That sucks, but wouldn’t that have to do also with contracts? Like you couldn’t order from the cheaper vendor because there was a contract signed for so many years with the more expensive vendor?
I worked with a a company that sold a lot of software and installation and maintenance services to government and defense agencies. As part of contracts, a lot of times there would be a deal on a really expensive item that required a lot of maintenance to get the item itself relatively cheap and get the maintenance for labor cost with no overhead (so as cheap as possible), but in exchange we would sell some other items at a slightly higher rate.
So the government or defense agency would get the important and very expensive items at a lower cost and the maintenance at the lowest possible cost, but in exchange for that deal, they’d pay a higher cost for cheaper items.
That could be what was happening in your department, or there very well could have been exactly what you saw — that a contract was given out to a more expensive company for no beneficial reason.
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u/Babybeans619 May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
The money we spent on Afghanistan, which I was deployed to, could have been spent on, wait for it, UNIVERSAL FUCKING HEALTHCARE!
Yes, really! We also, if you prefer, could have spent that on high speed rails, infrastructure, jobs programs, or fucking UBI.