18 Comments
Jan 14, 2023Liked by Matt Stoller

One of the major culprits are national and global consulting firms.

I worked higher education IT at a time when a college or university would program its business applications in-house. All worked fine. Then, usually through Board members or state officials, institutions were convinced to hire consultants ( fill in the name of your favorite national firm) to help the institution streamline procedures through better automation and to reduce costs. The recommendations were always to buy software from private corporations and to use the consulting firm to help implement truly awful software and to re-engineer business practices. Remember, the number one goal of any consulting engagement is more consulting engagements. The result was always more expensive, often MUCH more expensive and no better in result. And, here is the kicker, no consultant ever recommended that in a given state all of the public institutions of higher education combine their IT efforts to produce and manage IT solutions for what were duplicative processes at great savings for all.

It is also worth noting that the Open Source software effort was effectively co-opted by consulting firms and former hardware firms whose mainframe hardware was made obsolete by arrays of small cheap machines.

If you work in the public sector you know the end is near when some big shot thinks it is a good time to bring in consultants.

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Jan 14, 2023Liked by Matt Stoller

Serious question- is there a legitimate purpose for lobbyists? Legitimate might not be the right word. Do they provide a service that is value add to governance? That question might not be quite right either. What would we miss if they didn’t exist? Aw heck, you know what I mean!!

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The big issue with the FAA is that it’s funding doesn’t automatically scale with its responsibilities, and is subject to volatile appropriations. The FAA ATC unit needs to be funded entirely by fees on airlines, ideally in a way that scales with inflation and with air traffic volumes.

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Jan 14, 2023Liked by Matt Stoller

Wow, there are so many creative ways to fatten the giants. Shocking and awful... Glad they're covering up, hopefully at least a little slow, but I can't see them stopping such a successful practice...

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Stoller has tweeted before, ‘there’s plenty of talent out there. But they all work for management consultants by the 100s of thousands’. I’d never considered the consulting apparatus as part of the deep state, mostly I’d thought only of the nat security orgs like FBI, CIA. But without question these bloated consultants are everywhere justifying their own existence.

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Matt, thanks for another excellent piece. I always come away more informed after reading your newsletter. How would you recommend we speak up about this issue?

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The main thing I drew ouf of this was that the Software Liability bill was killed by Democrats as Matt very quickly and quietly stepped through that lobbyists got it shut down. Had it been due to Republican officials.... it would have had it's own paragraph and in bold italic text...

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Jan 16, 2023·edited Jan 16, 2023

Great article. I love how it touches on egos. I had a similar conviction of fake, arbitrary, transactional rewards when I saw a statement that the latest Nobel peace prize winners are, coincidentally, Ukrainian activists. Fighting for peace by asking for more arms in their effort to kill as many Russians as possible— instead of humbling themselves to the fact that they are pawns. So many people have poof! died due to to a small, energy dependent nation of allegedly hurt egos.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/07/world/nobel-peace-prize.amp.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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Baksheesh.

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