I've been a on several "tiger teams" (super cheesy, i know!) that were parachuted in from a consultancy to bail out Federal Gov projects that had gone bad. I've been tasked to state governments as well, and was always blown away by the huge variation between different states. Virginia, for example, at least around 2010, had a very well-run government. Illinois is a steaming pile of garbage as far as being a black hole for money. New Jersey is even worse. They recently, in the beginning of the COVID crisis, blamed their COBOL system for the unemployment check backups. The expert team that was brought in quickly determined that the system wasn't the issue, and the bottleneck was bad management.

I think that, like governments, companies are not all equal in their efficiency. I work with a several people who used to work on the factory robots at Ford, and the level of efficiency at Tesla dramatically exceeds that at Ford. As organizations age, they get more and more corrupted, unless reforms are periodically pursued. Think about what IBM used to be, vs what it is today.

I think the problem with the Federal Government agencies is that they started out very efficient, and filled with bad asses who were hungry. They are never actually reformed though. They just go through periods of politicians who starve them of money then to other politicians that give them plenty, and there's no consistency party wise of course. GOP throws money at their pet agencies, Dems at theirs.

But starving them of money and then throwing it at them again isn't any kind of reform. The result is they have remained stagnant, and filled with people who substitute meaningful work for work that generates great optics.

In late 2017, I was chosen to be on a team to go engage in a Hackathon for the Department of Health and Human Services that was focused on developing solutions to help combat the opioid crisis in the US. My company actually pushed to organize it, and therefore my team wasn't allowed to be considered for a prize, but we did participate.

The rules were that the teams would all get in the building, sign NDAs, and then be given data that wasn't available to the public, and have 24 hours to build a solution. We walk in, and they had changed the name to a "Codeathon", because high ups in HHS didn't like having the word "Hack" in the title. They had a massive room filled with suits, watching presentations about the opioid crisis and what HHS was doing to solve it, and pushed the actual competitors into side rooms that were incredibly uncomfortable, with card tables and folding metal chairs. We then ended up having to wait because they had delays in getting the USB drives with data out to the contestants. The person whose job it was to make the drives forgot to do it the week before. We waited for 5 hours for the drives to be distributed.

Eventually, we got the data, and started the work. Built some very cool solutions and presented them. The suits who had been sitting in the main room watching the presentations by HHS didn't show up to watch the presentations, because they were at 3PM on a Thursday, and we were told that the traffic in DC is bad, so most of them had bailed out back to Virginia and Maryland by then.

The hackathon (or codeathon) had no food provided. We had to periodically leave the building, buy food, and re-enter through the security checkpoints.

The sad part is that unlike me, the rest of my team had never seen the Federal Gov in action. They were all shocked at how incompetent everything seemed to be, and how many people in fancy suits seemed to do nothing. Hundreds of them, watching presentations. They had a long discussion on the flight back about how dismayed they were with the whole experience.