I used to work at the Air Force Base where they used the $700 wrench (or whatever cost it was), and I heard the context. It turns out that "$700 wrench" was a custom hand tool that saved a day of disassembly and another day or reassembly work on an F-111. (Many planes in the fleet was disassembled completely and reassembled 6 or 7 times in their lifetimes.) There only a handfull of those tools made.
We also heard about the $7,000 coffee maker scandal. It turns out that was the drinking water heater in the C-5 Galaxy. The plane was used primarily for long-haul heavy-lift missions, but also carried passengers along on many flights. Think flights of 10+ hours - the pilots and passengers are going to want something hot to drink. A standard coffee maker takes electricity (but only costs $20.00). The electricity has to be generated by the APU, which takes jet fuel. The designers calculated the extra cost for jet fuel to generate that electricity over the life of the aircraft was several times more than the $7,000 hot water heater, which used waste heat from the engines for heating water.
I worked for the DoD for 10 years, as well. It was my first job out of engineering school. I had a Civil Engineering degree, and I was hired as an environmental engineer at one of the Air Force's large Superfund sites. This was in 1990, when Regan was out and Dubya was in. Of course with the politics at that time, big government was bad, bad, bad, so there was a hiring freeze on. That posed a small problem for the department that wanted to hire me. See, they were under this hiring freeze, but they needed someone to do the work, or face fines of $10,000+ per day from the EPA and state for not cleaning up the mess they made of the water supply. So what can they do: hire contractors!
I worked for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as a "graduate intern". (To this day, I've never been to Knoxville, TN, by the way. The job was in California.) My first day on the job, I was tasked to walk paperwork around the base to get about a dozen signatures. It was the paperwork that secured the funding for my position. Our salary was about $27,000 per year at the time. The paperwork in my hand said they were paying about $65,000 per year for me. It was a similar situation to the OP - the government was providing for all computers, offices, and other overhead. Ooooo - bad contractor taking the US taxpayer to the cleaners, right? Not necessarily...
See, to do any procurement - i.e. let a contract - is a major hassle, involving lots of regulations and procedures. It would take in the neighborhood of 2 years to go through the process from start to finish, and take lots of government employee man-hours (they really did have other real hazardous waste cleanup work they would prefer to be doing). So it is common practice in these situations to look around in the government and see who _already_ has a contract, and piggy-back on that. Well, as it tuns out, the Department of Energy had a big contract with Martin-Marietta to run Oak Ridge National Labs, and Martin-Marietta has the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) on subcontract. So, this Air Force base in California had a Memorandum of Understanding with DoE to use their contract to get warm bodies through UTK.
So who's getting all of that extra money I'm not seeing? Well, each layer in the contracting process takes it's own service fee for managing this arrangement. Marint-Marietta adds their percentage, the DoE adds their percentage, DoD adds their percentage, HQ Air Force adds their percentage, our command (AFMC) takes their percentage, and my base adds their percentage. After all that, we're up to $60,000+ per year for a graduate intern, so the base can avoid $10,000 per day in fines and do the cleanup work they should be doing in the first place... because some bonehead politician has to cater to a constituency that whines about big government, implements a hiring freeze, and still demands that that same government fly big, expensive (but very technologically cool) machines around to blow up people.
Now, the OP was likely in a somewhat different position, but given my experience, it's not surprising. It's been going on for a long time, and there are reasons for it. Not good reasons, but insting that the problem is simply "big government" and "greedy contractors" without looking at our own expectations of that government is stupid.
Incidentally, a year later I was hired into the position as a Federal employee, and took a $500/year pay cut. I wrote the position description for the job I was applying for, and spent about 4 month shepherding that paperwork through the process, so the department could get someone who they know could do the job - me.
Boeing, like all aerospace majors, has tended to be very cautious about space vehicle design, perhaps in part simply because the cost-plus nature of major NASA and DoD contracts has meant there's less incentive to innovate. Why try some weird new design that may fail if the same old boring design, just multiplied by sixty, will work fine? So what if costs $bazillions? Your profit margin is guaranteed no matter how bloated the budget gets.
Actually, when I worked for the DoD, "cost-plus" contracts (short for "cost plus fixed fee") were a means of providing an incentive to come in on or under budget. The contract price was negotiated and agreed upon, and the "fixed fee" was determined as a percentage of the negotiated cost. If the project ran over budget, the governmnet still paid the "cost", but the "fixed fee" didn't change. Thus, the profit margin decreased. If the project came in under budget, the government again only paid the (lower) "cost", and the "fixed fee" represented a higher profit margin.
At least that was how we used those contracts at the time. For some new weird design, the "cost-plus" structure would have some advantages for the government, because it puts some of the risk on the contractor.
The contractor would probably want to use the "time-and-materials" mechanism where, indeed, the "profit margin is guaranteed no matter how bloated the budget gets". Then all the risk is on the government. (Perhaps this is the contract structure these projects usually use?)
This is not to say that there isn't lots of fraud/waste/abuse in these kinds of government activities, just that it was present in many more subtle (and institutionalized) ways than just the contract mechanism or the relationship between the project mangers and the contractors.
And that does not even get into micromanagement by Congress, changing the mission requirements every 9 months at random...
In my experience, this is closer to the primary problem. The lack of long-term vision and leadership is the biggest killer of budgets and innovation. At the Congressional and Administration level, vision - by definition - does not extend beyond the next election.
As important is the following: For upper and middle managers in civil service, continuously increasing your annual budget is the priority. The way you grow an organization (and by extension, your pay scale and prestige) is by increasing your budget. Decreasing your budget through effeciency or innovation shrinks the organization, your pay scale, and your prestige. (Actually, it makes your job go away, because you pay scale can't be decreased.)
In my organization, not using all of your budget for the year in the first 3 quarters was really bad. It resulted in your remaining budget getting pulled by headquarters and sent somewhere else (where they could spend it immediately), and your budget request for the next year being cut by a corresponding (or greater) amount. It also reflected badly in preformance reviews. Consequently the incentive was this: spend as much money as fast as you can. (That was not how the management put it, of course, but that was the net effect.) I don't believe this was an isolated situation, either.
Thus, there is no institutional incentive for cost effeciency and innovation. I think that an organization independent of this process is the only way to achieve greater cost effeciency in the near term. In the long-term the institutional incentive must be changed. A new contractor (Scaled) is a start, and maybe this is the catalyst.
Prehaps the government project managers in charge of this NASA/DoD project have found a way to resist or avoid this dis-incentive system. [Insert diety here] knows all the project managers I worked with wanted to. I'm hoping so.
Try out MadSci. It's a moderated forum for kids to post questions to the "Mad Scientist Network". Questions are screened and passed on to volunteer experts for answers.
My wife is a Marine Biologist and has been answering questions there for several years. They're a pretty enthusiastic bunch.
Well, IAARCE (I am a Registered Civil Engineer), and yes, this does work with human waste. In fact, it's probably being used at your local wastewater treatment plant now to power their pumps and such. It's as very common way to reduce -or eliminate - electricity costs at treatment plants.
It also works at landfills. Methane is extracted from the landfill, and used to turn generators. The electricity is fed into the power grid, and the power company pays the landfill operator (usually the county) for the juice. Here in Northern California, the power company (Pacific Graft & Extortion - AKA PG&E) is legally required to purchase the power.
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I'm an engineer, too, so Fortran 77 - on a PDP-11. (Later on a VAX.)
I used to work at the Air Force Base where they used the $700 wrench (or whatever cost it was), and I heard the context. It turns out that "$700 wrench" was a custom hand tool that saved a day of disassembly and another day or reassembly work on an F-111. (Many planes in the fleet was disassembled completely and reassembled 6 or 7 times in their lifetimes.) There only a handfull of those tools made.
We also heard about the $7,000 coffee maker scandal. It turns out that was the drinking water heater in the C-5 Galaxy. The plane was used primarily for long-haul heavy-lift missions, but also carried passengers along on many flights. Think flights of 10+ hours - the pilots and passengers are going to want something hot to drink. A standard coffee maker takes electricity (but only costs $20.00). The electricity has to be generated by the APU, which takes jet fuel. The designers calculated the extra cost for jet fuel to generate that electricity over the life of the aircraft was several times more than the $7,000 hot water heater, which used waste heat from the engines for heating water.
I worked for the DoD for 10 years, as well. It was my first job out of engineering school. I had a Civil Engineering degree, and I was hired as an environmental engineer at one of the Air Force's large Superfund sites. This was in 1990, when Regan was out and Dubya was in. Of course with the politics at that time, big government was bad, bad, bad, so there was a hiring freeze on. That posed a small problem for the department that wanted to hire me. See, they were under this hiring freeze, but they needed someone to do the work, or face fines of $10,000+ per day from the EPA and state for not cleaning up the mess they made of the water supply. So what can they do: hire contractors!
I worked for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as a "graduate intern". (To this day, I've never been to Knoxville, TN, by the way. The job was in California.) My first day on the job, I was tasked to walk paperwork around the base to get about a dozen signatures. It was the paperwork that secured the funding for my position. Our salary was about $27,000 per year at the time. The paperwork in my hand said they were paying about $65,000 per year for me. It was a similar situation to the OP - the government was providing for all computers, offices, and other overhead. Ooooo - bad contractor taking the US taxpayer to the cleaners, right? Not necessarily...
See, to do any procurement - i.e. let a contract - is a major hassle, involving lots of regulations and procedures. It would take in the neighborhood of 2 years to go through the process from start to finish, and take lots of government employee man-hours (they really did have other real hazardous waste cleanup work they would prefer to be doing). So it is common practice in these situations to look around in the government and see who _already_ has a contract, and piggy-back on that. Well, as it tuns out, the Department of Energy had a big contract with Martin-Marietta to run Oak Ridge National Labs, and Martin-Marietta has the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) on subcontract. So, this Air Force base in California had a Memorandum of Understanding with DoE to use their contract to get warm bodies through UTK.
So who's getting all of that extra money I'm not seeing? Well, each layer in the contracting process takes it's own service fee for managing this arrangement. Marint-Marietta adds their percentage, the DoE adds their percentage, DoD adds their percentage, HQ Air Force adds their percentage, our command (AFMC) takes their percentage, and my base adds their percentage. After all that, we're up to $60,000+ per year for a graduate intern, so the base can avoid $10,000 per day in fines and do the cleanup work they should be doing in the first place... because some bonehead politician has to cater to a constituency that whines about big government, implements a hiring freeze, and still demands that that same government fly big, expensive (but very technologically cool) machines around to blow up people.
Now, the OP was likely in a somewhat different position, but given my experience, it's not surprising. It's been going on for a long time, and there are reasons for it. Not good reasons, but insting that the problem is simply "big government" and "greedy contractors" without looking at our own expectations of that government is stupid.
Incidentally, a year later I was hired into the position as a Federal employee, and took a $500/year pay cut. I wrote the position description for the job I was applying for, and spent about 4 month shepherding that paperwork through the process, so the department could get someone who they know could do the job - me.
Boeing, like all aerospace majors, has tended to be very cautious about space vehicle design, perhaps in part simply because the cost-plus nature of major NASA and DoD contracts has meant there's less incentive to innovate. Why try some weird new design that may fail if the same old boring design, just multiplied by sixty, will work fine? So what if costs $bazillions? Your profit margin is guaranteed no matter how bloated the budget gets.
Actually, when I worked for the DoD, "cost-plus" contracts (short for "cost plus fixed fee") were a means of providing an incentive to come in on or under budget. The contract price was negotiated and agreed upon, and the "fixed fee" was determined as a percentage of the negotiated cost. If the project ran over budget, the governmnet still paid the "cost", but the "fixed fee" didn't change. Thus, the profit margin decreased. If the project came in under budget, the government again only paid the (lower) "cost", and the "fixed fee" represented a higher profit margin.
At least that was how we used those contracts at the time. For some new weird design, the "cost-plus" structure would have some advantages for the government, because it puts some of the risk on the contractor.
The contractor would probably want to use the "time-and-materials" mechanism where, indeed, the "profit margin is guaranteed no matter how bloated the budget gets". Then all the risk is on the government. (Perhaps this is the contract structure these projects usually use?)
This is not to say that there isn't lots of fraud/waste/abuse in these kinds of government activities, just that it was present in many more subtle (and institutionalized) ways than just the contract mechanism or the relationship between the project mangers and the contractors.
And that does not even get into micromanagement by Congress, changing the mission requirements every 9 months at random...
In my experience, this is closer to the primary problem. The lack of long-term vision and leadership is the biggest killer of budgets and innovation. At the Congressional and Administration level, vision - by definition - does not extend beyond the next election.
As important is the following: For upper and middle managers in civil service, continuously increasing your annual budget is the priority. The way you grow an organization (and by extension, your pay scale and prestige) is by increasing your budget. Decreasing your budget through effeciency or innovation shrinks the organization, your pay scale, and your prestige. (Actually, it makes your job go away, because you pay scale can't be decreased.)
In my organization, not using all of your budget for the year in the first 3 quarters was really bad. It resulted in your remaining budget getting pulled by headquarters and sent somewhere else (where they could spend it immediately), and your budget request for the next year being cut by a corresponding (or greater) amount. It also reflected badly in preformance reviews. Consequently the incentive was this: spend as much money as fast as you can. (That was not how the management put it, of course, but that was the net effect.) I don't believe this was an isolated situation, either.
Thus, there is no institutional incentive for cost effeciency and innovation. I think that an organization independent of this process is the only way to achieve greater cost effeciency in the near term. In the long-term the institutional incentive must be changed. A new contractor (Scaled) is a start, and maybe this is the catalyst.
Prehaps the government project managers in charge of this NASA/DoD project have found a way to resist or avoid this dis-incentive system. [Insert diety here] knows all the project managers I worked with wanted to. I'm hoping so.
My wife is a Marine Biologist and has been answering questions there for several years. They're a pretty enthusiastic bunch.
Well, IAARCE (I am a Registered Civil Engineer), and yes, this does work with human waste. In fact, it's probably being used at your local wastewater treatment plant now to power their pumps and such. It's as very common way to reduce -or eliminate - electricity costs at treatment plants.
It also works at landfills. Methane is extracted from the landfill, and used to turn generators. The electricity is fed into the power grid, and the power company pays the landfill operator (usually the county) for the juice. Here in Northern California, the power company (Pacific Graft & Extortion - AKA PG&E) is legally required to purchase the power.
-Ax