Source: Niskanen Center
by Ann Lewis
“Every government technology leader knows a story about a project that accidentally wasted a billion dollars. The details vary, but the arc is familiar. A critical system needs modernization. To reflect the urgency, Congress and OMB allocate a large budget and assign it — along with a modernization mandate — to an agency. The agency appoints a team, often composed of well-meaning but non-technical program managers, contracting specialists, and analysts, who are often focused on many simultaneous projects. … Years pass, the vendor bills the agency for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the agency continues to pay — because Congress and OMB already decided this problem was worth hundreds of millions. But as time passes and milestones accumulate, it becomes harder to say what ‘done’ looks like. Eventually, often under pressure from OMB or Congress, the agency asks to see progress.” (04/30/25)
https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-to-save-a-billion-dollars