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Trump Promises a Federal Technology Overhaul To Save $1 Trillion (technologyreview.com)
New submitter threc shares a report from MIT Technology Review: The tech world descended on Washington, D.C. yesterday to attend a tech summit at the White House. According to MIT Technology Review associate editor Jamie Condliffe: "Trump suggested he might relax his stance on immigration as a way to get tech leaders to help his cause. 'You can get the people you want,' he told the assembled CEOs. That sweetener may be a response to a very vocal backlash in the tech world against the administration's recent travel bans. Trump may hope that his business-friendly stance will offer enough allure: if tech giants scratch his back, he may later deign to scratch theirs." The report continues: "'Our goal is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government's technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens,' said Trump at the start of his meeting with the CEOs, according to the Washington Post. 'We're embracing big change, bold thinking, and outsider perspectives.' The headline announcement from the event was Trump's promise to overhaul creaking government computing infrastructure. According to Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and advisor, there's much to be done: federal agencies have over 6,000 data centers that could be consolidated, for instance, while the 10 oldest networks in use by the government are all at least 39 years old. The upgrade, said Trump, could save the country $1 trillion over the next 10 years."
When the first words uttered were
They will NOT be training their own replacements!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Doubts that it's going to save $1 trillion. Trump lies constantly and he won't stick to anything he says, so this could even be true in that he'll actually try but as soon as the plan hits any minor bumps he'll give up on it, move on to something else, and blame the Democrats for it. Right now the only "promise" he seems inclined to keep is to try to deport just about every illegal immigrant DHS can get its hands on.
The good news is it will save $1 trillion over 10 years. The bad news is that it will cost $1 trillion over 2 years.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
seems more like what it'll cost and how long it will take to me.
Yes, if you got REALLY lucky, you might save money in the long term.
The history of government technology overhauls should indicate quite vividly that you not only spend tear-jerking amounts of money to upgrade your systems, you also spend a lot of time thereafter fixing it or throwing it all away and starting over again.
So I can't decide whether Mr. "The Cybers" man doesn't understand anything about technology, or he understands it so well that he is willing to lie to the American taxpayer about savings when what he actually means is to pump money into the (already wildly successful) technology sector. Either way, I wonder what his blue-collar supporters think about that ....
"Who knew IT was so complicated??!"
Why is this such a hard concept?
The USA has no obligation to people who do not live within her jurisdiction or who aren't citizens. There is sufficient talent inside her borders to do whatever we wish to do. It is a travesty that people are so short-sighted they would allow a functional invasion of foreigners.
I have no doubt that you could save hundreds of billions, possibly trillions over the years if smart agreeable people get together and figure it out. The problem is at some point you need to include others and then the trouble starts. Any organization over with more than 100 people run into this. The more people and departments the worse it gets. I am older now and I have seen smart ideas pass from their creators to the masses of underlings and watch it get mangled beyond belief. Your trillion dollar savings will be eaten up by those underlings a hundred fold.
I seriously doubt someone who's own business organization was found last fall to be running Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2007 has any bloody clue how to manage such a task.
According to Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and advisor [...]
Considering all the projects he's responsible for, what plans has he come up with?
I'm curious, as he's responsible for so much and yet I've heard so little that was actually attributed to him.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Was contracting for the government and heard the same thing under Obama administration.
love is just extroverted narcissism
If a 50 year old software tool still completes the task for which it was designed in a satisfactory way, why change it? My 50 year old house provides adiquate shelter and living space so I'm not going to knock it down and rebuild.
Why does it have to always be new and Whiney every 5 years?
> "Trump suggested he might relax his stance on immigration
> as a way to get tech leaders to help his cause. 'You can get
> the people you want,' he told the assembled CEOs.
Translation: you can bring in low paid Russian immigrants to work on government systems. The more critical systems, the better. Our voting systems need some work, and before 2018.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It funnels 1 trillion dollars into Trump holdings LLC
We always hear about Washington, D.C. but never about Washington, A.C.
#DeleteFacebook
Regardless of my feelings about Trump's lack of competence, he is undeniably a master at self promotion and posturing. Tech companies were never going to say no to hundreds of billions in new government IT contracts. But why waste an opportunity to make it seem like he masterfully negotiated the deal? He certainly knew most of his campaign promises would be disastrous, but they spoke to his base (and often independents) and gave him room to maneuver in the undiscerning public eye.
Trump never wanted to be responsible for destroying our economy with protectionist practices; it would make him look bad. Trump's performance as president has arguably shown his lack of competence at actually executing on his agenda, but his competence at self promoting himself even in the absence of accomplishments is unquestionable.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I got a call about an opening in a government agency doing a job not far off from what I do in the private sector. However, I'd need to move to DC (not necessarily a deal breaker), but there's a hiring freeze on, budget cuts, government shutdowns and let's just say the people being appointed to run some parts of the government aren't exactly shining examples of competence to run their agencies. I work at a well run company with a decent salary and benefits. Why am I going to leave that to step into chaos, incompetence and possibly having my job eliminated by budget cuts, or skipping paychecks because of political bullshit? DC isn't a cheap area to live in and the traffic is horrible, but it still has a lot of other upside going for it in terms of what I like to do in a metro area.
Readers here may recall that Trump's budget director Mick Mulvaney published a budget that had a $2 Trillion dollar math error.
Republicans (think Paul Ryan) often (always?) produce budgets that contain all sorts of tax cuts for upper brackets and then a "magic asterisk" that gives no detail but says the shortfall will be made up by a) economic growth stimulated by the tax cuts and b) cost savings from cutting government waste.
So my take is the bad optics of all this finally bubbled up to Trump (I guess Fox News couldn't filter it out totally) and he gave the command to his minions to find trillions of dollars of "government waste and inefficiency" to save the budget. So they came up with this.
It doesn't have to make sense. All he wants to do is get headlines out there that proclaim Trump Saves Us Trillions and for most of his base and way too much of the swing voters that is all they will see. It is ideal for this media purpose. If the topic gets the slightest bit technical he can count on the talking airheads to gloss it over and he'd up with "opposing views on this story" in the worst case.
What that means: enough voters will think have this view: Trump and Republicans produced a budget that will save our economy and Democrats are Fighting It. . They don't have to be right. They just have to throw up enough chaff to confuse the voter and Republicans win the mid-terms again.
Good!
And they'll get obscenely priced bids from "American" companies that will end up offshoring the work anyway.
Yeah, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet.. And that's just the A's
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A few thoughts on this: 1. Supporting out-dated hardware, software and infrastructure, gets progressively more expensive as time goes on. If you space a tear out and replace project over say five years as an operating cost instead of an all up front capital cost, it should be doable and save some money in the long run. 2. The more out-dated hardware, software and infrastructure are past end-of-life, the less secure those networks and systems are. Can we stop with the ridiculous federal data breaches everyone?! My security clearance info is out there in the wind so I kind of take that a little personally. 3. Updating infrastructure doesn't have to result in lay-offs or outsourcing (a Yuuuge security risk IMHO). Enough with the FUD. 4. All Federal infrastructure upgrade projects don't have to become total fiasco's, "IF" they have the proper leadership, oversight, scope and funding. You can't tell me that there aren't enough experienced companies, with good success records that could take on this kind of project. 5. Put off infrastructure projects long enough, for whatever reason and eventually, really bad shit happens. Anyway, that's my $2 worth as an IT person.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder if they are going to put everything on private clouds. For me that's what this announcement looks like. A few days back the CIA was claiming giant savings and security because they gave everything to Amazon...
Trump lies constantly
Sessions met with Russian ambassador. Reality, he was at a gala with hundreds of people and Sessions didn't even know ambassador was present.
DNC demanded he resign because of that meeting that didn't happen.
Flynn broke the law. Sketchy details on what he did. Reality is Flynn filled out wrong form when declaring he was paid by Turkey, not that he hid or failed to declare, just wrong form.
DNC demanded he be jailed.
Russia and Trump colluded to fake election. Reality, not a shred of evidence from ANYONE.
DNC demanded he resign or be impeached.
Russia threw the election. Reality, DNC servers hacked and they paid a private company to say Russia did it. DNC refused to let FBI examine servers. Private company will not testify under oath that Russia did it anymore. FBI now has ZERO evidence of Russia even interfering.
Comey leaked information, which is questionable at best, as a disgruntled employee in order to get a special council appointed for something he knows no evidence exists for.
And Trump is the one who lies constantly?
Oh boy, the left has YET to say anything truthful since Trump has been elected. Ossof was also going to win BIG in Georgia last night too, but I guess that was Trump lying again. Its apparent to most of the country that Trump isn't the compulsive liar here. Its the DNC party who had been telling you Trump is days away from impeachment for literally months now and there is still zero chance of it happening.
I think you are calling the wrong person a liar.
Oh the opportunities here to lobby, at Trump institutions of course, for part of the government pie.
The usual idiots with political axes to grind can keep on droning on about things they don't know anything about. I see lots of that above.
Everything Trump said is true in regards Federal IT. Everything Kushner said is also true.
The federal government's IT issue revolves around the huge body shop LSI contractors - GD/NG/BAH/CACI etc. These companies and their subcontractors do a lot of the development and O&M type work associated with federal programs. Key things to remember about these firms:
1) They won't modernize anything without being paid (again).
2) They take prior government guidance and twist it into justification for their incompetence
3) They maximize labor over automation
4) They keep knowledge institutionalized within their company to the maximum extent possible to maintain their incumbent status
These companies and their business practices are a huge reason why Federal IT sucks. They get away with it due to Congressional cover. When pressured, or at risk of losing a contract, their lobby in Congress is activated by notifying the lawmakers that jobs will be lost in their districts. The noise level and scrutiny of the Executive agency is usually sufficient to shut that attempt down. Minor GS-level functionaries melt away when Congressional staffers start getting on their case.
Trump could help with the problem but it's like the Dutch boy trying to use his fingers to fill in holes in the dike. You run out of fingers after a while.
There are other problems like institutional incompetence amongst GS personnel, but those are probably more amenable to solution than the one I describe.
Bottom line: The whole system is broken and sucks.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I buy that he might know how to save money constructing a wall, but I'm not certain this knowledge translates well into the technology domain. Government I.T. jobs are notorious for going over budget.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Yeah... Trump promises a lot of things, many of which are contradictory.
The bar is set rather low, however. After the most tech-savvy President ever effed-up his own promise to revamp the government, if Trump achieves something — anything — he'll still have done better than the predecessor. Not that you'd know about any such success — unless you are paying really close attention — from the established reporters.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This sounds like something the clueless PHB would say after watching a vendor's webinar on how their new fog* technology is going to save 90% over cloud services.
*fog is the new hotness, google it
We should upload all our freedoms, the constitution, the bill of rights, hell, our own memories of when we were a democratic nation, into foggy memory. Compliments of Putin and the Trump administration.
Oops, already done! Move along.
...I am fine with impeaching him, even tho i voted for him...he is breaking all his campaign promises
Cynical.
Trump might be on to something. There are crazy amounts of funds being burned in even the average IT department because nobody wants to clean ship, like throwing the outdated shit out, sign off on the costs to replace it with something better.
That is because managers these days think in quaterly earnings, and such a project takes several quarters, if not several years. It's like driving your own car because you don't want to spend money on a new car - after some point, you are actually losing money because the increasing costs of repairs, bad fuel efficiency etc. add up to more than what a change of cars would cost you. But if you don't have the money to buy a new car, you are stuck in that cycle, even if you realize it.
Modernising IT costs money. Over a carefully chosen period of time, you can very certainly show that the program costs more money than it saves - but will that still hold over a longer period of time?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
EOM
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
And yeah, it would be the congress who would be cutting the cheque. POTUS does not control the purse strings.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
As a civilian user of government IT systems, I can tell you that they are byzantine and often use severely outdated technology. I listened to some of the technology leaders' comments yesterday and I noticed that Apple and Alphabet seems very upbeat about it all but IBM seemed to poo-poo the idea. I have an idea why. Take, for example, the State Department's system for getting ITAR export licenses. These fools are STILL using Lotus as a document submission system. It only runs on Windows and it must be submitted using Internet Explorer. IBM owns Lotus. They're still living in the dark ages, Watson technology not withstanding. They clearly have a lucrative contract with State and don't want to see their gravy train derailed. Then there's the inscrutable WAWF system. The password rules are so restrictive that it would likely be easy to hack because of the severely limited ways to create a password.
Bottom line is that the private sector operates in vastly superior ways. The government (not just federal) needs to adopt these methods AND they need to eliminate the low-bidder rule. By categorically rejecting the lowest bid would take away the habit of low-balling it now and charge through the nose for changes that permeates government contracting.
Nice to see Trump continuing the IT initiatives started under Obama. I'm working on one of them. One the biggest challenges that we had was management looking at six different reporting systems and drawing different conclusions about the same data. It took a few years to consolidate the reporting systems into a single reporting system. Our security compliance went from 70% to 95%, and 99% is the new expectation moving forward.
Right now the only "promise" he seems inclined to keep is to try to deport just about every illegal immigrant DHS can get its hands on.
Good enough for me.
Serious question. What kind of person believes that Trump could accomplish anything other than insulting people in broken English? Even if he understood a fraction of what's going on around him (he doesn't), he could never accomplish something like that.
I don't respond to AC's.
None of this will change the underlying restrictions which restrict the speed of government. There are extraordinary rules which bound the IT people in government and changing this is what will bring efficiencies.
For example, it can take six months simply to approve creation of a database with over ten individual's information on it. Compare to the private sector, where information is shared willy-nilly and bought/sold and leaked all over. (200m voter preferences database anyone?) That does not include a long list of user interface, hosting, and privacy, requirements which go far beyond what industry would call "best practices".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_Act_of_1974
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government_Act_of_2002
These laws and the regulations which stem from them are where the savings exist because I.T. people in government really do wish to improve these systems and would organically but our bound.
...to justify $2T in tax cuts to his 1% buddies
Because "big change" and "bold thinking" never lead to projects going over budget.
But hey, there's no headlines in saying "We're encouraging our agencies to consider consolidating services over the next five years."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Government systems should be refactored to make government services better. Full stop. Saving money might be a useful side effect, but it might not, but cost-savings should not be the goal. Cost-saving projects run the risk of not actually saving anything while also screwing up things which already (kind of) worked.
As a for-instance, when a bank merges with another bank, they'll often claim some crazy cost-savings from merging backend operations. But it would be stupid to run a bank with multiple sets of backend operations, you'd lose more from lost opportunity due to confusion that you'll gain from literal cost savings from merging things. But nobody wants to hear the story of "There's a huge risk in combining disparate operations systems", instead trotting out cost savings makes everyone happy.
This is ignoring the problem that the government doesn't get to choose its field of operations. A tech company to some extent chooses its field based on whether it will be able to do things efficiently, and then if it takes over the world it can just ignore the detritus. But the US government must integrate, say, service records of veterans across decades, call it ~100 years. They have to take potentially sketchy records from the world wars and integrate them in a useful way into a system which is also taking in 1000x as much data about people currently operating in Syria. There's no possibility of saying "Could we just go regenerate this data to add the missing tags?" It's actually somewhat likely that in some cases you're better off with federated systems rather than a single system of integrated data.
Basically, it's a hard problem. You can almost certainly design a system to handle things better, but any redesign will have huge capital costs. A very likely outcome is that you'll have a new system which doesn't quite handle everything the old system did, and now you have two systems with different groups dependent enough on each that you can't shut either down, so things are actually less efficient.
Of the 10 oldest networks that are at least 39 years old, how many of them are likely to be running IPV4 (or, lol , IPV6?). What about of the next 50 oldest? I could see agood chunk of the hoped-for saving disappear into replacing those DECnet, SNA and maybe X.25 networks (and NETBEUI, AppleTalk, Netware, Banyan Vines, etc) because you'd have to change all the systems they areconnected to and the software on them.
Especially when you consider how many of them are likely to be miltary systems running ICBMs and the like, I can see the defence contractors rubbing their hands with glee.
He'll twitter them into submission, as usual.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Our goal is to generate billions in billable for IT consultants at Accenture, IBM etc..." There I rephrased that for him. IT contracting with the US government is a license to print money and generate very bad code on rollouts that are always a disaster. I worked in the HIPAA and CMS arena for 12 years. Oh, boy...talk about "waste, fraud and abuse." The best thing for the Americans public is if they don't do anything at all. But then it's more money for me if they do...so I'm rather conflicted.
...I have a very nice bridge for sale in NY that you'd be interested in. Only a bit over 100 years old, and it great shape!
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Just stop flying down to golf in Florida every weekend.
http://www.newsweek.com/trumps...
Sure we can save money replacing a 10+ year old mission critical database on antique hardware whose maintenance costs ~$1mil/year. However, there are probably 40 different systems that directly interact with it that all need to be tested. Testing that cutover will probably cost $50-$100mil in time and contractor resources in part because we will have to hire and train people to modify the other old stuff touching it. The actual cutover will likely cause an agency outage for 2-3 days in the best case scenario, and weeks of outage in a worst case scenario. Will we better off for doing it - absolutely yes. In a world of limited budgets, can we justify that? So far the answer has been no.
Repeat the above discussion (twiddling the numbers based on the project) for every other antiquated system.
The problem gets a little easier after the first few projects are completed because all of a sudden you have resources that understand the less antique systems a bit better. If you were lucky on the first few, you also have more confidence in the projects - until you get burned badly on one.
The government instead has engaged in big bang rewrites of major applications. If successful and properly scoped they can replace the antiquated systems. Usually, if they are successful they just put a new face on the antiquated systems which doesn't really help. The ones we hear about in the news are the ones that are spectacular failures. Far more common on the slow lingering failures/death march projects.
What the tech companies don't understand is that the government can't just drop a system it doesn't like any more, as Google does regularly. There are regulatory requirements that need to be changed first, and those requirements frequently come from Congress. Congress is not known as a body that acts quickly, efficiently, or competently.
I wish I had a good solution, but if I did I'd be a tech visionary making big money, not a grunt in the trenches trying to help.
Maybe he doesn't know what a trillion is? This isn't the first time he reminds me of George W Bush (to whom he doesn't compare favourably):
An aide walks into the oval office. George W. Bush is currently president, and the Iraq war is dragging out into a long and grueling occupation. The aide presents the numbers from yesterday to the President.
"Mr. President, yesterday the US coalition forces killed a confirmed 36 insurgents."
The President nodded his head patriotically.
"There were some losses on our end, however." The aide continued. "We lost a US hummer with four soldiers in it to an IED outside of Tikrit, and 2 Brazilian soldiers were killed in a crossfire in Baghdad."
The president nodded solemnly with the news of the hummer, but his face was ashen by the end of the sentence, and he buried his face in his hands. The aide looked startled, "Sir, what's the matter."
With scared eyes, President Bush looked up and mumbled "How many is a brazilian?"
What's more important? $5 T-shirt and one is out of work or $10 T-shirt and one has a good paying job?
Priorities.
You could elect Jesus Christ and Mohamed as Pres/VP and they still wouldn't have enough political power and clout to untangle the bureaucratic rat's nest that is the US government.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Linux Torvalds can save the US Federal and State budgets $1,000,000,000,000 over the course of a decade if they switched to Linux. Thanks to Steve Ballmer, we have some data to examine. How much of these expenditures are for Windows licensing?
This would also close some of the attack vectors into government systems, saving significantly more money.
This biggottry is not allowed at Slashdot.
Trump "Promises" ? 'nuf said
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Anyone else find it odd that Hair Trump always pulls the figure $1T out of his ass when announcing these initiatives? A trillion for infrastructure... A trillion savings for IT... That tells me that he (or his staff) hasn't put much thought into these announcements.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Sorry, but voting Republican is what you usually do when you think the government is far too underpowered and not nearly expensive enough. And if Congress gets too much in the way of funnelling taxpayers' money to the president's friends, he can always start a war without their permission, so his friends can be contractors in that.
I think it's fine that Trump is saying he's going to be the next Bill Clinton, but he has to really do it if he wants people to start thinking of him as a real RINO. Expect Republicans to campaign against him, even if he doesn't get impeached. Saving money is the bane of the radical left's existence, anathema to everything the modern Republican party stands for: using government force to take away your money without your consent. There's only one way to get a a more expensive and anti-American government than voting Democrat, and that's voting Republican. Republicans have to protect this reputation or else they'll be known for nothing, not having any coherent political message at all. That's is Brand Death.
Trump, they're not going to let you endanger that. Fortunately, with your attempts to legalize pollution (i.e. make certain business' expenses become public expenses) we know that it's not really your agenda. We know you're still here to take away our money to subsidize thieves. You're no RINO as much as you pretend otherwise.
Not all that cynical, really. The history of IT is filled with stories about massive Government and Military IT upgrades that either don't pan out or run severely over budget and end up cancelled or drastically scaled down. For instance, air traffic control modernization has been a big issue since the Carter administration: https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... Then there's the IRS modernization: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/... And various military software overhauls: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12... https://arstechnica.com/inform...
"if tech giants scratch his back, he may later deign to scratch theirs."
unless he puts something down in writing for said "tech giants" i dont think any of them would believe him. The only thing that anyone can predict about trump is that he will always be looking out for his own personal brand. If this venture fails he will just try and silence people and make it go away like he did with trump university.
The problem with running a country like a company is that companies fail all the time. In order to run a country one must rally the people of the country to all work together for the betterment of the country. If i am not mistaken that is precisely why the states was founded, yet that drive was taken over by capitalists shortly after the civil war. America isnt alone in this either, most countries have fallen to this ruse and we as a species are forever worse about it..
The US could save a lot in cooling costs by moving the data centers to Russia (and bandwidth savings on both sides...)
So he said "You can get the people you want" and immediately everyone imagines what he means. He hasn't DONE anything and he prides himself on closing deals by basically saying whatever it takes. So I've learned with Trump look to actions, not invented interpretations of his random comments.
I'd suggest that there are lots of those "people" tech leaders need right here in the good old "US" of "A". Sure, maybe he will revert the H1B situation to the same or even worse (from the perspective of an older US tech worker) but he hasn't taken any steps to do that yet. But if you are imagining outcomes how about imagine something good. He discovers unicorns that poop gold.
I mean seriously. I've seen predictions of him bringing in Russians in the responses implying they'd be put to work on our voting systems!. Where is there any indication of that? What Trump has proven to be is a very effective way to get people to spew their inner dark imaginations. It is a great time in history to own popcorn stocks and sit back and watch it all unfold. What he has proven is that the world is all far less fragile than everyone seems to think.
I work for $MEGACORP and have lost count of the number of legacy systems (which albeit old, worked perfectly) that have undergone "upgrades" over the last few years to complete and utter shite "apps" that are unusable. Why? Because "mandatory upgrades" that's why.
There are aftermarket mitigation measures available for legacy OSes. Sometimes keeping the legacy stuff around can save a bit of money in the end but good luck convincing some shite-for-brains IT PHB that.
This from the asshole that threatens to shoot people who say things he doesn't like. Then when they make fun of him for making such stupid statements he threatens to sue them for... for him threatening to shoot them and them not taking it seriously.
Get off of /. if all you are going to do is constantly threaten other people and then pretend you are the victim. The only person threatening to shoot other people here is you. Just because you find that acceptable behavior doesn't mean ANYONE else does or has done the same to you.
All government does is spend. They never save. I'm sure they still have buggy whip inspectors because nobody ever gets laid off, no matter how useless.
Nothing will happen because congress won't do anything Trump wants. If it were approved, they would spend $1 trillion and get no savings at all. How many decades have they been trying to upgrade the air traffic control systems from the 60s?
On the plus side, I'm pretty sure that President Trump has a reality distortion field of his own.
Yep, that's Creimer for you. Shooting up people you don't like is acceptable, and he threatens to do the same. Talk about cutting a program that can't be afforded and you are the devil incarnate.
Creimer is so dumb he doesn't realize debate over issues is acceptable but shooting people isn't. He is literally that dumb and doesn't realize it. Here comes his threats to shoot/sue/call the FBI on me again. I wonder what his next threat is going to be since nothing has worked before.
As a Federal employee, the department I work for can't even run e-mail and VPN reliably, yet they mandate use of those services. At this point just about any real direction would be an improvement.
"My guess they will save 1 trillion over ten years, by spending 2 trillion over the same period of time."
Well duh. That sort of thing is baked into American culture. Just look at how we are about health care.
Funny how it only takes a generation and people think that the new normal has been eternal...
Gov waste and corruption are OK as long as it is lower than the profit margin of private management... Even then, private isn't always better... look at ISPs...
Trump would delegate it to a few corrupt billionaires who'd pocket any savings and commit fraud (like many did to get that rich....--> ) Trump would believe whatever FOX told him while the Gov would lose massive amounts of money while claiming savings... Maybe they'd play some accounting games but they don't seem to bother much anymore. Now everybody just flat out LIES and calls truth fake news. (25% of the nation is retarded and they vote.)
Look at NYC which spent billions to fail to redo a system just to save a little money on employee time cards etc. Have you been involved in gov contract projects? They are a moving target that is pushed by political winds-- it is no surprise private contractors have so much trouble. The bidding contractors generally only have 1 skill: how to get contracts (and bribe for them.) Their other talent is not going to jail; wait a few losses out and then get contracts AGAIN.
Obama had a few IT people trying to fix just a little bit and they didn't have a good time of it. You have to fight entrenched powerful PRIVATE forces -- a lot of what people think is government has already been privatized out -- government does better when they in-house; their contracting work always seems to be a disaster with far LESS accountability.
Pursuit of perfection... like the pursuit of Utopia is actually EVIL.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
That's what I was thinking. MS probably convinced T that if the Fed Gov't simply used only MS products, everything would be compatible and integrated with everything, and magic wizard dialog boxes and IDE Intellisense would auto-magically do most of the work.
MS-Wall is compatible with MS-Border-Guard and compatible with MS-Extreme-Vetting and MS-Mex-will-pay-for-it. Just sign the check and plug'em in!
Table-ized A.I.
That my number one gripe with the "social justice" type and the government its self. They worry more about people that need help on the other side of the planet than in their own back yard. Pathetic.
I say, sir, are you aware that the man you are fighting is made of straw, and that it is of your own invention? A fierce scallywag he is, for sure, but maybe you could dial down the virtue signaling a bit? Kthx
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
consolidate 6000 data centers? where? and would we all have to move our offices or will we still have the low latency we currently enjoy from local data centers? how will the data get to this place. seems DT wants to rebuild the internet, develop a new uber framework, replace all the cobol and mainframes? it will cost more than a trillion and take more than 10 years.
mapreduce hadoop mongo buzzword blah blah.
Anti-Trump circlejerk 24/7. Good luck selling this turd, DICE.
We don't seem to be able to do very large software projects reliably. The ACA website was unusually successful for a project that size.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Obama instituted Obamacare (also known as ACA), and this alone made more than 20 million Americans feel confident about their lives, secure in the knowledge, that if they have a medical issue, then they will not go bankrupt.
Insurance payments are taxes just like any other, only to private companies.
Obamacare is thus a substantial tax cut for the people.
And Republicans want the nation not to have it. Think about that.
Health-related bankruptcies weigh heavily on the economy, too, because those bankruptcies reduce the financial independence and solvency of the people affected, and so increase the burden on the rest of the society.
With ACA, these 20+ million people actually have surplus money that they could spend on something useful, such as investing in hurricane-proof housing and related home improvement. Americans, whose lives have been healed and saved through ACA=Obamacare, can continue working, contributing to society, and paying tax.
ACA/Obamacare does not prevent health-related expenditures, but these have been a lot smaller than under private insurance. It seems, that Big Health and Big Pharma in the U.S. actually want people to get sick and die very slowly, so that said companies could profit off someone's terrible pain.
Oh no, it isn't impressive. At all.
Trump is "pushing for" stuff he hasn't got done. And that's about it. Trump hasn't passed a single significant piece of legislation; he can't focus long enough to do the work of governing.
Want to know what Trump has done a lot of? Signing Executive Orders. Remember one thing Trump bitterly criticized Obama for doing? Signing Executive Orders.
Oh, and Trump has made it clear that he likes having his ego stroked. So gather round campers and debase yourselves! The Great Orange Leader needs endless ego stroking until he spurts with self-satisfaction. Yes, it's that disgusting.