And this does not work so well either. The problem with many government contracts is not just that they are usually cost plus, but that they do not take the total cost of ownership into account. In your example of roads, if the government put out requests for proposals based on the lowest total cost of ownership of a road over say 100 years, we would have roads engineered to a much higher standard that would not need to be rebuilt at such a high cadence. Whenever government thinks they know how to specify the best engineering method to solve a user requirement, they are generally wrong.
That sounds like a bad solution to a bad problem. The better way to set things up is to devise a process in which the incentives are from the default set up to benefit the most people.
People are upset at what trump is doing in relation to the USPS. Why would we want his administration in charge of broadband as well?
> Whenever government thinks they know how to specify the best engineering method to solve a user requirement, they are generally wrong.
It's not that they're usually wrong, they simply aren't attempting to optimize towards that at all. Most The government tends to make decisions optimized against political merit, not engineering efficacy or solution fit. The reason they generally appear wrong is because generally engineering efficacy and solution fit have little if any positive correlation with political merit.
