[MrEfficiency]

What happens in a country 1/5 the size in population and 1/10 the size economically shouldnt be expected to perform the same on something literally 10x bigger.

You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less.

Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians to benefit greatly and the company contracted to do a subpar job that barely meets specifications.

I trust my local government, but I do not trust the federal government to be competent.

[Balero]

In the UK, voters are a fair bit closer to MPs than people in the US (where I currently live) are to their congress representatives. Though much much further from Members of the House of Lords than from Senators. However there is a complete missing segment of local politics that exists in the US, and that has good engagement, that is much less powerful/engaging in the UK (State and city level, compared to County/city Councils)

Comparing like for like in size and budget, shouldn't the larger states, eg Texas and California have good state level systems. And then the slightly small, but still well funded ones (such as Florida and New York) should have better systems?? I'm assuming that there is a lower limit for the system quality/population size trade off, where it stops being beneficial.

There are also some parts of the US government that have pretty good systems as far as I'm aware, in the military and security.

"The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less." This is absolutely true, the amount of corruption in US politics is astounding.

I disagree that just being bigger leads to worse technology and systems. There are numerous, different reasons they are bad, and this is not directly linked to the size.

[clintonb]

USDS and 18F are staffed by confident people from industry. The federal government, when it comes to software, is not as incompetent as you think.

[dragonwriter]

An organization staffed by competent people that reports to people that are neither competent in the relevant domain nor willing to defer to those that are remains, as an organization, incompetent. As USDS and 18F are both in the executive branch entities, their organizational competence is limited by the leadership of executive branch; this is particularly true of USDS, which is in the Executive Office of the President.

[MrEfficiency]

This is literally the problem.

Instead of having a department make software, they are supported from a vastly superior group of developers that work temporarily with that department.

Maybe its too much to ask, but shouldnt the company providing the software also employ the talent that is used to make the software?

[dragonwriter]

At least part of the original idea for those entities was to serve as a cadre to improve competence government wide.

Having some experience with why government lacks organizational development competence (TLDR; short-sighted management with the wrong goals), I don't think they can do that—they literally are addressing the wrong problem—but the idea wasn't to be a silo of technical skill.