself (you know, that whole "reuse" idea that we've all been chasing after for the past 50 years).
All of that aside, a huge amount of costs are associated with government bureaucracy. The profit margins on my contract, for example, are *limited* to 8.5%. No matter how much I spend, I'm only going to earn 8.5% - that profit margin is ridiculously tiny when you consider what a firm operating at commercial rates is going to make profits wise. "Oh...so you'll just drag it out so you make more money." Ha! Sure. The project drags out...but I can tell you from 15 years working with the US Government, it drags on and on not because I really want to keep working on the same stinkin' thing (redoing it over and over) for my own giggles and grins but because the US Government is a huge bureaucracy and it takes forever for them to make a decision on anything. Need clarification on a feature request? Well...first we have to work that through the Government Program Management Office (PMO) who oversees your project, then they need to potentially track down user-representatives, convene a meeting, possibly do a usability test and/or request a conference, get multiple disparate agencies who are going to use your tool to agree to put aside their differences and unique business processes, etc., etc., etc.
Meanwhile, the team is being held to an unrealistic schedule set for political reasons. To minimize risk of schedule slippage, you make a decision and press on accepting the fact that you may have to rework the feature you just developed. The government entities that are closest to you are just as frustrated as you are...and they know they can't let your team go onto other projects because then they lose the people who understand the project and its history - who have the requirements and design knowledge to meet the needs of the customer so they keep giving you money to keep your team together. You do your best to catch up on the copious amounts of documentation the government requires (for my 450K SLOC system
National Debt % of GDP
1972: 34.5%
1976: 34.0%
1980: 32.5%
1984: 40.0%
1988: 51.0%
1992: 64.9%
1996: 66.6%
2000: 57.0%
2004: 62.2%
2008: 69.2%
Yes, can we please go back to before Reagan took office, and make sure he doesn't? We could have eliminated the Reagan and Bush years in one brilliant stroke.