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Northrop Grumman Sues US Postal Service Over Automated Snail-mail Sort Contract
McGruber writes "The Federal Times is reporting that Northrup Grumman has filed suit against the US Postal Service, accusing the USPS of violating the terms of the 2007 fixed-price ($875 million) contract to produce 100 massive automatic sorting systems, each capable of handling millions of magazines, catalogs and other pieces of flat mail. The Postal Service embarked on the project just as mail volume was beginning to nosedive, cutting into anticipated efficiency gains. The sorting machines' performance has been uneven, according to a series of reports by the Postal Service's inspector general."
Northrop Grumman is so fucking bad, that I refuse to believe that anything they do is malicious. They're not competent enough to try to really screw the taxpayers. Every interaction I've had with them indicates that NG corporate is hostile to actually producing hardware and software, and desire to only create IP that NG can then charge the government to use. They are, however, so fucking incompetent that when I tried to get them to give me a proposal for a sole source, small change, that they were going to charge us 5x cost for, they failed to provide a compliant proposal before the money got pulled. You got that right. 80% profit and overhead, and they couldn't actually execute their core business function, which is extracting money from the federal government. Granted, our acquisition system is it's own disaster, but only NG could be so bad as to fail to ask when we're throwing money.