Inside DOGE, The IRS & How to Scam the US Government - Sam Corcos

1. 0:00 – 6:22

   Becoming Chief Information Officer of the Treasury Department

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      You got a new job. Congratulations.

   2. SCSam Corcos0:01

      (laughs) Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:02

      How'd that happen?

   4. SCSam Corcos0:04

      I, uh, I had a lot of friends reach out to me from the administration, uh, saying that they really needed help doing, really looking into IRS modernization. It's one of the worst managed IT projects in the government. Uh, I think maybe second only to the VA's attempt at implementing an electronic health records system. Uh, it's about 15 billion dollars over budget. It was actually started right around the time I was born, and it's still ongoing. It's still five years away. It was five years away in 1991, it's still five years away. So, they said they really needed somebody to look into this and see if we could fix it. So, um, I, I've always wanted to do government service. It's a thing that has been important to me. I, I care a lot about the future of the country, especially the national debt. But I, I kind of assumed this would be a thing that I would do in my 50s, after I'm retired, um, but my, my wife really encouraged me to, uh, to give this a go. So about six months ago, I made the plunge and, and here I am. (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson1:12

      What are you?

   6. SCSam Corcos1:13

      I'm, uh, I'm the chief information officer of the Treasury Department. That's my official role.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:19

      What's that mean? What's that guy do?

   8. SCSam Corcos1:20

      So the chief information officer in, in private companies is usually the CTO, is the, the primary technical leader. In the government, it's the chief information officer.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:30

      Mm-hmm.

   10. SCSam Corcos1:30

       Um, it's an interesting one. I think a lot of what I've learned is tracking the history of a lot of these things can be interesting. So, the chief information officer really stems from, if you go way back, it stems from when it was effectively a librarian role, if you want to call it that.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:46

       Mm.

   12. SCSam Corcos1:46

       Where it, the, the, the legacy of chief information officer is when things were in filing cabinets. Where is the information? How do you keep track of this stuff? And it slowly evolved into what it is today. But part of the challenge that I've seen internal to government is that most of the chief information officers, at least before this administration, were non-technical, and the main reason is there's no technical standards or requirements for the role. And so, you can kind of see how you get there where, when it's a librarian role, it's not, there, there's no requirement to really know how computers work.

   13. CWChris Williamson2:28

       Mm.

   14. SCSam Corcos2:28

       And if you never update the standards, you just sort of fall into the situation.

   15. CWChris Williamson2:34

       Is that prescient? That not only were the systems not updated, even the job title wasn't?

   16. SCSam Corcos2:39

       I think it's, it's less the job title, it's more the qualifications for the job. Like we have standards for being like the chief counsel of an agency. You have to be a lawyer. I think most people would think that's reasonable. We just never updated that for technology or, in government they really call it IT. That's the, that- that's- that's the more common way they would describe it.

   17. CWChris Williamson3:00

       It also feels like an outdated term.

   18. SCSam Corcos3:01

       Yeah, for sure. (laughs)

   19. CWChris Williamson3:03

       How technical are you?

   20. SCSam Corcos3:05

       Me? Um, I've been a software developer for more than ten years. In my most recent role, I was the CEO, so I didn't do as much coding, I did in the early days. Um, I actually poked around in my GitHub account a few months ago. I- I've contributed about a million lines of production code. So I'm, I'm not the best engineer that I know, but I've, I've done a lot of it.

   21. CWChris Williamson3:26

       That sounds like a H index for engineers compared with academics.

   22. SCSam Corcos3:29

       Yeah, it's, it is definitely something that if you, if you optimize for it, it becomes useless, because it's very easy to just like-

   23. CWChris Williamson3:37

       Burn out.

   24. SCSam Corcos3:37

       ... create a bunch of boilerplate code and pretend like you did it. But it's, uh, it's, but I'm sure it's correlated.

   25. CWChris Williamson3:43

       What's your relationship with Doge?

   26. SCSam Corcos3:46

       I was originally brought in through Doge in March, so that's when I started. Uh, I was put in at the Treasury Department with my primary focus, uh, being the IRS.

   27. CWChris Williamson3:58

       Okay.

   28. SCSam Corcos3:58

       Which is trying to figure out how to land the plane on this, on this, uh, IRS modernization program.

   29. CWChris Williamson4:04

       What did you think you were walking into?

   30. SCSam Corcos4:08

       I really didn't know. I've read a lot of things. Uh, I've heard stories from friends of mine who have been in the government in the past. Uh, some of those things turned out to be true, some of them turned out not to be true. Um, I think my, the thing that I was really encouraged by, which is an expectation that I had coming in, is that my friends told me that this administration is willing to make changes that have never been on the table before. When it requires significant structural changes to an organization, uh, that requires a lot of courage that historically we've been shuffling things around, that people are willing to make those changes now. That, for the most part, has been true-
2. 6:22 – 11:19

   The Politics of Working in Politics

   1. SCSam Corcos6:22

   2. CWChris Williamson6:22

      You said, uh, you had been assured that going in people were ready for change. I have to, um, predict that the 50 people who were put on administrative leave were probably not so keen on the changes that were being made in that regard. So-

   3. SCSam Corcos6:38

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson6:38

      ... it sounds good from the outside com- you were ready for change, like this is th- th- there's been enough that's been done. People are sick of the ossification and the slow, lumbering behemoth that is internal government systems that need updating.

   5. SCSam Corcos6:51

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson6:51

      But that can't be everybody, and maybe it's not even most. Perhaps it's some key decision makers. So that power struggle between move fast, break things Doge degens and existing government bods that are scared they're gonna lose their job-

   7. SCSam Corcos7:04

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson7:04

      ... wh- I mean, h- anybody that's worked in an office understands that navigating politics in the office is difficult.

   9. SCSam Corcos7:11

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson7:11

       You are in politics.

   11. SCSam Corcos7:13

       (laughs) Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson7:13

       So what do the politics of politics like when it comes to that power struggle?

   13. SCSam Corcos7:17

       So the, the specifics, the, the interesting thing about... Well, we'll take this specific example. So a lot of the folks that I talk to, uh, some of the people who we ended up putting on administrative leave, um, I have a lot of empathy for them because a lot of them really didn't intend to be in that role. Uh, they were put into that role, and several of them, I can think of some specifically from conversations that I had, they knew that they were not technical enough to be in this role, and they knew that they were not making good decisions and they felt some guilt about it, and they were put into that position for, uh... 'Cause it's largely, promotions are largely tenure based, so just by being around long enough you end up in these roles.

   14. CWChris Williamson8:08

       Mm.

   15. SCSam Corcos8:08

       That's a whole set of problems in the government is that, uh, almost everyone in the performance reviews, almost everyone gets a four or a five, no matter what. And so it's very hard to make sure that the people in these roles are actually the ones who know what they're doing. So some of these folks were really hardworking, good people, they're just put in a position where they could not be successful.

   16. CWChris Williamson8:30

       Mm.

   17. SCSam Corcos8:30

       And I talked to some of them afterwards and, like, they're obviously not happy, but they didn't lose their jobs. They're just on administrative leave so that we can shuffle things around, but, you know, it's, a lot of them really understand why this is happening and they, they know deep down that this is for the best. Uh, but it is, it is uncomfortable.

   18. CWChris Williamson8:51

       Just lingering on your appointment first.

   19. SCSam Corcos8:54

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson8:55

       What is the role that this executive order thing plays in what you do and how you arrived at this?

   21. SCSam Corcos9:02

       Um, I think the Doge executive order sets up the ability to create the office. I was actually never... I think this, this is, uh, a common question is like, "What even is Doge?" (laughs)

   22. CWChris Williamson9:13

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   23. SCSam Corcos9:14

       And, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's an office in the Executive Office of the Presidency, the U.S. Doge Service. Um, I've never been a part of that organization. I've, I was brought in directly as an employee of Treasury. I get my deliverables and my instructions from the Treasury team. I coordinate a lot with the Doge people. I think the, uh, there's been a lot of court documents that describe me as Doge-affiliated. So-

   24. CWChris Williamson9:38

       Like you're Doge-adjacent.

   25. SCSam Corcos9:39

       Doge-adjacent, yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson9:40

       Yeah.

   27. SCSam Corcos9:40

       So like-

   28. CWChris Williamson9:41

       Alt-Doge.

   29. SCSam Corcos9:41

       (laughs) Yeah. It's like whatever these definitions are, it's kind of amorphous. Um, but yeah, I, it's, it's allowed us to, uh, there's, there are specific authorities in that executive order that give us the ability to review contracts and to make sure that we have review on a lot of the things that are being done in these agencies.

   30. CWChris Williamson10:04

       Are you different as a political appointee rather than a career public servant?
3. 11:19 – 25:05

   What It’s Really Like Working for the US Government

   1. SCSam Corcos11:19

   2. CWChris Williamson11:19

      Mm. America has the fifth highest government expenditure per capita in the world.

   3. SCSam Corcos11:23

      Hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:25

      Is that a good thing?

   5. SCSam Corcos11:26

      I did not know that. That's, uh, probably not. (laughs) I think in theory it's fine if there wasn't such a large deficit. If we were, if we were not going into such debt in order to pay for this, I think it would be fine. But the, uh, our national debt is reaching a, a critical point where we will never... There's like some runaway effect that we need to, we need to get that under control.

   6. CWChris Williamson11:58

      I want to know how the gov... Oh, there we go.

   7. SCSam Corcos12:01

      (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson12:01

      This is the usdebtclock.org, and all of the numbers are massive. What stands out here?

   9. SCSam Corcos12:09

      I mean, the $37 trillion.

   10. CWChris Williamson12:12

       Where's that?

   11. SCSam Corcos12:13

       Right over there.

   12. CWChris Williamson12:13

       Over my shoulder.

   13. SCSam Corcos12:14

       That's really the top line number.

   14. CWChris Williamson12:15

       Okay.

   15. SCSam Corcos12:16

       Uh, it's, uh, just an astoundingly large number. We have, uh, $100,000 in debt per citizen. Um-

   16. CWChris Williamson12:27

       And it's going up at about a $100,000 a, a second.

   17. SCSam Corcos12:30

       (laughs) Yep, pretty much. Yeah. That's the, that's really the intent of Doge and a lot of s-

   18. CWChris Williamson12:36

       What's the Doge Clock? What's that?

   19. SCSam Corcos12:38

       I don't actually know. I think that's maybe counting the amount of money saved from Doge, but-

   20. CWChris Williamson12:42

       Yeah, it looks like it.

   21. SCSam Corcos12:43

       ... maybe the, based on the goals of the organization.

   22. CWChris Williamson12:46

       So I'm interested in how the government operates internally. Uh, what's it like inside of it? Everybody thinks about this. You hear the stories of, you know, the sort of, um, hallowed halls, the chesterfield sofas, the-

   23. SCSam Corcos13:00

       Yeah. (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson13:00

       ... sort of cigar lounge ty ... I might be speaking a bit British here. But still, uh-

   25. SCSam Corcos13:04

       (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson13:04

       ... what is being inside of the government like? Uh, how slow and ossified is it? How keen are people to change? Are people just sort of sat back with their feet up, not doing any work?

   27. SCSam Corcos13:16

       I'll, uh, I'll give two different examples that show how, how it can go. So this kinda ties back to what I mentioned around I ... From the conversations I've had with friends of mine who have been in previous administrations that things are slow, decisions don't get made. Everyone ... The whole name of the game is cover your ass. Everyone is like, "Every decision is made by committee, so no one can be blamed." Th- that's the whole game. It's all about optics.

   28. CWChris Williamson13:44

       Mm.

   29. SCSam Corcos13:45

       Um, it ... At least in my limited experience, I've only been in government for six months and I've only really been in Treasury, uh, we're lucky, as I think many of the other agencies are, that we have a secretary, somebody who's leading the organization, who's willing to make the hard calls. Oftentimes everyone knows what needs to be done, but there's just a lack of willingness to do it. So, uh, the example that I gave before, putting those people on leave, uh, that was a decision that the secretary's team had to make. And after we did it, there was about a week of everyone panicking and then everything almost immediately got better. As in better than it was even before.

   30. CWChris Williamson14:25

       Mm.
4. 25:05 – 37:46

   How Do You Change the System?

   1. CWChris Williamson25:05

      How hard is it to get change to happen, then, just across the board? It seems like there's some protections in place, um, there is this odd tenured professor thing going on, uh, very procedural, uh, there is a disincentive for starting that process because you're gonna get kicked in the ass off the unions. Uh, there will be social pressure as well. Oh, did you hear about Sandra? Sandra got, you know, let go by that, that Sam guy from Doge again. Uh, if you wanna make some changes happen, how much of a solvent have you been able to be with these new sort of powers to step in and, and actually make shit happen?

   2. SCSam Corcos25:42

      Yeah. I would say there are, there are certain things that are relatively easy to get the first step in. This is, this is one of the biggest surprises for me is, uh, specifically, uh, as having been a CEO before, one of the things that you learn is that you have to be very careful with what you say to the team. Because if you suggest an idea, it might just become the new company priority without you realizing it-

   3. CWChris Williamson26:20

      Yeah.

   4. SCSam Corcos26:20

      ... and people just immediately action this thing. Uh, it is about as far the opposite of that as you can imagine in the government. Um-

   5. CWChris Williamson26:31

      You can say whatever you want and people just continue on the existing train tracks.

   6. SCSam Corcos26:33

      Yeah. Like, the president puts out an executive order that says, "This is the new priority." The secretary sends a message to the whole comp- the whole organization and says, "This is the new priority." And then you check in a couple weeks later and everyone's just like, "What? Which thing?" And the, the number of times that I have had to just, like, really hound people to get these done, you can often find that these... Sometimes you, you have this thought of, "You know what we should really have? We should have this policy in place, but nobody's doing it, so we should write this policy." And then you discover that's actually been the policy for 15 years. (laughs) Somebody 15 years ago had this idea, but it didn't actually happen.

   7. CWChris Williamson27:14

      Could you give me an example of something?

   8. SCSam Corcos27:16

      Yeah. I mean, Do Not Pay is a specific one. So Do Not Pay is, like, it's a list of whenever there's, like, a, a fraudster using a particular bank account. Before you send out money to that bank account, you wanna check it against the list of known fraudulent bank accounts, and that's a, that's a thing that makes sense that you'd want to do. Um, that's been a thing that was supposed to be implemented in, like, 2013, so this isn't, this isn't new. Um, but the, I would say, if I were to say it concisely, the biggest surprise is that, uh, executive orders are not self-actualizing. Just having the policy is a very small part of the amount of work that actually needs to get done to get these things implemented-

   9. CWChris Williamson28:04

      Mm.

   10. SCSam Corcos28:04

       ... and under the hood, you really have to, you have to hound people. I think if, if I were to say the one thing that the Doge people are particularly good at, it's knowing what the priorities are and making sure they get done.

   11. CWChris Williamson28:23

       The enforcement, in a way.

   12. SCSam Corcos28:25

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson28:25

       Interesting.

   14. SCSam Corcos28:26

       And sometimes just doing it. There's, there's a lot of times when there just is not the talent or capacity in-house to get it delivered, and the process for outsourcing it to a contractor is so cumbersome and onerous that sometimes you just have to do it yourself.

   15. CWChris Williamson28:42

       Have you spoken to Dominic Cummings?

   16. SCSam Corcos28:44

       No.

   17. CWChris Williamson28:45

       You know who he is? He was, uh, Boris Johnson's, uh, enforcer, right-hand, during COVID.

   18. SCSam Corcos28:51

       Mm.

   19. CWChris Williamson28:51

       He was also the guy that Benedict Cumberbatch played in the movie about Cambridge Analytica-

   20. SCSam Corcos28:57

       Oh, yeah. (laughs)

   21. CWChris Williamson28:57

       ... uh, for Brexit.

   22. SCSam Corcos28:58

       Mm.

   23. CWChris Williamson28:59

       So, um, technically proficient, has a Substack. You know, he's, like, sort of modern DGen, does podcasts wearing a baseball cap.

   24. SCSam Corcos29:05

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CWChris Williamson29:06

       Anyway, I think it'd be interesting for you to speak to him.

   26. SCSam Corcos29:08

       Sure.

   27. CWChris Williamson29:08

       So I'll, I'll, I'll intro you. But he famously brought up a bunch of stories, I'm gonna just give you a few that will maybe make you feel a little bit less bad about your situation. Uh, one was during COVID, uh, there was no way to keep the figures centralized, so they were written on pieces of paper and then he would write them on a whiteboard. And Boris apparently was just shooting from the hip based on what newspapers were put in front of him that day-

   28. SCSam Corcos29:38

       Mm-hmm.

   29. CWChris Williamson29:38

       ... and that was where the policies came from.

   30. SCSam Corcos29:40

       Mm.
5. 37:46 – 43:51

   What Has Sam Sacrificed for the Government?

   1. SCSam Corcos37:46

   2. CWChris Williamson37:46

      What have you had to give up to take on this role?

   3. SCSam Corcos37:50

      Uh, well, the simplest one is money, but, like, you can make money later. The- I think the biggest- the- the hardest selling point for this is that, uh, it's not just that you make less money, that's fine, but for the types of people that they wanna bring on, the pitch that you have to tell them is like, "I hope you have a lot of money in savings because as a result in taking this job, you'll probably burn down a lot of your savings." And so I've been trying to advocate for, uh, just make it... These are called, uh, th- the... A lot of these leadership roles are SES. There's the generals, GS, which is like most government employees, and then there's the SES, which is the executive leadership group. There's about 8,000 SES, if memory serves. Um, just make the compensation average, just like industry average. I think the- the role that I'm in should probably be compensated something in the range of like a VP of engineering at Walmart would be probably a reasonable comp. But, uh, this role, the CIO often makes less than the engineers on the team, and I think that, uh, it leads to a lot of challenges when it comes to both keeping people in there who actually care.

   4. CWChris Williamson39:08

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SCSam Corcos39:09

      Like, thi- this is... I- I found myself, uh, struggling with this where there are some contract, there's one that comes to mind that was a couple weeks ago, $35 million for some set of new toys that we really didn't need, but it's technically in the budget, and I just said, "No, we don't need this." And a lot of people were upset, and I found myself in the back of my head going like, "Why do I care? This is not my money. I could just say yes and then this problem goes away and no one will care. There's not a single person that will care. By me saying no, onl- there are only people who are upset and there's like this ambiguous win for the taxpayer."

   6. CWChris Williamson39:50

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SCSam Corcos39:51

      Uh, of course, I still did say no, but you can- you can feel that in the back of your head and you're thinking like, "You really need people in these positions to care enough to be willing to make those hard calls."

   8. CWChris Williamson40:03

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   9. SCSam Corcos41:15

      Hmm. I'm not sure that that's the framing. I would say, why should they trust people with substantial relevant industry experience (laughs) versus people who oftentimes stumble their way into these leadership roles? I think that's probably the way that I would frame it. Um, and it's not even like trust as in they're gonna do anything nefarious. It's just when you work in an organization, you want your leaders to make good decisions. And I think especially within technology, you want people who make good decisions in these roles. And one of the consequences of not having this is just this contractor bloat, and like a- a very specific and relevant example is the amount of money that we were spending at the IRS on cybersecurity contractors was just astounding.

   10. CWChris Williamson42:18

       Oh.

   11. SCSam Corcos42:18

       It was hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And we were doing a contract review and we asked all of the leaders of these groups to justify their contracts, like which of these are mission critical? Which of these are not? Which can we descope? The cyber team came back, said 100% of their spend was mission critical. Not a single thing could be changed. We moved on during that administrative leave portion, we- we put those leaders on leave, we brought in the cyber engineers who really understood what these contracts do, and we just went line by line.And on I, I would guess about a third of them, we hadn't even used this vendor in years and we were still paying them $10, $20, $30 million a year, and just nobody cares. And when it's not your money, there is some non-zero risk that if you cancel a contract, something bad might happen and there is zero benefit of canceling it for you-

   12. CWChris Williamson43:19

       Mm.

   13. SCSam Corcos43:20

       ... at all. There's zero benefit. You can just ask for more money and you will probably get it and then that's it. So finding people who are willing to make those calls, and this kind of ties into the, the industry comparison, if the IRS were a private company, it would have gone bankrupt many, many years ago because people would stop buying the service because it's bad.

   14. CWChris Williamson43:41

       Mm.

   15. SCSam Corcos43:42

       You'd have some feedback loop where people recognize these problems and they s- they, they stop funding it.

6. 43:51 – 53:47

   The Procurement Process is Broken

   1. SCSam Corcos43:51

   2. CWChris Williamson43:51

      Government contractors have been pretty vilified, I think, by Doge and other people over the last few months. How come? Like, what is it specifically about the contractors that have, uh, got the Eye of Sauron turned around onto them?

   3. SCSam Corcos44:05

      There are many things. (laughs) I think the biggest one is, uh, this core incentive misalignment problem, which is the pricing is often arbitrary, and they will claim that it's not. They say, "Oh, it's firm-fixed price," kind of like the one that I mentioned earlier. They said, "Oh, we didn't change the price at all. It's firm-fixed price. We charge the same price to everyone. It's just a scope change." And it's like, okay, but, like, we're not getting anything different and it costs more. So, what's going on here? Um, a lot of the contractors, some of this is not even specifically the fault of the contractors. So like, I'll give you, I'll give you a specific example of a type of problem that you experience. So, if you want to do something simple like, "Hey, I wanna sign up for this online service and it's like $10," there might be some threshold where you can do it, but in general, it's like, great, we need to set up a contract vehicle, which could take a year, and you have to go through this whole rigmarole of like a competitive bidding process is what it's called. The, the procurement systems that we have today, the process that we go through to procure things is totally and utterly broken and it leads to disastrous and bad outcomes. So like if you wanted to do that, you'd have to do this competitive bid, and this is at least the case for IRS, I, I know from other discussions this is the case a lot of other agencies as well, which is that the, uh... If you are in technology and you need a specific piece of software, you'll write up the RFP, the, the proposal for what you need. That then goes to the procurement team. At that point, it's basically a black box. Usually, the engineer has no further input into what is selected, who selects it, what... They'll often just end up with some random vendor for something that is somewhat related to what they asked for and then they just have to make do. The other challenge is that because we have these salary caps for most, for all roles really, but for a lot of the very specialized technical roles, we can't really be competitive with hiring some of these roles. So, uh, in the early to mid-career, we can actually be reasonably competitive. We can pay engineers something like $160, $180. The cap is $226, I believe. So you can be reasonably competitive for those roles. But once you get into like mid to late career, which is when people really specialize, there's just no way to pay $250,000 ever. It just does not exist. And so there, there are some, I think there's a special thing where there are a total of 800 people in the government that can exceed that number and it requires a whole process to do, but the only way you can hire that $250,000 person, the way that you would do it is you would hire some contractor, one of these large entities that I mentioned before. You pay them $500,000 to funnel $250,000 to the person that you actually wanted to hire.

   4. CWChris Williamson47:18

      Mm. And they'll arbitrage off the top.

   5. SCSam Corcos47:20

      And then they'll arbitrage off the top and this whole system incentivizes those kinds of things.

   6. CWChris Williamson47:27

      How important is getting above $225 for the sort of technical talent that you need to run the government?

   7. SCSam Corcos47:32

      Well, this is the, this is the interesting thing is that for the most part you don't, but there are some that are crucially important. Um, the IRS as I mentioned has, when I arrived had about 8,500 people in IT. It's now about 6,000 plus another, I think, 6,500 contractors.

   8. CWChris Williamson47:52

      (laughs) Yeah.

   9. SCSam Corcos47:54

      Yep. And so the, the numbers are often misleading and you, it's hard to really get a handle on who is doing what and how many people are there. Um, there are maybe a hundred of those roles in total where you would really like to be able to pay up to maybe $300,000-

   10. CWChris Williamson48:14

       Mm.

   11. SCSam Corcos48:14

       ... and it would make such an impact on the organization to be able to retain your really technical high-context people that are there already-

   12. CWChris Williamson48:25

       Mm.

   13. SCSam Corcos48:25

       ... and to be able to bring in people who have a lot of experience with this stuff.

   14. CWChris Williamson48:29

       If you fix the contractor problem, what would improve?

   15. SCSam Corcos48:33

       Well, uh, I'll give you another specific example of like the contract, the, the procurement process generally is we, we have this big initiative for, uh, to eliminate paper processing at the IRS. We spend something ballpark with like labor and all this stuff, ballpark a half a billion dollars a year on paper processing. Um, the...... uh, we wanna use external vendors. This is what people in the commercial, uh, in the commercial space do all the time. There are vendors, they take in paper, they use, uh, robots to digitize them, and they basically just send you an API request. So it, technically, you're still receiving paper, but your, your organization doesn't even need to know about that. It's just-

   16. CWChris Williamson49:22

       You don't need a warehouse, you don't need-

   17. SCSam Corcos49:24

       You don't need any of that, yeah. We have this gigantic warehouse in Kansas City. I can show you pictures, like, there's paper stacked to the ceiling.

   18. CWChris Williamson49:30

       (laughs)

   19. SCSam Corcos49:30

       And it's just some of these things are months, sometimes even years backlogged just, like, sitting there 'cause it takes so long to process these things.

   20. CWChris Williamson49:39

       Mm-hmm.

   21. SCSam Corcos49:39

       So, um, the, uh ... When I first started, I said, "This is really obvious. It's way less expensive to use a vendor. It scales way better. There are far fewer issues using these vendors, so we should just do that." Great. We started the process. We, we have to write up the proposal. We, we do a competitive bidding process to get the vendors. We get a bunch of vendors who sign up. Cool. We pick a couple of the vendors. Then it gets contested, which is a thing where if you believe ... If you're one of the other vendors and you believe that the process was unfair or that one of the other vendors was selected unfairly-

   22. CWChris Williamson50:20

       Mm-hmm.

   23. SCSam Corcos50:20

       ... you can contest it.

   24. CWChris Williamson50:21

       Mm-hmm.

   25. SCSam Corcos50:21

       It costs, I believe, $100-

   26. CWChris Williamson50:23

       Mm-hmm.

   27. SCSam Corcos50:23

       ... and you can just do it. Anyone can do it. And then the process stops for 30 days. And then there was some situation we had to re-compete it, which then takes another, however, 30, 60 days. Then you have to do an, like, you have to do a new analysis, then it gets contested again, and then it's just like we, I don't even... We started this process of zero paper in April. We don't even have the contract awarded yet to start on the project, and this costs us more than a million dollars a day that we don't have this implemented and nobody cares because we just have to follow the process. Because if you don't, it can get overturned and it can get contested. And it's just like the, like, it's just, it's maddening.

   28. CWChris Williamson51:13

       Well-

   29. SCSam Corcos51:13

       It's, it's a million dollars a day, and I'm trying to make this point. We need this done. We need to start. I don't care which vendors we use. We need to start moving on this project, and it's like, well, you know, we have to wait for another 30 days before we can do anything because of this rule and then ... But, but you can also see how this exists for a reason, which is you don't want, you don't want people to just choose their buddy's company, right? That's, I'm sure there's-

   30. CWChris Williamson51:40

       Some checks and balances.
7. 53:47 – 1:01:28

   How Much Money Does the Government Really Spend?

   1. SCSam Corcos53:47

   2. CWChris Williamson53:47

      It, there's sort of a strange, um, contrast going on here because people say the budgets are tight-

   3. SCSam Corcos53:53

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson53:53

      ... in government. But you seem to be saying the opposite at the same time. Which one's true? Are there misconceptions about how much money government spends?

   5. SCSam Corcos54:03

      I think the, if I'm a, if I'm gonna steelman the way that, like, when, when people are in the government and they say that budgets are tight, I think probably the fairest way to describe it is they're saying that for the things that are important that we want to spend money on, we are not allowed to. I think that's probably the fairest way to describe it. It's not that there's a lack of money overall. Like, the overall budget ... Yeah, (laughs) the overall budgets are astoundingly large, but when they say, "Hey, we'd like to spend $10,000 on this thing," it's like, "Well, which contract vehicle are you gonna use?" "Oh, well, we don't have one." "Okay, well, you need a competitive bidding process. Maybe in a year and a half you can get that, and we will have spent a million dollars to try to come up with some contract vehicle so that you could spend $10,000." And so the amount of overhead ... I, I've described it to a friend of mine recently as, in government, everything is at least medium hard.There is no, like, just go, "Oh, yeah, that's simple," just go, you can handle that. Everything requires so much time and overhead to do, especially with all this contract nonsense that it's, uh, the... If you wanna do something very simple, if you wanna hire good people, the, the problem is you, you can't spend money on things that are useful because there's so much overhead to do all these things that you're, you're trapped. And so the amount of, I don't wanna call it discretionary, but it's really, like, the... If you know what's important, like the, the paper initiative that I mentioned, I could argue budgets are tight because, like, we can't get money for this thing, but we have money for this thing. We just can't do it, we're stuck.

   6. CWChris Williamson55:49

      Mm-hmm. So legislation is tight, budgets are wide.

   7. SCSam Corcos55:53

      You could say that, or you could say the rules are tight, the rules are-

   8. CWChris Williamson55:57

      Mm-hmm.

   9. SCSam Corcos55:57

      ... cumbersome and onerous 'cause most of the stuff for, it's called FAR, um, Federal Acquisitions Regulation, I think is what it stands for, I don't think hardly any of that involves legislation. It's just, like, compounded rule-making from GSA and other groups that just make it really hard to do these things.

   10. CWChris Williamson56:18

       When it comes to the big spend in government, how much of this is negligence, fraud, incompetence, waste? Like, how culpable is anybody here? Because it sounds like everyone has plausible deniability.

   11. SCSam Corcos56:36

       Yeah. I, I think one of the things that's been a, a strange observation is this, this term waste, fraud, and abuse. Um, it's, it... You know, Trump in his first campaign ran on drain the swamp. This has been a longstanding campaign goal. Um, I think what was most surprising was discovering how, uh, how gray the boundaries are between these concepts of, uh, what is waste, what is fraud, and what is abuse. I'll give you, like, a very specific example. This was not at our agency, but I was talking to another CIO who's dealing with this. They were doing contract review, and they disc- they found a contract for a piece of software that's, like, $20 million a year that has been on the books for, like, five to 10 years, and one of the DOJ initiatives was, uh, matching the number of licenses that we pay for with the number of licenses that are in use.

   12. CWChris Williamson57:41

       Mm-hmm.

   13. SCSam Corcos57:42

       And they discovered that we'd been paying for these licenses, and not only was nobody using it now, no one had ever used it. N- not a single license had ever been activated for this product, and it was set to just effectively auto-renew, and every time it would come up for renewal, people would say, "Oh, yeah, it's mission critical. We have to keep it," because nobody really knew what it was for, who used it.

   14. CWChris Williamson58:05

       Mm-hmm.

   15. SCSam Corcos58:06

       So is that waste? Is it fraud? Is it abuse? S- I think we could say it's wasteful, at a minimum, but you start looking into, like, "Oh, well, who runs the company?" It's like, "Oh, well, that, that's interesting 'cause that guy used to be in the government. I wonder if there's anything there." But nobody really looks into it.

   16. CWChris Williamson58:26

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SCSam Corcos58:28

       These, these boundaries get very fuzzy, and it's really hard to know what's going on. Um, the, uh... I would say in, in terms of, like, abuse as well, this ties into some of the other procurement problems. Like, uh, there's this whole program within, uh, the Small Business Administration that has some requirements on how many of your contracts go to small businesses, and there's this... It's the 8A program, and there's something called, uh, the Small Disadvantaged Businesses, and frankly, it's just a huge scam. The... If you, if you give a contract to a Small Disadvantaged Business, you can basically skip the whole procurement process. You can skip the competitive bidding process-

   18. CWChris Williamson59:12

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   19. SCSam Corcos59:12

       You can pick the vendor that you want.

   20. CWChris Williamson59:14

       Mm-hmm.

   21. SCSam Corcos59:14

       It's like you get the fast lane-

   22. CWChris Williamson59:15

       Mm-hmm.

   23. SCSam Corcos59:15

       ... but it's capped. Uh, for some of these groups, it's capped at $25 million. So this is one of the things when I was doing contract review, and you see all these things, like 24.9 million, 24.9 million, 24.9 million, and you're like, "Okay, something's going on here, and you can skip it." And these contractors or these, these... this workaround, they will often take 10, 20, sometimes 50% off the top of a contract to do actually nothing. On, on the books, they're supposed to do 51% of the work is what it says-

   24. CWChris Williamson59:50

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   25. SCSam Corcos59:50

       ... but they never do 51% of the work.

   26. CWChris Williamson59:52

       Mm-hmm.

   27. SCSam Corcos59:53

       I shouldn't say never, almost never. I have yet to find an example-

   28. CWChris Williamson59:57

       (laughs)

   29. SCSam Corcos59:57

       ... having looked for this-

   30. CWChris Williamson59:59

       Good caveat.
8. 1:01:28 – 1:10:56

   Why is Finding Engineers Proving Difficult?

   1. CWChris Williamson1:01:28

      (whoosh) A increasingly large group of people are getting increasingly rich off of this.

   2. SCSam Corcos1:01:33

      Yeah. That's right.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:01:36

      How's that feel from the inside? And how's that feel as an American?

   4. SCSam Corcos1:01:42

      I would say from the inside, it's, uh, it's obviously very frustrating. I think it's, in some ways, being in the role that I'm in, I feel encouraged because you can see how to fix it.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:01:55

      Look at these big glaring problems.

   6. SCSam Corcos1:01:57

      Yeah. It's, it's, uh, it's both concerning and encouraging at the same time.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:02:03

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SCSam Corcos1:02:03

      Because you can see, you can see how bad it is, but also you have such an impact on being able to change these because you have the willingness and the authority to do it.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:02:14

      Yeah.

   10. SCSam Corcos1:02:15

       And you can have, you know, 10, 100 million dollar swings with very little effort-

   11. CWChris Williamson1:02:21

       Mm.

   12. SCSam Corcos1:02:22

       ... because people just haven't really looked at these things before. So, uh, I think the, the, the biggest surprise to me has been for so many of these things, just the, the scale of how problematic a lot of these contracts are. I think everyone kind of knows that the government is inefficient, and that's kind of okay. We all know that, and-

   13. CWChris Williamson1:02:42

       Mm.

   14. SCSam Corcos1:02:43

       But we all think these things might be 2X or 3X inefficient, but you find examples where things are 100X, 1,000X beyond what you pay in the commercial sector-

   15. CWChris Williamson1:02:54

       Mm.

   16. SCSam Corcos1:02:54

       And it's just, uh, there's just no excuse for it. It's crazy.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:02:58

       Is there anything in addition to the technical talent problem that's contributing to dysfunction of IT systems in the government?

   18. SCSam Corcos1:03:11

       I think upstream of all of these things is leadership, and, uh, I would s- I would separate out the, call it political leadership from administration to administration, and much more the career civil servant leadership.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:03:26

       Mm.

   20. SCSam Corcos1:03:26

       Um, there are some examples of, uh, entities that are within my purview that are pretty well run. Um, FinCEN, which does a lot of, uh, they do a lot of, uh, international finance, uh, investigations. Uh, they have their CIO, Amy Taylor, who's technical. She's been there for a long time, and she runs a tight ship. And you can see downstream of good leadership tends to lead to good teams.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:03:57

       Mm. Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   22. SCSam Corcos1:03:57

       They tend to have technical talent. And you see some of these organizations that have had, uh, like Tim Gribbin's over at, uh, Bureau of the Fiscal Service, he's been running that for six years. He's had stable leadership. He is very intentional about who's on his team. Uh, they do performance management. They, they take it seriously, and they have a pretty good team. Um, so if you have good leadership, things like what is the technical talent of the people on the ground tends to work itself out because the people at the top care enough to follow through on ensuring that you have that.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:04:34

       They continue to find people until they get the right technical talent.

   24. SCSam Corcos1:04:36

       Yep.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:04:37

       Yeah. I, I, it's a rule of business that A-grade players hire-

   26. SCSam Corcos1:04:40

       Yes.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:04:41

       ... A-grade players, but B-grade players hire C- and D-grade players.

   28. SCSam Corcos1:04:44

       That's right. And the, uh, so many of these things... So, at the IRS, which is, to be blunt, has had poor technical leadership for roughly 40 years, it's just this compounding issue. So, we... At the IRS, the policy for a long time has been we don't do technical interviews. We just do resume review. So if you were to apply-

   29. CWChris Williamson1:05:08

       Mm-hmm.

   30. SCSam Corcos1:05:08

       ... and you just wrote the word Java on your resume, we will just assume that you know how to do this.
9. 1:10:56 – 1:15:54

   Are Young People Favoured for Government Jobs?

   1. SCSam Corcos1:10:56

   2. CWChris Williamson1:10:56

      Doege became, uh, famous for hiring young people.

   3. SCSam Corcos1:11:00

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:11:00

      Uh, infants, some are accused.

   5. SCSam Corcos1:11:02

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson1:11:03

      W- why is the federal government behind the private sep- sector typically when it comes to hiring young people?

   7. SCSam Corcos1:11:10

      Yeah. I think the, the biggest reason is, uh, there are, there were actually some quite successful programs. There's one called Pathways, I think it was maybe before Pathways, but there was a program that used to exist where you could recruit people out of colleges, and there was an internship program. But this actually maybe ties into what we were talking about before of, like, so many of these things are just unforced errors, where we used to have this internship program. We'd get people out of college or grad school, they would be in the job, they'd see if they like it, and then we'd wanna hire them. And then we could hire them. That worked. This was, like, early 2010s. Then there was a change that said, well, you can't just hire them because that... I, I believe it has something to do with, like, they thought it violated something around veterans' preference or something. There was some reason why-

   8. CWChris Williamson1:12:09

      Mm.

   9. SCSam Corcos1:12:09

      ... they didn't want you to just be able to hire people normally anymore through that. So, they had to go through a competitive process, finger quotes, right, which is the one that I basically just described before. And so, uh, it was often, and some of, some of the people who've been there for a long time told me, it was usually the case that those interns who were actually really good, who they really wanted, would not be the ones that could be selected-

   10. CWChris Williamson1:12:36

       Mm.

   11. SCSam Corcos1:12:36

       ... 'cause they were deemed unqualified or they were deemed, uh, insufficiently experienced or they did not have enough of a veteran's preference to make it to the top of the stack. Um, the, a lot of the hiring processes that we have are, uh, they... For a lot of these roles, you are, you are specifically instructed to hire the minimally qualified candidate, which, which means you're instructed to hire effectively the first person who meets the minimum threshold.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:13:11

       Okay. That sounds like it would be quick though.

   13. SCSam Corcos1:13:14

       It is quick.

   14. CWChris Williamson1:13:14

       All right.

   15. SCSam Corcos1:13:15

       It's, it's quick if you don't care who you get. (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson1:13:18

       Right. But it's, it's quick to get people in who are often underqualified and not fit for purpose and slow to get them out.

   17. SCSam Corcos1:13:25

       Yes. Effectively impossible to get them out, but, yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson1:13:27

       Right. So you hire quickly, fire slowly.

   19. SCSam Corcos1:13:29

       Yeah. Or never, fire never, yeah. You, you can hire slow- there are different hiring authorities. There are some roles where you have something called direct hire authority-

   20. CWChris Williamson1:13:39

       Mm.

   21. SCSam Corcos1:13:39

       ... which just allows you to-... pick the people who you want for specific roles. There's a very limited number of roles that have direct hire authority-

   22. CWChris Williamson1:13:48

       Mm-hmm.

   23. SCSam Corcos1:13:48

       Most of these are in this competitive process, um, and the competitive process often means that you will end up with candidates that are not the ones that you want.

   24. CWChris Williamson1:13:57

       You are painting a picture that is almost exactly what I thought it was going to be.

   25. SCSam Corcos1:14:01

       (laughs) Oh, yeah?

   26. CWChris Williamson1:14:02

       Like, uh, you know, as a immigrant foreigner who doesn't really pay much attention or care about what goes on inside of the US government-

   27. SCSam Corcos1:14:09

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson1:14:09

       ... uh, this is precisely what I thought it would be.

   29. SCSam Corcos1:14:11

       Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson1:14:12

       Uh, it is ossified, right?
10. 1:15:54 – 1:25:55

    US Media is Fuelling Federal Mistrust

    1. SCSam Corcos1:15:54

    2. CWChris Williamson1:15:54

       Mm-hmm. What's the federal government missing that the private sector isn't? Is it, uh, competition, incentives, accountability?

    3. SCSam Corcos1:16:04

       (inhales deeply) I think there's one thing that it w- it is always missing and will always miss, and this is just a ... I would describe it as an assumption that you have to make when you're thinking about designing any system, and it's kind of how we got here to begin with, which is there is no feedback loop when it's the government. It's kind of like why FDR was so opposed to public sector unions, is because in the private sector you can unionize, but if you demand too much from the company, eventually the company will just die.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:16:34

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SCSam Corcos1:16:35

       But the government won't. You can just demand more, you can just work less. They, there is no counterbalance to the unions-

    6. CWChris Williamson1:16:43

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    7. SCSam Corcos1:16:43

       ... in the public sector. It just, you can just always say yes and nothing happens. The debt just gets larger, the amount of money just goes up, and there is no force that pushes against it. So, um, the, the assumption that you always have to make, and why we end up with so many of these rules around personnel, around contracts, is that there is no natural incentive structure that prevents government from doing bad things.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:17:11

       I, I, I think it doesn't surprise me that this is the sort of challenge that people are facing, but also, 16%, only 16% of Americans trust the federal government. That was some Pew study from 2023, I think. Is that surprising to you, given that you, what you've seen from the inside on what trusting the government means? But you would-

    9. SCSam Corcos1:17:37

       Mm-hmm.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:17:37

        ... trust somebody to, uh, look after your dog. Okay, so what are the things that they need? Well, they need to be driven, they need to be competent, they need to be conscientious and aware, uh, they need to have the skillset that's required to be able to look after a dog, um, they need to not be, uh, malicious against dogs. So there's, you know, the fraud, waste, abuse, you, like, insider tra- all of those things. There's a, a number of different levels that you need to get through in order to be able to think, "I trust this person," and not all of them are malicious, and not all of them are competence-based, but 16% of Americans-

    11. SCSam Corcos1:18:12

        Mm-hmm.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:18:12

        ... trust the federal government. Doesn't seem surprising.

    13. SCSam Corcos1:18:16

        Yeah. I think it's generally good for people to be skeptical of the government. It is the entity with a monopoly on violence. That is a thing that one should inherently be skeptical of. Um, I do wonder how much of that is just ... a, an overexposure to the news. I think that's, uh, there's, there are a lot of things that are ... either completely not real that people believe are true, or they are sufficiently non-representative of reality that they are effectively not real.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:19:01

        Mm-hmm.

    15. SCSam Corcos1:19:01

        And if you go way back, people cared a lot more... I'm sure you've, you know all this stuff. People cared a lot more about th- their local community. There was no 24/7 national news coverage.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:19:14

        Mm-hmm.

    17. SCSam Corcos1:19:15

        But over time, it's basically become a team sport, and people watch it like they're watching football, and these, these things that have always happened sort of on the edges of the government are now front and center, and they look like they are representative of reality when they're not.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:19:34

        Right.

    19. SCSam Corcos1:19:35

        So I don't really know, and I've, it's been interesting to observe from the inside how the tail can wag the dog in a lot of these things, like-A specific example is at the IRS, we hosted for the first time ever, we took 50 of our best engineers who have been there, many for 10, 15 years, across all the different teams. We brought them together for a strategic planning session at Treasury to discuss across all these teams, which rarely talk to each other. What are you seeing? How do we land the plane on this modernization program? It was incredibly useful. People were finding data sources that we didn't even know about. Uh, we were finding all kinds of issues. Problems that were just a coordination problem that had been stuck for years got resolved on the spot, because people could just talk to each other 'cause historically when you have this many layers, for an engineer to talk to another engineer, they've gotta tell their supervisor, who tells their director, who tells the subject matter expert, who goes across to the other team, and then it's got, it goes through like eight layers of filtering, none of whom know anything about this topic.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:20:45

        You can't just Slack them.

    21. SCSam Corcos1:20:46

        You can't just, like, communicate with them.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:20:48

        What is communication? What, what's the platform that you guys use?

    23. SCSam Corcos1:20:51

        Teams typically or email.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:20:52

        Microsoft Teams and email?

    25. SCSam Corcos1:20:54

        Mm-hmm. Yep.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:20:55

        I, I haven't used Teams apart from-

    27. SCSam Corcos1:20:56

        It's very similar to Slack.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:20:57

        Okay. Right.

    29. SCSam Corcos1:20:58

        Yeah. Mm-hmm.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:20:58

        Uh, how many people are in your teams?
11. 1:25:55 – 1:30:04

    DOGE is More Than a Meme

    1. CWChris Williamson1:25:55

       Obviously, a lot of people associate-

    2. SCSam Corcos1:25:56

       Mm-hmm.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:25:57

       ... Doge with Elon. Elon left recently.

    4. SCSam Corcos1:26:00

       Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:26:01

       How big of an impact... Well, actually, uh, even before that-

    6. SCSam Corcos1:26:04

       Yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:26:04

       ... how much of a driving force was Elon in Doge?

    8. SCSam Corcos1:26:09

       Um, in the stuff that I was doing, not a lot. I had very little interaction with him. Um, the... We primarily worked with the secretary's team and within our agency. Um, I think the biggest effect was, um, there was a more... How would I describe it? I think the, the biggest impact was when there was the initial blow up, there was a week of real uncertainty on what it all meant.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:26:49

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SCSam Corcos1:26:49

        Um, but over time, the, uh, the teams had already been so embedded with the agencies and the departments, and since we really take our instructions from them, it didn't have that much of an impact. I think some of the impact is that the inter-agency communication weakened a little bit, um, just because there's less of a central connecting force for these things.

Episode duration: 2:55:44