[dgoodell]

I work at NASA in tech development and I have found that we have a lot of poor quality support service contracts. The faceless contracting companies supply staff that technically fill roles like providing IT support services, or supporting purchasing. More often than not they are so utterly unhelpful and unknowledgeable that it's actually easier and faster to do things myself, totally defeating the purpose. The contracting mechanism seems to add significant extra communication overhead to everything making things much more sluggish, bureaucratic, disconnected, and just plain unpleasant. I actually care very much if my work gets done.

Getting a large contract in place can be a miserable slog and take a huge amount of time and effort to sort out, particularly with the cumbersome government contracting rules and laws. Good contract documents are also really challenging to write. Often times the results will be non-optimal, terms will be interpreted in ways you didn't intend, or you with you had put some more info in there. In many cases I believe the timeline to get a good contract in place can be comparable to the work that we want to perform. That's just silly.

Use of contracts for tech development creates large disconnects and significantly reduces our control and responsiveness to changing needs and ideas. If NASA employees are doing the work we can easily pivot when circumstances change and re-prioritize labor and much more quickly drop bad ideas as we learn new things. We can start investigating something without completely knowing what we're doing and figure it out as we go along. That sort of thing is harder to do with a contract. If the work is being done by a contractor, changing anything is vastly more difficult and complicated, and often not even worth the effort.

If we have a device or something developed by a contractor they often manage to contaminate it with some kind of proprietary info making it much more difficult to use and communicate the data. The tools and devices we develop internally don't have that problem and we're free to use, adapt, and communicate technical info about them as much as we want. Also, if we develop something ourselves, we inherently more deeply understand it and can more quickly make modifications or test out new ideas. That's less often the case when work is done on contract. IMO many of our most valuable developments are done internally due to the enhanced flexibility.

Not that all contracts are bad. There are plenty of cases where using contracts makes great sense and works out terrifically. However, you often just have to hope the right sort of company has decided to exist because doing it ourselves is often not an option. I have absolutely been told about a contractor: "I know they're not the best, but they're the only one interested in doing this work. If don't fund them for too long they may lose interest and then we'll have nothing".

There are plenty of other problems unrelated to contractors as well. But over-reliance on contracting is a big one.

[pdfernhout]

Thanks for the great example. I quoted it in a comment on r/fednews and two other NASA people agreed with it: https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1iq66qa/comment/mc...

[evanjrowley]

As a contractor, I absolutely agree with all of your points here about the downsides of contractors.

I worked for several years on a few amazing contracts where we had the freedom to pivot and respond to changing needs. My most recent one however is terrible, but I believe it's due to a much more complex set of issues.

The organization is embroiled in decades long internal turf wars, leading to a culture of independent silos. The government must be perfect, therefore, each silo must be well-managed. So you end up with bureaucratic management processes duplicated across these silos. Regulatory obligations are growing more complex all of the time, so the processes become too entropic for the small silos to handle, and then leadership deteriorates. In a place like this, 50% of a contractor's job is to be the bureaucrat's human shield for when SHTF.

Just like the adage "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" there seem to be places in government where nobody ever got fired for making things too complicated. A recalibration is long overdue, probably not for NASA, but definitely other places where the overhead really isn't worth the result.