[mindcrime]

The federal government is not a for-profit corporation intent on profit.

Not on paper, no. In practice, it's a massive mechanism to transfer wealth to the rich, connected, insiders and the sycophants who hover around them and suck at their teat.

As with any customer, your goal should be to give the customer what they want, while educating them about what they need. At the end of the day, you need to make your customer happy, and for a federal agency that often means don't fail, don't get their name in the paper. Which generally comes from doing it in a predictable fashion with incremental change.

So very true. "Not getting their name in the paper" is probably a good idea for most customers.