Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA President Trump's latest executive order takes aim at federal IT procurement, moving to centralize how Uncle Sam buys tech across agencies. The order directs agencies to move toward consolidating procurement of IT and other common goods and services under the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal agency …
Trump seems to be managing/threatening by 'Executive order' then tempers the impact for 'select' victims IF a suitable 'donation' is made to trump or something that trump is connected to !!!
Is this the way US of A government and the presidental post is supposed to work ???
There appears to be little 'pushback' so it is not being stopped and Trump is doing this more & more !!!
Isn't this otherwise known as 'Grift' ???
I thought the US of A liked to be known as the 'Land of law & order & the beacon of Democracy' ... that mask appears to have slipped somewhat !!!
:)
The situation is totally out of control, and it's a direct result of the currect crop of Republicans and Trump himself never having to bear the legal consequences of totally ignoring the law as if it did not exist. Ignoring subpoenas and stoking an insurrection without spending as much as a second properly in jail as everyone else due to way too scared officials showed them they could pretty much do what they wanted, and what you see now is the inevitable result. When you treat people different because of their status you encourage these conditions.
The US is done for, because the previous AG didn't have the balls to go hard on these people. These, well, I guess you can call them criminals, immediately noted that weakness and built on it.
The devastation you can see now is 100% Republican caused, but how they finally manage to rig things this way, sorry, that's in my opinion 100% on the Democrats.
It has one plus side: maybe just maybe, other nations finally learn to stand on their own and decouple from the USD as trading currency. Clearly, the devastation from their mortgage gaming wasn't enough of a lesson :(.
Not sure what devastation you are referring to, that is, unless you are part of the government. If so, thanks for your service.
Please understand, this is not affecting our lives one bit out here in the states. All we know is our cost of living went up 30% during the last administration. The ones that voted are not stupid or bad people, they are just desperate. For better or worse, things had to change.
Let’s work together and make the opportunity for change work for as many as we can.
Here is one for you:
GsaAuctions.gov listed FEMA MRE pallets this week. Each lot had over 17k meals. 100s of thousands of meals sold for less than $1 each. I bid on some just so that we could give them to homeless and the food bank outlets. Our government could have done this direct to the needy themselves.
They were going out of date in August so instead of FEMA destroying them, the GSA sold them to people who could use them. If the right person had just said something and moved a bit of paper, that could have helped a lot of needy families.
"instead of FEMA destroying them, the GSA sold them to people who could use them" "Our government could have done this direct to the needy themselves."
Not sure from your comment if you support the idea that the government should have fed people, or sold the meals to groups that would feed people.
Yep, slipped MASSIVELY. Growing up in the 80s we enjoyed watching American movies and into the 90s. Even the cheese ones, like Air Force One, the speech in Independence Day, even watch The Contender the other day. All mentioned the presidency, how prestigious it is, following the law etc. But Trump even in his first term and even more so now, have pissed all over this and now the USA is just a mockery. It really is bad. When will he be stopped, its clear he is going to try and stay president until he cops it and he'll have quietly put a plan in place that one of his sons takes over and not the VP.
And the GOP, they are no more, the amount of kissing they are doing is truly shocking. Do they not realise when he's gone, they'll be all out of office, no one will be voting for them ever again.
Yup - that's the downside.
The positive is supposedly less waste. An example being software licensing: Allegedly there's a lot of software licenses paid for but not used. A central purchasing scheme should allow unused licences to be assigned elsewhere rather than buy new ones.
Now, no saying that's what will happen but in principle, that's not exactly terrible.
Other than it also moves people towards the 'one size' problem of the software purchased not really being the best for each department...
Still, on the surface, it is an idea that always makes sense at the time, usually after a period where things were "distributed among the departments so they can more efficiently control their own purchasing." And after 5-10 years of consolidated purchasing, it will swing back the other way. It's been doing that here in Saskatchewan for going on 50 years...
TBH the desired outcome should be fairly easy to achieve across all government - it could be for anything IT, Vehicles, Transport, services, facilities….
Work out the approx total spend with HP, Dell, Citrix, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Broadcom, Bytes, Ingram, Sophos, and smaller companies wanting to sell nationally…etc across all Government. Find the best value prices* paid and that is you starting point - that’s the maximum ‘Governmnet’ price any Government- central, devolved, Police, NHS, Molitary, Council organisation/dept pay regardless of who they are.
* not an excuse to what it up with other made-up costs..
<In my last company, as an example we needed some iPad’s for some upgrade support work. The nominated supplier was 25% more than direct from Apple or even John Lewis with a better warranty - and free delivery - not £12/unit. We had to follow Global IT Procurement policy - to no-ones benefit despite our CEO gelling us to spend money wisely - “spend it like it’s yours”… load of horseshit>
Level-set the unit price and work forward from there on better volumes and stop the rebates money slopping around as a ‘profit centre’ exclusively for the procurement team..
I strongly suspect the F-47 is going to be one of the most epic clusterfucks in history. Not just because Boeing, although that too.
But: what are the odds that the development of this plane, tech demos flying since 2020, just *happened* to be ready a couple months after Trump took power, so he could announce it? As a coincidence, close to zero I reckon. I’ve got nothing against the project, know nothing about it. But the timing makes me think this project has probably been an ongoing roll of problems for years, and none of the tech really works yet.
And Trump is going to force them to fly something, anything, before the next election, ready or not: “the F-47 produced during the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the contract will fly during Trump’s presidency”
This thing is going to fall out of the sky.
As I understand it, the Pentagon paused the NGAD project last year to assess whether against rising costs (never a surprise in military aviation) it should go ahead or not.
Presumably the internal assessment came in recently and the Orange Buffoon made maximum media out of the decision.
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/07/air-force-taking-a-pause-on-ngad-next-gen-fighter-kendall/
I just watched the announcement from the White House, and I'l sold.
After all, in Trump's own words:
"We know every other plane, I've seen every one of them"
Well, if he can personally vouch for having seen every other plane...
"Its speed is top, over 2, which is something that you don't hear very often"
It is true, you don't often hear of a speed of "top over 2". Thank heavens nothing can move at top speed.
@ChodeMonkey
"This is fantastic news! A superb win for President Trump. Emperor of Eggs. Gallant of the Gasoline. Huzzah."
Reading your comment sounds sarcastic, but it is about the reality of something good happening under the Trump administration so sarc makes little sense. Maybe Schrödinger's comment?
And are grateful for it.
NASA are ok for the moment, but all too soon:
'No, you can't have a ThinkPad, how many times have we told you? What do mean, "this laptop isn't ISS validated"? It has Bluetooth and USB-C, that means it can do everything!'
For a minute I read your 'Title' as:
'Central Services' == you get the model *we* give you ...
As in the film 'Brazil' ...
[If you have seen it, think of the 'Central Services Advert' ... ]
See ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-yXL-LDMyg
:)
From the EO linked in TFA:
> The Department of Education currently manages a student loan debt portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion. This means the Federal student aid program is roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo. But although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid. The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.
In other words, the DoE is 100 times *more* efficient than Wells Fargo[1] and in a move that is all about efficiency[2] it is the DoE who gets canned?
And as for "return authority over education to the States and local communities", well, the book bans in schools are just getting started and if you thought "Pi is to equal to 3" was stupid, wait until you read the Christian (i.e. Creationist) science textbooks!
Not being in the US and this not having an *immediate* obvious route to damaging international relations or finances (the coming Marching Morons still have to work their benighted way through the schools system) this isn't going to affect me & mine badly in the short term, but I'd like to look forwards to a few more Hollywood blockbusters in the coming decades: "Jack Reacher : Gospel Worth Dying For" does not appeal. Could be worse, though: so far I've not heard of[3] any push to go so far that we'd get James Bond in "The World is Not Flat Enough"
[1] yes, yes, I know WF does a wider variety of products, but then 100 times 1,500 is less than 200,000
[2] yeah, pull the other one
[3] please don't disabuse me, not until after the weekend at least
There is no "return authority over education to the States and local communities." That is where it is, and ever has been. ED doesn't dictate how to educate; it doesn't micromanage the states. It mostly distributes funds, conducts research, and ensures the states adheres to Federal law and the Constitution. Most of the discourse about the dept has come from the Right, so this propaganda is what most people have heard. That ED dictates education policy and implementation methods is a Republican lie carefully calculated to gain support for the destruction of ED.
They should leave GSA alone and create a new General Assistance Department to assist other federal agencies. Second DOGE "employees" to it
On that Wiki page
"The characters are portrayed as inept, subject to greed, selfishness and incompetence."
Tick, tick, tick and tick
"However, malice was never a factor and all the humour was light-hearted.'
No, no, no, that doesn't sound like a good match for DOGE employees, ex- or not.
Centralising purchasing under the GSA might be an improvement, if:
* The GSA itself is not a sprawling, bloated bureaucracy;
* The GSA does not have technology-ignorant staff denying purchasing requests for bad or arbitrary reasons ('Server purchase denied; just use Azure or AWS." "But the server is going to be used to hold Top Secret data!"); and,
* The GAA can and will act on purchase requests in a sufficiently-timely way.
Based on a decade of experience when I was last involved with purchases for government (left that position nearly 2 years ago), GSA pricing was often much more expensive for the equipment we were looking at, by a significant amount. The "discounts" we'd get from vendors meant we'd get much more bang for the buck. Even when things went out for competitive pricing, which was the usual, considering the effort of justifying a sole-source.
Mandating using GSA would have cost more, for less.
Granted, we were never your typical "desktop office computer with office style apps", it was always much more specialized, which GSA does *not* do well. From what I remember of SEWP from my early 2000s interaction with it, it was a god-send for similar reasons. Having more familiarity with the special, nuanced needs of the people looking to purchase stuff beats out the cookie-cutter "why do you need more than a 14 inch monitor or a Pentium?" approach that GSA takes most of the time.
You wouldn't buy petabytes of storage or hundreds/thousands of cores of HPC compute through GSA unless you wanted a mediocre solution that didn't meet what you needed to solve your current problem.
No doubt this will soon be followed by the building of a national mouse mat distribution centre somewhere in rural Mississippi, to process the thousands of GSA-MM-2347 mouse mat request forms that arrive weekly from offices all over the country.....
Ensuring that nothing happened nationwide without approval from a big centralised bureaucracy worked out so well for the Soviet Union.
Manufacturers will now only have to, ahem, influence, a small number of people to sell lots of kit.
And that's at least one Boeing jet most of us will not have to worry about flying in.
I would point out that in regard to UK councils and Oracle, most people on here have been demanding centralised Govt purchasing of tech to save money. I guess the USG is spying on, er, learning from wise El Reg readers.
"The fact sheet claims agencies spend over $1 billion a year on PCs, and says nearly $6 billion worth of purchases have funneled through the GSA over the past decade - delivering an average savings of 38 percent compared to other procurement channels."
We have a single federal government agency for non-trivial procurements in Canada. The had a standing offer arrangement for computers and software. From what I saw, it seems doubtful that the savings, if any, were any where as near as large as what was claimed. One thing I noticed was that the stuff on the price lists tended to be dated, and when prices were falling (which they were up till recent times), It seemed you were locked into both old prices and old technology. Moreover, if you were looking for anything that wasn't completely standard, you were likely to get gouged.
This post has been deleted by its author
One no doubt knows that the agency will be led by the scumbags that are appointed by the Orange Manbaby and his arsehat Musky Smell to line their pockets with commissions!
Should be hysterical to watch the choke point breakdown and their government unable to get supplies.
On the plus side, that will totally revive the US towing business. And repair business for all the bits that fall off that hit other cars. And healthcare for the people hit by FSD following Musk in dismissing people as important, or that get hit by bits falling off at speed. No, wait, they're busy killing off heathcare, so that's 2 out of 3.
There's only one thing certain now: Trump will be in the history books. Just not in a very good way, unless the book is published in the US in which case it'll be mainly pictures as the average reading age of the US is apparently around 11 years old. Which probably includes Trump.
.. and now he does neither.
He has bascially become a proxy for Musk who is now let loose on the country without any election or confirmation of his department or role. If you want to talk about illegals, he's a prime example of the bad ones, as opposed to the folks who just want to make a living by doing the jobs Americans do not want to do.
Now for the fun part: now those people are shipped out en masse, who is going to do those jobs? There won't be much food picked, and I suspect santiation will take even more of a hit than it did already. Bleagh.
So you need a fine tooth cross grain sawblade for a half inch arbor? Here's a coarse ripcut 3/4 inch arbor blade. What do you mean thats not what you want? It's a saw blade right? Stop complaining, that blade is 10% cheaper!
Sometimes you WANT small, focused purchasing departments that know what their "customers" want. Because the alternative is that everything dies in bureaucracy.
Because the alternative is that everything dies in bureaucracy
As far as I can tell that's the actual aim because so far they have done astonishingly little that actually benefits the US - the projects which allegedly will bring jobs to the US may spend some money, but I suspect they'll simply wait until Trump is gone in 3.5 years and then bail, and just pay him personally some cash to keep trouble away.
The moronic thing is that they're slaughtering the goose with the golden eggs. If they invested properly in the country there is so much more potential to get rich, but no, they want it all now.
Oh boy. If only the taxpayers knew how much more this will cost them. GSA is the worst in terms of shipping time confirmation, product availability confirmation, minimum order requirements, and price. Doesn't matter if it's IT related or not. Most of these vendors just buy from other vendors such as yes, Amazon, at a lower price, then charge the gvt a higher price. I buy everything I can, yes with my government credit card on Amazon Business that is "agency approved". The costs are lower, shipping is faster, and there are no minimum order quantities. I'll continue to do so until I'm told not to for the sake of saving US Taxpayer money. GSA is garbage.
