Obama Administration Closing Recently Opened Datacenters

An anonymous reader writes "After quadrupling the number of government datacenters over his first three years, Obama's Administration is reversing course and closing the most recently opened datacenters. With one datacenter reportedly the size of three football fields, my question is what happens to all those recently purchased servers? Will the government hold a server fire sale? Count me in!"

Comments

Stimulus.

[wsxyz]

After all of the equipment is sold for scrap at pennies on the dollar, they'll build the datacenters again. That's called stimulus in action.

Re:Obama wastes taxpayer money?

[Aryden]

Yepp, his fault that something that was approved, budgeted and begun before his administration was done... (this is my glare face)

He approved the continuation based on being told that these centers were necessary for data retention and they aren't. So they are getting closed. As any good business person would do when faced with budget restrictions.

Re:Timing...

[astrodoom]

So what you're saying is that the qaudrupling over the last 2 years WAS from the obama administration's continuation of the policy, but they didn't start the policy?

idk, I'm all for specificity, but that seems a bit nitpicky. Either way, they're cutting the data centers now, which is a great move for cutting waste since they're running at 27% utilization. Sad that it means cutting the jobs associated with those data centers, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Re:Timing...

[bennomatic]

Have you ever worked for an organization larger than 1000 employees? Larger than 10,000? I don't know how many people are employed by the federal government, but it's a lot. And there are a lot of programs that have interwoven dependencies. Whether you think that the government should be smaller or not, whether you think that all the programs are worthwhile or not, big decisions have big implications, and it's not usual for large organizations to take several years to make a decision and even longer to implement them.

To that end, it's entirely possible that these datacenters were planned during the Bush years based on policy decisions made in the Clinton era, which were in turn affected by the Reagan/Bush1 years. Wings of a butterfly and all.

The point of the GP was not, as far as I can tell, "BUSH BAD OBAMA GOOD!", but rather, "This is not an example of a bad decision made in haste and reversed in haste."