Fed Contracts - Great Unraveling or 18 Theses

[Anonymous]

Another thread on FFRDCs alluded to this, but its impact extends to a ton of federal contracts, defense and civilian.

Palantir is looking to lead an in innovation revolution in defense services, and part of its claim as to why Big Five are entrenched is the wide use of cost plus contracts.

Their manifesto

https://www.18theses.com/

There is now a big push for firm fixed price contracts for almost every contract of there. We are seeing it in our science contracts, which may be bad for if we want experiments to complete, as re-do, problem resolution, are completely unpredictable so we will either have contracts padded really high or exhaust funds and work is halted. How does it work in reality?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another thread on FFRDCs alluded to this, but its impact extends to a ton of federal contracts, defense and civilian.

Palantir is looking to lead an in innovation revolution in defense services, and part of its claim as to why Big Five are entrenched is the wide use of cost plus contracts.

Their manifesto

https://www.18theses.com/

There is now a big push for firm fixed price contracts for almost every contract of there. We are seeing it in our science contracts, which may be bad for if we want experiments to complete, as re-do, problem resolution, are completely unpredictable so we will either have contracts padded really high or exhaust funds and work is halted. How does it work in reality?

The form of a contract is ultimately an expression of risks and incentives. Cost plus incentivizes companies to bid low and the government owns the risk of overruns. A FFP contract incentivizes companies to bid high because they own all the risk of overruns. How it works in reality depends in both cases on having the government be a smart and involved buyer. In most cases it isn’t going to be obvious which form of contract costs less in the end.

[Anonymous]

I would not bet on this government being a smart and involved buyer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would not bet on this government being a smart and involved buyer.

That is certainly Palantir’s bet.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would not bet on this government being a smart and involved buyer.

Part of the isssue is the work is congressionally mandated, so the consequences for work not being done can be health and safety or national security issues

[Anonymous]

Palantir's CTO's 18 Theses, taken to its logical result, is an argument for the privatization of the DOD, the US Air Force, the US Army, and the US Navy. Is this really a good idea ?

[Anonymous]

Oh god this company. Yes they make some good points here, truly. But they're not looking to solve them. Their entire platform is just borrowed from open source with a bunch of proprietary stuff on top that makes it impossible to integrate with anything else. Just a tech company building a moat off the US taxpayer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Oh god this company. Yes they make some good points here, truly. But they're not looking to solve them. Their entire platform is just borrowed from open source with a bunch of proprietary stuff on top that makes it impossible to integrate with anything else. Just a tech company building a moat off the US taxpayer.

+100

[Anonymous]

Peter Thiel doesn't want to improve the government- he wants all the contracts

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Another thread on FFRDCs alluded to this, but its impact extends to a ton of federal contracts, defense and civilian.

Palantir is looking to lead an in innovation revolution in defense services, and part of its claim as to why Big Five are entrenched is the wide use of cost plus contracts.

Their manifesto

https://www.18theses.com/

There is now a big push for firm fixed price contracts for almost every contract of there. We are seeing it in our science contracts, which may be bad for if we want experiments to complete, as re-do, problem resolution, are completely unpredictable so we will either have contracts padded really high or exhaust funds and work is halted. How does it work in reality?

The form of a contract is ultimately an expression of risks and incentives. Cost plus incentivizes companies to bid low and the government owns the risk of overruns. A FFP contract incentivizes companies to bid high because they own all the risk of overruns. How it works in reality depends in both cases on having the government be a smart and involved buyer. In most cases it isn’t going to be obvious which form of contract costs less in the end.

It's next to impossible to come up with the complete set of requirements. Companies that win FFPs more than make up any losses via CRs...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh god this company. Yes they make some good points here, truly. But they're not looking to solve them. Their entire platform is just borrowed from open source with a bunch of proprietary stuff on top that makes it impossible to integrate with anything else. Just a tech company building a moat off the US taxpayer.

+100

Moats via no-bid contracts... Nice work if you can get it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another thread on FFRDCs alluded to this, but its impact extends to a ton of federal contracts, defense and civilian.

Palantir is looking to lead an in innovation revolution in defense services, and part of its claim as to why Big Five are entrenched is the wide use of cost plus contracts.

Their manifesto

https://www.18theses.com/

There is now a big push for firm fixed price contracts for almost every contract of there. We are seeing it in our science contracts, which may be bad for if we want experiments to complete, as re-do, problem resolution, are completely unpredictable so we will either have contracts padded really high or exhaust funds and work is halted. How does it work in reality?

It doesn't.

Palantir's business is selling products that (poorly) support data integration and analytics. But data integration/analytics/the 18theses assume away the hard part - the data has to actually exist in the first place and real systems maintain the data.

For the Feds, those real systems implement absurdly complex/one-off/constantly changing Federal tax law/tax accounting, are VA legacy EHRs that run hundreds of hospitals, handle decades worth of per individual facts used in complex current decisions for entitlements payments, etc. Those thousands of real, semi-integrated Federal systems run the Federal government. Each of those systems is immensely complicated, poorly documented, national scale, and pass complex data to similarly complex other Federal systems. The systems are written for hardware/OS/DB platforms in software languages that the DOGEers have simply never seen. Maintaining/upgrading/replacing any of those systems, let alone any significant set of them, requires detailed knowledge of the existing systems and strict systems requirements/design/development/test practices.

Palantir/DOGE assume a few "brilliant" random/off-the-street techies can use AI to fix all of that in a couple days.

[Anonymous]

Palantir = snake oil

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Another thread on FFRDCs alluded to this, but its impact extends to a ton of federal contracts, defense and civilian.

Palantir is looking to lead an in innovation revolution in defense services, and part of its claim as to why Big Five are entrenched is the wide use of cost plus contracts.

Their manifesto

https://www.18theses.com/

There is now a big push for firm fixed price contracts for almost every contract of there. We are seeing it in our science contracts, which may be bad for if we want experiments to complete, as re-do, problem resolution, are completely unpredictable so we will either have contracts padded really high or exhaust funds and work is halted. How does it work in reality?

The form of a contract is ultimately an expression of risks and incentives. Cost plus incentivizes companies to bid low and the government owns the risk of overruns. A FFP contract incentivizes companies to bid high because they own all the risk of overruns. How it works in reality depends in both cases on having the government be a smart and involved buyer. In most cases it isn’t going to be obvious which form of contract costs less in the end.

Any sort of cost contract, especially CPFF is called an exotic at my agency. They are risky as hell, and it usually reveals that the program office has no faith in their own planning skills. Problem here is that program offices don’t know how to define their requirements.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Another thread on FFRDCs alluded to this, but its impact extends to a ton of federal contracts, defense and civilian.

Palantir is looking to lead an in innovation revolution in defense services, and part of its claim as to why Big Five are entrenched is the wide use of cost plus contracts.

Their manifesto

https://www.18theses.com/

There is now a big push for firm fixed price contracts for almost every contract of there. We are seeing it in our science contracts, which may be bad for if we want experiments to complete, as re-do, problem resolution, are completely unpredictable so we will either have contracts padded really high or exhaust funds and work is halted. How does it work in reality?

The form of a contract is ultimately an expression of risks and incentives. Cost plus incentivizes companies to bid low and the government owns the risk of overruns. A FFP contract incentivizes companies to bid high because they own all the risk of overruns. How it works in reality depends in both cases on having the government be a smart and involved buyer. In most cases it isn’t going to be obvious which form of contract costs less in the end.

Any sort of cost contract, especially CPFF is called an exotic at my agency. They are risky as hell, and it usually reveals that the program office has no faith in their own planning skills. Problem here is that program offices don’t know how to define their requirements.

Which leads to CRs - essentially backdoor CPFFs. The general issue is the Feds aren't buying standard off-the-shelf products. Getting complete, correct, finalized requirements is a pipedream.