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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.
> "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.
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.
Oh, I'll agree that if Trump is good at anything, it's self-promotion and posturing.
But I honestly think that he thought some of his campaign promises (the border wall among them) were doable, and he's so far out of his depth with not just political reality, but reality itself, that he doesn't understand why it can't be done with a snap of his fingers.
Trump's big problem (wait, I've narrowed it down to just one?) is that he expects the government to work in the same way that a corporation works. He's the CEO of the United States, and damnit, he should be able to snap his fingers and big projects are started.
Except that it doesn't work that way, and it never has.
I lost track of how many times I've had to explain to Republicans/right-leaning independents that, no, the border wall could not be started on Day One of the Trump Presidency, because of silly things like land surveys, and floodwater surveys, and so forth.
Sometimes, it even got through to them.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
All of that is the reason why you don't subcontract if you don't have to. Ignore the consultants you recommend outsourcing, they are only there to make a killing on the outsourcing, then propose insourcing to your successor and make another killing on basically reverting everything.
If you outsource and immediately make a contract with the outsourced company for the exact same services that it used to provide in-house, you didn't understand anything.
There are scenarios where outsourcing makes sense. Most of the actual outsourcings done are not in that set.
And if you are the federal government, your job is not to provide business to a small number of IT companies. Your job is to serve the people of your country in the best possible way, and having your own IT that doesn't answer to any other business goals is one important part of that mission.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Correction, Mr. Trump thinks the government works the way *his* corporation works.
No investors, no board, no experts.
Even Steve Jobs had more realistic expectations on what was possible.
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