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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."
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.
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??!"
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
> "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.
Young people entering the marketplace and want the newest shiny things.
Older people have enough experience to actually understand the meaning of "if it works, don't fuck with it".
#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
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.
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
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.
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.
Lack of parts, lack of security updates and patches. Inherently less secure and a big fat hacking target. Lack of capacity to keep up with modern demand, etc. All tech has an end of life. It may still function perfectly fine for what it was originally intended but that's like expecting today's cellular networks to still support a 1980s bag phone. Eventually the tech just can't get out of its own way and becomes a huge money suck.
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.
If yu think you're not allowed that in the USA - trying saying that in Germany.
Actually, don't.
No, seriousy. Don't.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
The true way to 1 Trillion dollars in savings over 10 years is to take a page from China's playbook and forego the great wall 2.0 and instead build a new, greater firewall 3.0 to protect the country from all those nasty threats like China, Nigeria and those damned pirates on the digital oceans spanning the digital coasts with swords and way too many R's...
Thirty four characters live here.
They aren't hiring anyone. This is going to be like this infrastructure program which will be a massive amount of money going to private companies for contracts. In return the government will get software that doesn't meet their requirements and is buggy as hell leading to an expensive long term maintenance contract. In exchange for praising Trump, letting him claim job creation, and/or doing business with some of his companies they will find that they can bring in more H-1B employees to increase the profits of their contracts.
Gift? Yes, in the German sense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
instead build a new, greater firewall 3.0 to protect the country from all those nasty threats like China,
And make China pay for it?
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.
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?