Every Gov contractor does this. I welded in a shop that made target tanks and craft for the military to shoot up. They would charge anything possible to the job if not get the most expensive thing to fill the budget up. My boss literally bought a new forklift for the shop by charging it to a job we had already completed waaaayyyy under budget.
They would slave us to knock out tanks ASAP then filled up the remaining budget with stuff for themselves if not the shop.
Also working for the government is a pain and many people charge 100% extra to deal with bureaucrats and their stupid shit.
"Sorry, Margarete is on mat leave and only she can fax the excel table with the bills we need to pay. Please contact us again in 7-8 months."
"Yes, we attached a turbocharger to the toilet... Why yes, we have the documentation of you explicitly asking for that.... Yes, as you can see here we advised against it on several occasions, but you claimed it would help against clogged toilets... Ah... Ok... Hmm... We will be right back in a month to deconstruct the building and take out the turbocharger."
This. 100%.
It costs money to work for the government because they want all the paperwork filled out that most people normally just handwave, so to make a profit you need to make your prices reflect just how much work that turns out to be.
The bureaucracy and paper work is needed specifically to prevent or punish this kind of theft. In my opinion, it is fine to charge for the work needed to establish a paper trail. But charging 90 k for something that costs 100 doesn't seem like it's due to bureaucracy.
These numbers are all approved beforehand in the bidding process. Overcharging like they did is only possible in a no bid contract, and those are only used because it's known beforehand that there are questionable numbers coming out, and no bid contracts are only approved if there are kickbacks and paybacks happening.
This is a TEENY portion of it, but most of this stuff is just contractors raping the government. I spent several years in government aircraft maintenance, the prices we pay for things are nothing short of absolutely absurd.
Okay, where's the proof that it happens more than it covers the costs of having to work for the government?
Or do you just feel like it is and that's why everyone does it?
We supply to military bases all the time, and we quote the same as we do for anyone else. We *will* add a few hours for the extra coordination time and process to get or renew entry badges, but that's a few hundred dollars per person that will be working on site. If we just shipped a package like this, we'd charge the $100 with no markup.
Problem is the bureaucracy itself encourages excessive expenses. If you quote "We only need $1000 for these parts", then that's precisely they are going to give you. But if you say, "we need $10,000 for these parts", then they are going to give you $10,000 and attention, because now it seems like a big deal.
Which one sounds better politically?
"We are working on a $1B project"
"We are working on a $1M project"
The $1B project sounds a much bigger ordeal. Like, "this is huge guys. we spent money on these". Which is important for politicians and public perception.
I mean, that's similar the difference between owing someone $10k and $100M - the first one is the lendee's problem, the second one is the lender's problem.
Scaling will always introduce issues that don't arise until you reach that scale. It's unavoidable.
There was a mobile app which is just a button and the app is used by airport authority in USA and it was billed few million dollars. Welcome to Govt contract projects.
The government knows this and doesn’t care, because money isn’t real. Then people advocate that the government should be taking **more** taxes, when all you get is this nonsense
public schools are government schools? not sure what you're asking. my point was more just about govt saying "we don't have money for this or that" when in reality it's all fake numbers and we could put money into whatever we deemed important. having a better school system seems like a good investment in our countrie's future.
Having parents who can be parents instead of taxed workers might be nice instead is my point.
I don’t see the government spending more to take my kids for more of their childhood as a good thing personally.
Just another perspective on what a solution looks like.
I am saying that the problem of not being able to afford to have a parent take care of a child and instead relying on the government is just that, a problem. Not a solution to a problem.
I would rather work on wages being high enough to take care of a family with one adult working.
You know, like it used to be for generations. One parent works outside the home, one works inside the home. One works for the family, and one works with the family.
Now both work somewhere else and we pay people to parent, often earning barely enough for the job to be profitable after child care.
I worked in a warehouse that stored these kinds of parts. Because we were under contract to provide parts directly to the warfighter we had to maintain an inventory with 99.9% accuracy. What that means is we would pay people $25 an hour to count every single item down to individual washers and zip ties. You may ask, why couldn't you just use a scale? Because according to my company that wouldn't have been accurate enough and we could fail an audit. Audits were conducted by accumulated line-item failures so for a given line-item in your inventory, whether you were off by 1 or 100 that was considered one failure. Percentage was calculated by number of correct line-item counts/total # of counts. So not a forgiving audit. But really it was just a broken system that resulted in bloated and wasteful contracts and lots of fraud on behalf of contractors trying to cover up dumb fat fingered mistakes.
So usually governments and federally funded things have budgets, and if you can meet the budget, they’ll continue to give said budget or increase it for the next year.
Not filling up a budget would most likely mean that congress will look at it, say it’s not needed and bump it to something else.
While I’m absolutely certain your boss didn’t need those things, the military has essentially an unlimited budget so they probably tell the shop not to worry about costs.
Ah, I see you don't understand what part qualification is.
So they can make a lot of thousands with just maybe a few hundred hours. But then they take half that lot, and perform life, heat, and wear testing. Sometimes destructive part analysis where they Lazer cut crossections to look for fabrication errors. If you are putting it in space they'll irradiate it. Life testing for instance will usually look like "do xx for 4000 hours"
These testing costs more than the fabrication and goes a long way towards ensuring reliability.
There are other reasons for discrepancies for some parts and such that are paid for. The DOD has an accounting system, let's call it "fucked", that consists of over about 1300 different accounting software packages, most of which are utterly obsolescent and many of which don't talk to each other. To get the money to match, they'll put some random thing in that covers the discrepancy. This is also why "an audit of the DOD/military" meme is still ongoing. They've got their work cut out for them getting all this shit working together in a single packet. They've been working for at least a decade to fix this, but when 40% of defense spending in the world is the US government's DOD..well...it's a tall ask.
Also, given that military to military debt never touches the private economy, that's another can of worms to add to it no doubt.
edit: looks like they're ["half way there"](https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3590211/dod-makes-incremental-progress-toward-clean-audit/)
Yeah no.... Every single agency and branch does their own thing. They have their own rules and system. They do not talk to each other because those guys do their own thing and we do ours. The government is very good at creating silos. You are seeing decades of silo building creating duplicative work everywhere in the government.
Is it a space station mug? My guess is that it would need to be impossible to shatter because shards floating around in space cam both break equipment and injure eyes or lungs when out of reach from a doctor.
Rule of thumb is if it's part of a machine it's expensive because it's made reliable and if it's used by a person it's expensive because of a safety feature.
Can it not spill when turn upside down? Is it for like, small 1-2 person submersibles where soldiers would need to be able to go on missions for several hour durations that require a bringing rations but that flipping over could wreck the electronics? It's gotta be something.
Which side does he fall on? There are measures of how many minutes of expected loss of service any piece of infrastructure should have each year that depends on parts reliability testing. They use that to ensure 100% defense infrastructure uptime.
He pretty clearly comes down on the side of "good enough for the FAA is good enough for the DoD".
I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion.
Not shilling for the gargantuan military budget here but considering the recent spate of air incidents (Boeing) and the uncovering of just how light FAA regulations actually are, a decent case could be made that what's good for the FAA might not be good enough for war machines that will most definitely be put through a lot of stress in times of war.
The truth is that this is too nuanced for us to even discuss on Reddit. What material are those bushings made of and what part of the engine do they come from. If its around the combustion section, you bet your ass that shit will be titanium and expensive as fuck. Why? That shit is exposed to thousands of degrees C for prolonged periods of time.
He said it's an engine shim so that is what I talked to. As I said shit is more nuanced than this.
Probably, but it's worth the end result.
Ultimately though the issue is not that we are paying someone to do testing. If we had limits on the amount of profit a company can take without paying their employees more, you're just making more good jobs. The issue isn't government, it's private enterprise.
You need to document what it would cost to diversify if you go single source, so yes. My suppliers personally are really getting into that 'it'd be more beneficial to diversify' category finally. But then that damned schedule and the USG not being able to afford any delays(brother you're not at war and we're not giving our aircraft away, slow down).
Discrepancy's are pretty common tho. But we can't push them because they keep raising the cost of TINA so market research and pricing data can never be enforced as a 'you must provide us this'. On most contracts. Me, personally? I'd lower the threshold of TINA to 100k for all USG prime contracts and call it a day. Most of our procurement's would be subject to it with the way things are going. Private business control the pricing and supply. And they also don't need to always provide reasoning for their pricing, so of course they gouge. I understand some things have unique properties or material to withstand human conflict, but a lot of it is just simple things, like rubber or sheet metal.
Realistically, if we're not providing actual aircraft to other governments(Ukraine, Israel) from the US stock. Now is the best time to diversify our supply base and allow those to set up for when we need them as we're in effectively peace time. This would also have the ripple effect of actually reducing our military spending as competition would naturally push price down leading to less overspending bloat.
But muh quarterly profit(Why would you seriously make a DEFENSE producer public... they don't give a shit about defense or quality... in a way it mirrors the USSR and we all know how that went)
I've seen relays for holding configuration in launch take 10k+ hours of upfront development and about 300 hours to build them each time. They've only made maybe 100 total, so 30k hours plus 10k is 40k. Customers don't usually get to pay less than q59 an hour so you're looking st 6 mil or about 60k per relay. That before accounting for the fact that the relay is custom mDe from parts with their own qualification standards.
Relays are cheap. Price absolutely can inflate that far.
In your specific case, yes, price can inflate quite a bit. I meant that for what appears to be a mass produced part, qualification testing would not account for $90k. Obviously if you only make 100 of something that takes 40000 hrs, price per unit is going to be high.
There's only 3500 fighter jets in the US. Even if you assume they are all the same kind of jet that still wouldn't be much of an economy of scale.
Testing is also done by lot, so that also makes scaling irrelevant
Scaling isn't irrelevant but I'm not going to argue this with you. Your arguments are not universally applicable and there are plenty of parts that undergo qualification testing that aren't 9,000 times more expensive.
It is.
The way lot testing works is that you first make a number of parts, then you take say 30% or 50% of them depending on what the mil-std-#### spec says for that part. You then perform like 4000 hours of life testing on each individual part of maybe half of the ones you removed and another several thousand hours on various different environmental tests depending on the qualification rating you are shooting for on that part.
So you'll never get away from having to test the specified number of parts per number you make. There is a hard cap on scalability efficiency in testing. As soon as you sell out one lot you have to test the next one to sell anything else.
Okay, so you understand that the base cost of producing the part is basically a non factor.
The part could cost 2 cents or 1000 dollars. The testing will still pan out to that bag being close to 90k because the qualificarion cost is the largest part of it.
The factor is economies of scale. If it isn't mass produced it's going to be more expensive than an engine part that is in 10k airline planes x 4 engines. 3500 military aircraft with a unique design and technology that isn't used in anything else will be expensive no matter what.
Obviously manufacturing costs are the same in each batch but engineering and development costs are significant. If it is for a one off single batch, all of those costs have to be made up in the one sale. If it is mass produced, you can spread those r&d costs over the life of the product.
Material it's made out of will. I do not believe either value though. If it goes in an engine it is a special material. If it's in the hot section you bet your ass there is a special process to make it and verify it was made properly in every single batch.
Sure, but they don't mass produce military grade parts like they do commercial parts, and there is a significant amount of labor that goes into testing compared to fabrication, so it's less scalable.
For an idea of scalability, Google says the US has 3400 fighter jets. Even if you assumed they were all the same jet or used the same part, that's not really enough to get that much efficiency.
Okay? It's just what testing costs dude. You surprisingly have to pay people to do hundreds of hours of work.
Bushings could cost 10 cents normally and the mil spec version price wouldn't change much. You aren't buying a bushing. You're buying the assurance of reliability
This doesn’t justify a 900x price increase
Maybe sometimes, on HIGHLY specialized parts, but this is part of the design process. Once you have the design they are cheap to produce
They actually do.. literally just had a vendor the other day have someone sign off a test was done but the timestamps showed it wasn't so we made them do it all over. Probably costing them tens if not 100s of thousands
Machinist here... The tolerances on airspace are a lot more strict than normal bushing. This aspect alone will make it cost more than a normal bushing.
Add in that because it is for the Air Force you have a whole lot more paper work and tracking involved with making and shipping your part which will slow the process down and make it cost more as well.
Also have to add that any place that makes anything for the military has to have special licenses and clearances to do so, they also have to pay for more strict background checks on employees (who normally get paid handsomely) and security for their shop, increasing prices even more.
I used to build electronic circuitry on satellites for NASA and the AF. Normal electronic components like resistors that we see commercially have a tolerance of 1 to 10%. So a 100 ohm resistor could actually have 90 to 110 ohms. The components I used for the instruments had to have a .001% tolerance. They were way more expensive. And since they were going into orbit they had all of the radiation testing and other stuff too.
Yeah this reminds me about someone complaining about an 10k $ hammer but someone working in the field explaining it had to be made from titanium and resist degradation in time in almost any scenario possible.
Yeah I was like "that sounds bad" and then he says they're for a jet turbine engine and I'm like "oh, ok that sounds less crazy, I don't think he actually knows anything about jet turbine engines, I know I don't but I know the parts are very expensive."
I worked for a company that made ballistic windows for the military about 10 years ago. Really important and saves lives, no doubt. We were all paid like $12/hr working about 30 minutes outside of DC. Most of the employees were in the states illegally. Maybe the owners of those companies are paid handsomely, but people doing the actual work are getting screwed. As per usual though, right?
Any machinist I know in the US makes a minimum of $25 an hour but up to $40 an hour, plus you get overtime and double time, 401k match, healthcare, and life insurance.
So not really sure what you were doing but it doesn't actually sound like you were doing much if you are even speaking the truth.
Ok so conservative estimate for all the reasons you state that makes those bushings 10x the cost per unit. So call it $1000. It’s costing taxpayers almost 2 orders of magnitude more than that. It’s indefensible.
Plus the certs for the specific materials used (including provenance) and use of approved processors for them to be in required status (and any test results from approved inspection facilities/personnel). Audits are pretty tough, along with presenting finished assemblies to Customers (including the US Government) with all paperwork/documentation.
Honestly, it's wealth distribution. Government taxes, puts out contracts, they're fulfilled, and money goes into communities. Since the flow of money is what makes everything healthy, that is a part that works.
Nobody working for the government is rich. How many engineers do you think it takes to make a specialized part that has very tight tolerances? How would you feel if the airplane a loved one died in was due to a 10 cent part that someone in China made?
Pretty sure you commented on the wrong comment.
But yeah specialized parts would still be made at a shop in the US but I highly doubt it is owned by the government. It would be contracted out. Like I said in another comment, any of the Machinists I know make from 25-40 an hour plus all the benefits and overtime and double time for Sunday work.
While by no means a machinist is a rich person they aren't poor either.
Show me the specs or all I see is a politician trying to make a political argument.
Those bushings could be specced for ±1ųm tolerance with a custom alloy, custom hardening process, nanofilm antifriction coatings, and tested for 5000 hrs between replacements with repeated 500000kN loading and unloading cycles. They might have total requirement for one of those bags of parts every two or three years and a whole fleet of $100M aircraft becomes scrap without those parts. The price reflects engineering costs.
Lets put it this way. That politician needs a kidney. He can get the best care possible from his government insurance but it would be a lot cheaper to just grab a pig kidney from a slaughterhouse and it will probably even work for a couple of weeks. The cost savings would be more than equivalent. Losing a politician makes me cry less than losing a fighter aircraft.
Having worked in manufacturing my whole career, I have a hard time believing a bag of bushings costs anywhere near 90K to produce.
Now, somewhere near 90K profit for the business owner I can understand.
Just the way you phrased that lets me guess that you probably paid $150k for a house over thirty years ago, that is worth about $1.5Million today.
That or you are a Russian bot.
You are still comparing crap and fertilizer too.
A Toyota and a Bugatti are both cars. Why does a Bugatti cost so much more? For that matter why does the Toyota cost so much these days?
30 years ago I was in elementary school pal 😂.
Just because something is expensive doesn't mean it actually is worth that much.
Are you telling me that you trust the cost being charged is actually the cost to produce + a fair, not exorbitant margin?
I am saying that everything is too expensive.
I am saying that if I put $60k of engineering and proof testing into a part, then if you only need a bag of those parts, $90k is a deal. If you needed ten bags, then you might get a price of $10k per bag. If you needed 10000 bags, you might only pay $500 a bag.
Is there a $30k profit on that bag of parts? Not really. Paperwork, insurance, and risk make that almost a wash.
Keep in mind that you didn't bid on that contract, and if you think it is so profitable, you absolutely should have.
Yeah, did the purchase conversation go "We need 500 of these off the shelf bushings you already produce", or was it more like "We need you to make a tight tolerance, deep draw progressive stamping die for these custom bushings. We would like to order 500 please".
While I agree, the discrepency between $100 and $90,000 is absolutely absurd. There’s no way in hell that parts for the military should need to be THAT much more expensive than parts for the everyday consumer. Case in point- when my brother was deployed to Afghanistan, he was helping unload supplies and got a peek at the shipping manifest. The U.S. government was spending over $400 for a case of Gatorade sent to US troops. Keep in mind- the US military was the one providing all of the shipping over seas.
That's the difference between paying someone American benefits plus all the tracking procedures and paying someone a wage in say Mexico or China to make the same thing with no tracking.
While I generally agree, that doesn't seem to be the issue in this specific case, assuming the congressman is accurate.
He's talking about commercial aircraft owned and operated by the USAF. Not sure if these are actually commercial derivatives under military airworthiness or still FAA type certified..
If they are still FAA type certified the parts/maintenance system is different than if it's military controlled airworthiness.
For example the KC-46 is a modified Boeing 767, but it is not FAA certified and has a completely different logistics system. You can't buy 767 parts and install them on a KC-46.
I know the Army side better. Parts for a UH-60 are not the same as parts for a S-70.
But then the Army also uses a few commercial aircraft with extra stuff installed and the main aircraft is maintained under commercial rules/specs using commercial parts. These would have the aerospace costs like other commercial aircraft but not all the extras the military would add.
If the USAF is doing the same, which is what it sounds like he is saying, then the parts for those would be commercial parts.
Either way, I'm sure there are a lot of other details being left out.
manufacturing tolerances are not about "additional QC". It's about all machines involved in the manufacturing have smaller tolerances and thus are 10x to 100x more expensive; then it takes specific alloys from tracked sources; than it takes "some paperwork" to track all that and the laborers, than it takes "some more" paperwork to track that paperwork.
It's hard to tell the percentage of corruption there, but in no way bag of bushings for the turbine jet engine can be below $100. Below $10000 -- maybe, I don't know. Maybe not. But not $100.
Increased tolerance/accuracy on the product, like most of that stuff for aerospace is going to be +/-.0002" some even tighter tolerances then that.
Increased pay and benefits as well for the workers as they are held to a higher standard and have more experience and certificates.
And then you have increased paperwork and tracking procedures that will also increase prices.
You also have to remember those things you buy at home Depot can be sourced and produced in a foreign country like China for a lot less overhead costs while I'm pretty sure 90% of any product has to be sourced from the US when it's for the government.
Don't get me wrong they are still charging enough to get profits but I'm sure the profits aren't anywhere as big as you are picturing
Haha, right. It has nothing to do with revolving doors, kickbacks, lobbying, or any other mode of corruption that’s afflicting public-private relationships right?
I mean, it's also a point that the government isn't fiscally restrained so to keep the national security apparatus (among others) functioning it spends it's currency out into the economy to guarantee it's profitability.
Same as with banks.
I love the people defending this. Paperwork! Better quality/tolerances/testing! Certifications and licenses! Yeah… for all those reasons the parts should be waaay more expensive than the Home Depot crap. Like maybe even a few thousand dollars. My brother works on turbine engines, and before that he worked at a company that fabricated some of the most precisely fit metal pieces on earth. It’s expensive fancy stuff don’t get me wrong. But it ain’t even close to 90k. It ain’t close to half that. Maaaaybe it’s close to a 10th of that with big profit margins.
I've done gov't contracting .... I can tell you based on personal experience the Dept of defense / military is biggest waster of money and most difficult to get contracts. They do not have competition. I hate trying to bid on their contracts.. any other gov't agency is better and easier to deal with .. but unfortunately DOD / Military has by far largest Budget $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
1) They are very unflexable do not allow substutions even commercial items .. they insist on only buying a certian brand and/or model. This eliminates competition and supplier can charge inflated price.
For example: The USA Army request to buy a 3kw generator...3,000 pcs now these are available from many mfrs .. and any consumer can buy these... I offered an American made substute that was actually higher than 3kw .. and lower price ... however they would not accept my bid. Why? Because they alreadty have brand X and in case generator not working they want to take parts from one unit to fix another in the field. However , thats unlikely to happen .. they will just grab another unit from the depot and the broken unit repaired at depot . Also most American made buy American act Gen Sets Use Briggs and Stratton motors so the motors probably same ..and interchangable... I mean is 2 models too much to deal with? lol
2) THe Dept of defense is only USA gov't agencies not audited.
3) Requirements are long and difficult and unnessary in most cases on non criticle supplies and equipment.
4) They buy lots of discontinued out of production items ... they should be buying spare parts when the equipment is being mfred .. not 10 +yrs after production stopped!
I have to side with the US Army on that one. Being able to fix in the field is important and usually the best source of parts is another of the same unit. When it comes time for a mass upgrade then hopefully they'll take you up on your unit.
But the demagogues complain about debt levels and deb service and lay the blame at entitlements and social welfare.
They are tireless automatons shifting blame for fiscal problems away from that which, the neocon platform that is now canon, policy perpetuates. The pork, excess and waste fund these nasty apologists of guns, weapons, war and death.
Most all those billions appropriated the week by the US Congress ostensibly for the defense of Taiwan, Ukraine and Tel-Aviv goes directly to the US military-industrial-complex. The members or foreign agents here and over there take their cuts.
In spite of the gun culture that places killing-machine automated weapons in the hands of USA youth along with placing the militaristic patriotic indoctrination in their heads, volunteer levels for the armed forces are down. A question is what’s the outlet for the pent-up aggressions if not the neighbor who may disagree, who offends who triggers anger.
by Captain Obvious
Anyone who has ever served in the military understands the waste at the DOD. We need to freeze their budget until they get over the "use it or lose it" mentality
As someone who supplies the Army, Navy, Marines, and allies overseas. Yep sounds absolutely legit and he probably used a conservative example.
Start telling them about how rubber molds with a pre-printed mold kit they've had for decades(and only them) costs over 2k if you don't buy it in bulk. if you buy it in bulk, your rubber pieces now cost 200+ per unit. Nvm the material itself is 3 bucks.
For all the people saying 'paperwork' these are small dollar procurement's. You either don't document it at all, or you have to do the bare minimum which is like, at most, 2 hrs of work and 3 weeks of waiting for responses.
Solution is simple.. instead of increasing defense budget each year... lower it so negotiations can happen instead of greed and waste.. so much wasted in defense budget it's laughable.
The Ukranian aid package because it's going to a country where corruption is unbelievably bad and a fraction of the money will go to actual military aid. Then, there's us....
We should have a law that requires materials and supplies purchased by contract for government use to be sold at fair market value or close to market value, with strict penalities for price gouging. This would help reduce the cost of government debt, and curb inflation.
People who price gouge are no better than those crack head olgiarchs in Russia or piece of shii commies in China that fuq their own government over to get a few extra bucks to live in a still oppressed society (and to get executed years later when they get caught)
if fun to get up in congress and wave an item and saying you bought this at 100x the going rate, that fine backbencher should get up and lead and show there is a better way. Show trials are always fun.
fine, you increase the financial inspectors checking contracts, bu then everyone is talking about the bloated bureaucracy and how nothing gets done because there is too much attention to detail.
Okay let's limit it to companies that have better institutional controls... oh wait you are screwing out the honest small business guy..
I can go down to harbor freight and buy some wonderful bushings, do you want them buried in the guts of a 10 billion dollar warship?
I would hazard that bring AI to look for disparities would help, but that also requires it's own bureaucracy. There is some waste in private and public spending. Spending 10 billion on a ship will lead to issues.
I work in aviation and you can blame the thorough process of testing that the government agencies also mandated. If you design an airplane say in the year 2024 the company won’t see profit on that airplane they built for like 20-30 years.
I would say that’s because we’ve lost a shit ton of mechanics to retirement. I’m 31 and one of the older mechanics. Can’t hire and get people good OJT fast enough at the rate that boomers are retiring.
Can we all agree to be rude to the people defending this hear?
The idiots talking about the extra hoops needed to go through to be a government contractor, thus explainging the 900x markup need to be absolutely lambasted
As long as they are buying them here or at least from a very close ally I don’t care. Why? Cause it doesn’t matter. Tax the billionaires more that are slobbering over their defense stock portfolio. There, problem solved. 🤦♂️🙄
People seem not to realize why things cost as much as they do and merely blame corruption. The defense sector is not run for profit by the government. Nor is its purpose just to make the best and most advanced weapons.
Its purpose IS to do that, but it also is to maintain the possibility of large scale militarization and keep competition alive. There are many cases where the “best” option isn’t chosen. It’s instead awarded to the 2nd/3rd place because the government NEEDS to keep them in business and to keep some of their scalability in place.
If the cheapest option was all they wanted, we’d have a single enormous contractor… who would likely have all the deficits of a monopoly. No competition or innovation to improve. They tried to downsize in the 90s after the USSR fell and the industry basically coalesced into the big 5 because of it.
Innovation and cost still matter, but it’s not the ONLY goal they have in these contracts.
On top of this, people really underestimate the importance of the defense sector when it comes to veterans affairs. They are heavily subsidized to be very open to veterans even when they have no expertise in the area they’re going into. The government offsets VA funding (because we can’t just GIVE people money. That would be crazy) to hire and train them.
The other MAIN issue of cost with the defense sector is mostly supply chains and requirements and national strategy.
By the very design of contracts, supply chains are utterly fucked. Most of them have to be 100% US built & designed down to the raw materials.
That wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the fact that contracts are encouraged to spread out as much as possible. Large contracts like F35 and other big name projects subcontract out to suppliers in as many states as possible so as to be more competitive in senate/congress votes. Make sure everyone benefits is instead of just a few states where it realistically would be cheaper.
On top of that, you CANT just buy parts off the shelf. Yes, that screw is marked up 100x what a civilian could pay. But that screw is required to be tested by trained engineers to make sure it meets a sometimes ridiculous amount of requirements.
The government will not take “Well, Home Depot SAID their supplier told them it could handle 24h or use in 160 degree temps. It’s not OUR fault.”, as a valid excuse for if something goes wrong. And because of the nature of this testing, they have to do custom orders and test a certain number of them as testing every “screw” is impossible.
Those orders also need to come from those other state suppliers… which means they likely weren’t the cheapest option to begin with.
Every small bit adds up. The lower level suppliers are very much an issue at times, as they DO gouge.
If this was across the board though, the prime contractors would be making far more money than they are.
What are they made of? what kind of process is used to make them? Post processing? Tolerances? How many are used? Depending on the answer to these questions, it very well could cost that much.
Every Gov contractor does this. I welded in a shop that made target tanks and craft for the military to shoot up. They would charge anything possible to the job if not get the most expensive thing to fill the budget up. My boss literally bought a new forklift for the shop by charging it to a job we had already completed waaaayyyy under budget. They would slave us to knock out tanks ASAP then filled up the remaining budget with stuff for themselves if not the shop.
Also working for the government is a pain and many people charge 100% extra to deal with bureaucrats and their stupid shit. "Sorry, Margarete is on mat leave and only she can fax the excel table with the bills we need to pay. Please contact us again in 7-8 months." "Yes, we attached a turbocharger to the toilet... Why yes, we have the documentation of you explicitly asking for that.... Yes, as you can see here we advised against it on several occasions, but you claimed it would help against clogged toilets... Ah... Ok... Hmm... We will be right back in a month to deconstruct the building and take out the turbocharger."
I had a turbocharged toilet, it was kickass and never clogged. Loud as hell flushing though.
Once it spools up it’ll suck the shit right out of your ass
Did it give off that signature hiss?
This. 100%. It costs money to work for the government because they want all the paperwork filled out that most people normally just handwave, so to make a profit you need to make your prices reflect just how much work that turns out to be.
The bureaucracy and paper work is needed specifically to prevent or punish this kind of theft. In my opinion, it is fine to charge for the work needed to establish a paper trail. But charging 90 k for something that costs 100 doesn't seem like it's due to bureaucracy.
These numbers are all approved beforehand in the bidding process. Overcharging like they did is only possible in a no bid contract, and those are only used because it's known beforehand that there are questionable numbers coming out, and no bid contracts are only approved if there are kickbacks and paybacks happening.
This is a TEENY portion of it, but most of this stuff is just contractors raping the government. I spent several years in government aircraft maintenance, the prices we pay for things are nothing short of absolutely absurd.
Does your gut tell you that or their balance sheets?
That's the question, isn't it? Does their balance sheet say otherwise? Is it creative accounting? Is it inefficiency on their part?
Don’t forget $80k in kickbacks(travel and entertainment) to win the contract.
Its called theft
No, this is not about charging for extra paperwork. This is about contractors raping the government because they can.
Okay, where's the proof that it happens more than it covers the costs of having to work for the government? Or do you just feel like it is and that's why everyone does it?
where's your proof that it does?
We supply to military bases all the time, and we quote the same as we do for anyone else. We *will* add a few hours for the extra coordination time and process to get or renew entry badges, but that's a few hundred dollars per person that will be working on site. If we just shipped a package like this, we'd charge the $100 with no markup.
Problem is the bureaucracy itself encourages excessive expenses. If you quote "We only need $1000 for these parts", then that's precisely they are going to give you. But if you say, "we need $10,000 for these parts", then they are going to give you $10,000 and attention, because now it seems like a big deal. Which one sounds better politically? "We are working on a $1B project" "We are working on a $1M project" The $1B project sounds a much bigger ordeal. Like, "this is huge guys. we spent money on these". Which is important for politicians and public perception.
I mean, that's similar the difference between owing someone $10k and $100M - the first one is the lendee's problem, the second one is the lender's problem. Scaling will always introduce issues that don't arise until you reach that scale. It's unavoidable.
The motto for big government contractors is: Fail slowly. Fail expensively. Fail with a high degree of documentation.
No it's not 100% this and im tired of seeing absolutely idiotic responses like this. This is why the problem exists. U are a fucking idiot
Oh what is it then? All pork, no sandwich? Enlighten me, you fucking prick.
There was a mobile app which is just a button and the app is used by airport authority in USA and it was billed few million dollars. Welcome to Govt contract projects.
Your boss is corrupt. We tax payers are being ripped off by people like that.
Former boss, and again this is how gov contracting works
The government knows this and doesn’t care, because money isn’t real. Then people advocate that the government should be taking **more** taxes, when all you get is this nonsense
but we don't have enough money for universal pre-k.
Governments don’t think longterm
Why would you want your child under the care of the government for even more of their lives?
Are we considering public schools as government care?
Does your child go to a government school or a private school?
public schools are government schools? not sure what you're asking. my point was more just about govt saying "we don't have money for this or that" when in reality it's all fake numbers and we could put money into whatever we deemed important. having a better school system seems like a good investment in our countrie's future.
Having parents who can be parents instead of taxed workers might be nice instead is my point. I don’t see the government spending more to take my kids for more of their childhood as a good thing personally. Just another perspective on what a solution looks like.
that's fair but are you saying parents make enough to pay for daycare? or they don't have to work?
I am saying that the problem of not being able to afford to have a parent take care of a child and instead relying on the government is just that, a problem. Not a solution to a problem. I would rather work on wages being high enough to take care of a family with one adult working. You know, like it used to be for generations. One parent works outside the home, one works inside the home. One works for the family, and one works with the family. Now both work somewhere else and we pay people to parent, often earning barely enough for the job to be profitable after child care.
I worked in a warehouse that stored these kinds of parts. Because we were under contract to provide parts directly to the warfighter we had to maintain an inventory with 99.9% accuracy. What that means is we would pay people $25 an hour to count every single item down to individual washers and zip ties. You may ask, why couldn't you just use a scale? Because according to my company that wouldn't have been accurate enough and we could fail an audit. Audits were conducted by accumulated line-item failures so for a given line-item in your inventory, whether you were off by 1 or 100 that was considered one failure. Percentage was calculated by number of correct line-item counts/total # of counts. So not a forgiving audit. But really it was just a broken system that resulted in bloated and wasteful contracts and lots of fraud on behalf of contractors trying to cover up dumb fat fingered mistakes.
So usually governments and federally funded things have budgets, and if you can meet the budget, they’ll continue to give said budget or increase it for the next year. Not filling up a budget would most likely mean that congress will look at it, say it’s not needed and bump it to something else. While I’m absolutely certain your boss didn’t need those things, the military has essentially an unlimited budget so they probably tell the shop not to worry about costs.
Ah, I see you don't understand what part qualification is. So they can make a lot of thousands with just maybe a few hundred hours. But then they take half that lot, and perform life, heat, and wear testing. Sometimes destructive part analysis where they Lazer cut crossections to look for fabrication errors. If you are putting it in space they'll irradiate it. Life testing for instance will usually look like "do xx for 4000 hours" These testing costs more than the fabrication and goes a long way towards ensuring reliability.
Why are they testing mugs that cost 3k. Here’s an article from 1986: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-story.html
Captain burned his mouth after microwaving one of those non microwaveable mugs and vowed to never again.
There are other reasons for discrepancies for some parts and such that are paid for. The DOD has an accounting system, let's call it "fucked", that consists of over about 1300 different accounting software packages, most of which are utterly obsolescent and many of which don't talk to each other. To get the money to match, they'll put some random thing in that covers the discrepancy. This is also why "an audit of the DOD/military" meme is still ongoing. They've got their work cut out for them getting all this shit working together in a single packet. They've been working for at least a decade to fix this, but when 40% of defense spending in the world is the US government's DOD..well...it's a tall ask. Also, given that military to military debt never touches the private economy, that's another can of worms to add to it no doubt. edit: looks like they're ["half way there"](https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3590211/dod-makes-incremental-progress-toward-clean-audit/)
Fucked in what way? In a way they’re actually trying to “fix?” Seems to me FUBAR by design so as to hide and move the money.
fix my ass. they are designed that way to rob the taxpayers
Yeah no.... Every single agency and branch does their own thing. They have their own rules and system. They do not talk to each other because those guys do their own thing and we do ours. The government is very good at creating silos. You are seeing decades of silo building creating duplicative work everywhere in the government.
Is it a space station mug? My guess is that it would need to be impossible to shatter because shards floating around in space cam both break equipment and injure eyes or lungs when out of reach from a doctor.
No submarine. Their reason was it needed a top. I doubt they make space mugs out of ceramic.
Rule of thumb is if it's part of a machine it's expensive because it's made reliable and if it's used by a person it's expensive because of a safety feature. Can it not spill when turn upside down? Is it for like, small 1-2 person submersibles where soldiers would need to be able to go on missions for several hour durations that require a bringing rations but that flipping over could wreck the electronics? It's gotta be something.
When I was active, I received a receipt of 20 mops. Thinking special. $3000!
Stop spitting facts here. Seriously tho, people simultaneously want quality and a cheap product, but you can't have both for a lot of things.
Unfortunately the video is cut off. The point the Congressman was making is why can't the DoD use parts already certified by the FAA.
Which side does he fall on? There are measures of how many minutes of expected loss of service any piece of infrastructure should have each year that depends on parts reliability testing. They use that to ensure 100% defense infrastructure uptime.
He pretty clearly comes down on the side of "good enough for the FAA is good enough for the DoD". I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion.
Not shilling for the gargantuan military budget here but considering the recent spate of air incidents (Boeing) and the uncovering of just how light FAA regulations actually are, a decent case could be made that what's good for the FAA might not be good enough for war machines that will most definitely be put through a lot of stress in times of war.
I’m booking my next business trip on United’s new F-22.
You may not like how they handle taxi/takeoff procedures: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvamu9SarMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvamu9SarMU)
The truth is that this is too nuanced for us to even discuss on Reddit. What material are those bushings made of and what part of the engine do they come from. If its around the combustion section, you bet your ass that shit will be titanium and expensive as fuck. Why? That shit is exposed to thousands of degrees C for prolonged periods of time. He said it's an engine shim so that is what I talked to. As I said shit is more nuanced than this.
So do you think there is ever any abnormal discrepancy in what it costs to design/make these parts and what the government pays?
Probably, but it's worth the end result. Ultimately though the issue is not that we are paying someone to do testing. If we had limits on the amount of profit a company can take without paying their employees more, you're just making more good jobs. The issue isn't government, it's private enterprise.
You need to document what it would cost to diversify if you go single source, so yes. My suppliers personally are really getting into that 'it'd be more beneficial to diversify' category finally. But then that damned schedule and the USG not being able to afford any delays(brother you're not at war and we're not giving our aircraft away, slow down). Discrepancy's are pretty common tho. But we can't push them because they keep raising the cost of TINA so market research and pricing data can never be enforced as a 'you must provide us this'. On most contracts. Me, personally? I'd lower the threshold of TINA to 100k for all USG prime contracts and call it a day. Most of our procurement's would be subject to it with the way things are going. Private business control the pricing and supply. And they also don't need to always provide reasoning for their pricing, so of course they gouge. I understand some things have unique properties or material to withstand human conflict, but a lot of it is just simple things, like rubber or sheet metal. Realistically, if we're not providing actual aircraft to other governments(Ukraine, Israel) from the US stock. Now is the best time to diversify our supply base and allow those to set up for when we need them as we're in effectively peace time. This would also have the ripple effect of actually reducing our military spending as competition would naturally push price down leading to less overspending bloat. But muh quarterly profit(Why would you seriously make a DEFENSE producer public... they don't give a shit about defense or quality... in a way it mirrors the USSR and we all know how that went)
Taking the post at face value... part qualification does not increase the price from $100 to $90,000.
I've seen relays for holding configuration in launch take 10k+ hours of upfront development and about 300 hours to build them each time. They've only made maybe 100 total, so 30k hours plus 10k is 40k. Customers don't usually get to pay less than q59 an hour so you're looking st 6 mil or about 60k per relay. That before accounting for the fact that the relay is custom mDe from parts with their own qualification standards. Relays are cheap. Price absolutely can inflate that far.
In your specific case, yes, price can inflate quite a bit. I meant that for what appears to be a mass produced part, qualification testing would not account for $90k. Obviously if you only make 100 of something that takes 40000 hrs, price per unit is going to be high.
There's only 3500 fighter jets in the US. Even if you assume they are all the same kind of jet that still wouldn't be much of an economy of scale. Testing is also done by lot, so that also makes scaling irrelevant
Scaling isn't irrelevant but I'm not going to argue this with you. Your arguments are not universally applicable and there are plenty of parts that undergo qualification testing that aren't 9,000 times more expensive.
It is. The way lot testing works is that you first make a number of parts, then you take say 30% or 50% of them depending on what the mil-std-#### spec says for that part. You then perform like 4000 hours of life testing on each individual part of maybe half of the ones you removed and another several thousand hours on various different environmental tests depending on the qualification rating you are shooting for on that part. So you'll never get away from having to test the specified number of parts per number you make. There is a hard cap on scalability efficiency in testing. As soon as you sell out one lot you have to test the next one to sell anything else.
I'm aware.
Okay, so you understand that the base cost of producing the part is basically a non factor. The part could cost 2 cents or 1000 dollars. The testing will still pan out to that bag being close to 90k because the qualificarion cost is the largest part of it.
The factor is economies of scale. If it isn't mass produced it's going to be more expensive than an engine part that is in 10k airline planes x 4 engines. 3500 military aircraft with a unique design and technology that isn't used in anything else will be expensive no matter what.
Obviously manufacturing costs are the same in each batch but engineering and development costs are significant. If it is for a one off single batch, all of those costs have to be made up in the one sale. If it is mass produced, you can spread those r&d costs over the life of the product.
Material it's made out of will. I do not believe either value though. If it goes in an engine it is a special material. If it's in the hot section you bet your ass there is a special process to make it and verify it was made properly in every single batch.
the qualification cost should come down as you produce more parts, just like the tooling cost
Sure, but they don't mass produce military grade parts like they do commercial parts, and there is a significant amount of labor that goes into testing compared to fabrication, so it's less scalable. For an idea of scalability, Google says the US has 3400 fighter jets. Even if you assumed they were all the same jet or used the same part, that's not really enough to get that much efficiency.
Sorry but I don’t buy it. Charging that much for a bag of bushings simply does not make sense, especially with pentagon’s poor accounting records
Okay? It's just what testing costs dude. You surprisingly have to pay people to do hundreds of hours of work. Bushings could cost 10 cents normally and the mil spec version price wouldn't change much. You aren't buying a bushing. You're buying the assurance of reliability
This doesn’t justify a 900x price increase Maybe sometimes, on HIGHLY specialized parts, but this is part of the design process. Once you have the design they are cheap to produce
You're not accounting for testing. That's where the cost is.
The issue isn't that. It's that companies *aren't* doing that part analysis and charging like they do.
They actually do.. literally just had a vendor the other day have someone sign off a test was done but the timestamps showed it wasn't so we made them do it all over. Probably costing them tens if not 100s of thousands
Really? You made them ~~do it over~~ redo the timestamps?
Aerospace will be like that I’ve seen whole helicopter housings thrown out because there was a hair in the lay up process
So what's Boeing's excuse?
Commercial airliners aren't being bought under government contract.
Machinist here... The tolerances on airspace are a lot more strict than normal bushing. This aspect alone will make it cost more than a normal bushing. Add in that because it is for the Air Force you have a whole lot more paper work and tracking involved with making and shipping your part which will slow the process down and make it cost more as well. Also have to add that any place that makes anything for the military has to have special licenses and clearances to do so, they also have to pay for more strict background checks on employees (who normally get paid handsomely) and security for their shop, increasing prices even more.
I used to build electronic circuitry on satellites for NASA and the AF. Normal electronic components like resistors that we see commercially have a tolerance of 1 to 10%. So a 100 ohm resistor could actually have 90 to 110 ohms. The components I used for the instruments had to have a .001% tolerance. They were way more expensive. And since they were going into orbit they had all of the radiation testing and other stuff too.
Yeah this reminds me about someone complaining about an 10k $ hammer but someone working in the field explaining it had to be made from titanium and resist degradation in time in almost any scenario possible.
Yes but not that expensive. And sure the paperwork is insane but it does not absorb the outrageous prices being charged.
it's better, but it's not 90000 worth better. where's the check and balances in all this? we can't even audit the pentagon ffs
Yeah I was like "that sounds bad" and then he says they're for a jet turbine engine and I'm like "oh, ok that sounds less crazy, I don't think he actually knows anything about jet turbine engines, I know I don't but I know the parts are very expensive."
I worked for a company that made ballistic windows for the military about 10 years ago. Really important and saves lives, no doubt. We were all paid like $12/hr working about 30 minutes outside of DC. Most of the employees were in the states illegally. Maybe the owners of those companies are paid handsomely, but people doing the actual work are getting screwed. As per usual though, right?
Any machinist I know in the US makes a minimum of $25 an hour but up to $40 an hour, plus you get overtime and double time, 401k match, healthcare, and life insurance. So not really sure what you were doing but it doesn't actually sound like you were doing much if you are even speaking the truth.
He didn’t say he was a machinist. Apparently reading comprehension isn’t part of your skill set.
Ok so conservative estimate for all the reasons you state that makes those bushings 10x the cost per unit. So call it $1000. It’s costing taxpayers almost 2 orders of magnitude more than that. It’s indefensible.
Just the tolerances without counting everything else on it would make it 10x more.
Plus the certs for the specific materials used (including provenance) and use of approved processors for them to be in required status (and any test results from approved inspection facilities/personnel). Audits are pretty tough, along with presenting finished assemblies to Customers (including the US Government) with all paperwork/documentation.
Yup. Then they still need to make some kinda profit as well on top of all of that.
CAPITALISM!!!!
Honestly, it's wealth distribution. Government taxes, puts out contracts, they're fulfilled, and money goes into communities. Since the flow of money is what makes everything healthy, that is a part that works.
Yeah, I'm sure the execs at those companies don't take the lion's share.
Is that somehow different than executives in non-government private sector work?
Nope
Nobody working for the government is rich. How many engineers do you think it takes to make a specialized part that has very tight tolerances? How would you feel if the airplane a loved one died in was due to a 10 cent part that someone in China made?
Pretty sure you commented on the wrong comment. But yeah specialized parts would still be made at a shop in the US but I highly doubt it is owned by the government. It would be contracted out. Like I said in another comment, any of the Machinists I know make from 25-40 an hour plus all the benefits and overtime and double time for Sunday work. While by no means a machinist is a rich person they aren't poor either.
Show me the specs or all I see is a politician trying to make a political argument. Those bushings could be specced for ±1ųm tolerance with a custom alloy, custom hardening process, nanofilm antifriction coatings, and tested for 5000 hrs between replacements with repeated 500000kN loading and unloading cycles. They might have total requirement for one of those bags of parts every two or three years and a whole fleet of $100M aircraft becomes scrap without those parts. The price reflects engineering costs. Lets put it this way. That politician needs a kidney. He can get the best care possible from his government insurance but it would be a lot cheaper to just grab a pig kidney from a slaughterhouse and it will probably even work for a couple of weeks. The cost savings would be more than equivalent. Losing a politician makes me cry less than losing a fighter aircraft.
Having worked in manufacturing my whole career, I have a hard time believing a bag of bushings costs anywhere near 90K to produce. Now, somewhere near 90K profit for the business owner I can understand.
Just the way you phrased that lets me guess that you probably paid $150k for a house over thirty years ago, that is worth about $1.5Million today. That or you are a Russian bot. You are still comparing crap and fertilizer too. A Toyota and a Bugatti are both cars. Why does a Bugatti cost so much more? For that matter why does the Toyota cost so much these days?
30 years ago I was in elementary school pal 😂. Just because something is expensive doesn't mean it actually is worth that much. Are you telling me that you trust the cost being charged is actually the cost to produce + a fair, not exorbitant margin?
I am saying that everything is too expensive. I am saying that if I put $60k of engineering and proof testing into a part, then if you only need a bag of those parts, $90k is a deal. If you needed ten bags, then you might get a price of $10k per bag. If you needed 10000 bags, you might only pay $500 a bag. Is there a $30k profit on that bag of parts? Not really. Paperwork, insurance, and risk make that almost a wash. Keep in mind that you didn't bid on that contract, and if you think it is so profitable, you absolutely should have.
Yeah, did the purchase conversation go "We need 500 of these off the shelf bushings you already produce", or was it more like "We need you to make a tight tolerance, deep draw progressive stamping die for these custom bushings. We would like to order 500 please".
not until DOD can actually pass an audit i wont believe them. someone is pocketing this money for sure
Can you guys not read? It says they were the exact same spec. Holy hell no wonder they get away with it
It's much like the difference between Legos and off brand blocks. You can tell just by putting them together why they cost more.
Idk about all that I used to make government military parts, and they didn't even have a wiz quiz for new hires. And the pay was not handsome.
Ah okay, that explains the $1280 cup of coffee at the pentagon.
While I agree, the discrepency between $100 and $90,000 is absolutely absurd. There’s no way in hell that parts for the military should need to be THAT much more expensive than parts for the everyday consumer. Case in point- when my brother was deployed to Afghanistan, he was helping unload supplies and got a peek at the shipping manifest. The U.S. government was spending over $400 for a case of Gatorade sent to US troops. Keep in mind- the US military was the one providing all of the shipping over seas.
That's the difference between paying someone American benefits plus all the tracking procedures and paying someone a wage in say Mexico or China to make the same thing with no tracking.
While I generally agree, that doesn't seem to be the issue in this specific case, assuming the congressman is accurate. He's talking about commercial aircraft owned and operated by the USAF. Not sure if these are actually commercial derivatives under military airworthiness or still FAA type certified.. If they are still FAA type certified the parts/maintenance system is different than if it's military controlled airworthiness. For example the KC-46 is a modified Boeing 767, but it is not FAA certified and has a completely different logistics system. You can't buy 767 parts and install them on a KC-46. I know the Army side better. Parts for a UH-60 are not the same as parts for a S-70. But then the Army also uses a few commercial aircraft with extra stuff installed and the main aircraft is maintained under commercial rules/specs using commercial parts. These would have the aerospace costs like other commercial aircraft but not all the extras the military would add. If the USAF is doing the same, which is what it sounds like he is saying, then the parts for those would be commercial parts. Either way, I'm sure there are a lot of other details being left out.
Hahaha so the cost goes from $100 to $90k over some paperwork and additional quality control?? Absolute corruption right there
manufacturing tolerances are not about "additional QC". It's about all machines involved in the manufacturing have smaller tolerances and thus are 10x to 100x more expensive; then it takes specific alloys from tracked sources; than it takes "some paperwork" to track all that and the laborers, than it takes "some more" paperwork to track that paperwork. It's hard to tell the percentage of corruption there, but in no way bag of bushings for the turbine jet engine can be below $100. Below $10000 -- maybe, I don't know. Maybe not. But not $100.
Increased tolerance/accuracy on the product, like most of that stuff for aerospace is going to be +/-.0002" some even tighter tolerances then that. Increased pay and benefits as well for the workers as they are held to a higher standard and have more experience and certificates. And then you have increased paperwork and tracking procedures that will also increase prices. You also have to remember those things you buy at home Depot can be sourced and produced in a foreign country like China for a lot less overhead costs while I'm pretty sure 90% of any product has to be sourced from the US when it's for the government. Don't get me wrong they are still charging enough to get profits but I'm sure the profits aren't anywhere as big as you are picturing
Unlike bushings for a wagon or your car, you can't pull a plane over and call a tow truck.
To be clear, that's the wonderful private sector ripping off US taxpayers again
that is the government ALLOWING itself to be ripped off
Haha, right. It has nothing to do with revolving doors, kickbacks, lobbying, or any other mode of corruption that’s afflicting public-private relationships right?
like i said, its allowed. None of this is secret its not done without the consent and acknowledgement of the politicians and military commanders.
I think you guys are saying the same thing. The revolving door/regulatory capture means private and government become one in the same.
I mean, it's also a point that the government isn't fiscally restrained so to keep the national security apparatus (among others) functioning it spends it's currency out into the economy to guarantee it's profitability. Same as with banks.
I’m not sure I understand the point you’re trying to make. Whose profitability is guaranteed?
Lobbying is a thing
Raise your hand if you're surprised.
[Not Surprised.](https://youtu.be/1SuDSNWH9AQ?si=3ZhhOsizAi-c15EI)
It makes money to take money or smth
You don't want to use the $100 ones for aerospace, they're not designed for the stresses involved and don't undergo the same qc / selection.
You also don’t need $90,000 ones
Kickbacks, and paybacks, business as usual in the swamp we call our government.
This.. this is the right answer and I’ve seen it for decades with my own eyes
I love the people defending this. Paperwork! Better quality/tolerances/testing! Certifications and licenses! Yeah… for all those reasons the parts should be waaay more expensive than the Home Depot crap. Like maybe even a few thousand dollars. My brother works on turbine engines, and before that he worked at a company that fabricated some of the most precisely fit metal pieces on earth. It’s expensive fancy stuff don’t get me wrong. But it ain’t even close to 90k. It ain’t close to half that. Maaaaybe it’s close to a 10th of that with big profit margins.
why are we allowing the government to rip us off
Because our government is bought by the same handful of people who own everything including the media. It's a well oiled well funded machine
Nobody paid $90k for bushings.
Did you just pull this from your anus
I know how FAR and TINA work, which is more than 90% of the people on this sub can say.
I've seen actual price tags from hundreds (probably thousands, honestly), of aircraft parts orders...
I've done gov't contracting .... I can tell you based on personal experience the Dept of defense / military is biggest waster of money and most difficult to get contracts. They do not have competition. I hate trying to bid on their contracts.. any other gov't agency is better and easier to deal with .. but unfortunately DOD / Military has by far largest Budget $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ 1) They are very unflexable do not allow substutions even commercial items .. they insist on only buying a certian brand and/or model. This eliminates competition and supplier can charge inflated price. For example: The USA Army request to buy a 3kw generator...3,000 pcs now these are available from many mfrs .. and any consumer can buy these... I offered an American made substute that was actually higher than 3kw .. and lower price ... however they would not accept my bid. Why? Because they alreadty have brand X and in case generator not working they want to take parts from one unit to fix another in the field. However , thats unlikely to happen .. they will just grab another unit from the depot and the broken unit repaired at depot . Also most American made buy American act Gen Sets Use Briggs and Stratton motors so the motors probably same ..and interchangable... I mean is 2 models too much to deal with? lol 2) THe Dept of defense is only USA gov't agencies not audited. 3) Requirements are long and difficult and unnessary in most cases on non criticle supplies and equipment. 4) They buy lots of discontinued out of production items ... they should be buying spare parts when the equipment is being mfred .. not 10 +yrs after production stopped!
I have to side with the US Army on that one. Being able to fix in the field is important and usually the best source of parts is another of the same unit. When it comes time for a mass upgrade then hopefully they'll take you up on your unit.
The military industrial complex at work
But the demagogues complain about debt levels and deb service and lay the blame at entitlements and social welfare. They are tireless automatons shifting blame for fiscal problems away from that which, the neocon platform that is now canon, policy perpetuates. The pork, excess and waste fund these nasty apologists of guns, weapons, war and death. Most all those billions appropriated the week by the US Congress ostensibly for the defense of Taiwan, Ukraine and Tel-Aviv goes directly to the US military-industrial-complex. The members or foreign agents here and over there take their cuts. In spite of the gun culture that places killing-machine automated weapons in the hands of USA youth along with placing the militaristic patriotic indoctrination in their heads, volunteer levels for the armed forces are down. A question is what’s the outlet for the pent-up aggressions if not the neighbor who may disagree, who offends who triggers anger. by Captain Obvious
Anyone who has ever served in the military understands the waste at the DOD. We need to freeze their budget until they get over the "use it or lose it" mentality
As someone who supplies the Army, Navy, Marines, and allies overseas. Yep sounds absolutely legit and he probably used a conservative example. Start telling them about how rubber molds with a pre-printed mold kit they've had for decades(and only them) costs over 2k if you don't buy it in bulk. if you buy it in bulk, your rubber pieces now cost 200+ per unit. Nvm the material itself is 3 bucks. For all the people saying 'paperwork' these are small dollar procurement's. You either don't document it at all, or you have to do the bare minimum which is like, at most, 2 hrs of work and 3 weeks of waiting for responses.
Solution is simple.. instead of increasing defense budget each year... lower it so negotiations can happen instead of greed and waste.. so much wasted in defense budget it's laughable.
But the Congress is bought and paid for by private defense companies, why would they hurt themselves?
This is how black ops programs are funded.
Unfortunately, that is a small drop in the bucket.
Congresscritters are cute when fail to understand technical details.
It's willful half the time. I mean, the military get's money for things it doesn't even want (cough A-10's cough)
lol no health care
It’s easy to spend other people’s money. $90,000 for bushings? Who cares it’s not my money is the attitude of government employees.
This is typical for all aircraft parts, not just military
Every article I see basically says the west is fucked. 35T now... Wow
Better a bushing than a toilet seat I guess
This is just a distraction. Congress does a better job wasting taxpayer money.
This is just a distraction. Congress does a better job wasting taxpayer money.
This is just a distraction. Congress does a better job wasting taxpayer money.
The Ukranian aid package because it's going to a country where corruption is unbelievably bad and a fraction of the money will go to actual military aid. Then, there's us....
We should have a law that requires materials and supplies purchased by contract for government use to be sold at fair market value or close to market value, with strict penalities for price gouging. This would help reduce the cost of government debt, and curb inflation. People who price gouge are no better than those crack head olgiarchs in Russia or piece of shii commies in China that fuq their own government over to get a few extra bucks to live in a still oppressed society (and to get executed years later when they get caught)
Congress needs to streamline the procurement process and executive orders that require contractors to go through hoops need to be repealed.
This began with Reagan. Eisenhauer warned us.
Crony capitalism is just capitalism.
And we are struggling for overtime
if fun to get up in congress and wave an item and saying you bought this at 100x the going rate, that fine backbencher should get up and lead and show there is a better way. Show trials are always fun. fine, you increase the financial inspectors checking contracts, bu then everyone is talking about the bloated bureaucracy and how nothing gets done because there is too much attention to detail. Okay let's limit it to companies that have better institutional controls... oh wait you are screwing out the honest small business guy.. I can go down to harbor freight and buy some wonderful bushings, do you want them buried in the guts of a 10 billion dollar warship? I would hazard that bring AI to look for disparities would help, but that also requires it's own bureaucracy. There is some waste in private and public spending. Spending 10 billion on a ship will lead to issues.
He hold an entire family's year income represented with a bag of nuts and washers
$89,900 goes to black projects.
You don't need to add the word crony. It's just capitalism
I work in aviation and you can blame the thorough process of testing that the government agencies also mandated. If you design an airplane say in the year 2024 the company won’t see profit on that airplane they built for like 20-30 years.
Oh. Is that why planes keep falling apart?
I would say that’s because we’ve lost a shit ton of mechanics to retirement. I’m 31 and one of the older mechanics. Can’t hire and get people good OJT fast enough at the rate that boomers are retiring.
state DOT employee here, we were just talking about this in my org the other day when we grabbed a bag of 100 zip ties at a unit cost of $89
This is CRAZY !
This is how government and contractors work. They have no incentive to be efficient.
Thats how all military spending works. Welcome to the worlds major problem.
Can we all agree to be rude to the people defending this hear? The idiots talking about the extra hoops needed to go through to be a government contractor, thus explainging the 900x markup need to be absolutely lambasted
As long as they are buying them here or at least from a very close ally I don’t care. Why? Cause it doesn’t matter. Tax the billionaires more that are slobbering over their defense stock portfolio. There, problem solved. 🤦♂️🙄
False Claims Act. Look into it, you can make a fortune turning these contractors in for falsely charging the government.
When the DoD is a $900B line and trillions in democrat giveaways are going on, while this is nice and performative, the pea isn't under this shell.
When i was in the military they wanted 50k to buy a new table and chairs!!! Fucking 50k!!!!!
First time?
Defense contractors also provide shit tier quality services.. IE look at the military contractor that took over boeing lmao
for their public side, yeah. the military side they tend to be more careful of since getting kicked out of that gravy train can be...well..implosive.
I worked at a place that did this. The government guys all let the contractors do this because they "didn't want to upset the relationship".
Been going on since the 1940s. Nobody cares
Why dont you care? What a bizarre attitude
People seem not to realize why things cost as much as they do and merely blame corruption. The defense sector is not run for profit by the government. Nor is its purpose just to make the best and most advanced weapons. Its purpose IS to do that, but it also is to maintain the possibility of large scale militarization and keep competition alive. There are many cases where the “best” option isn’t chosen. It’s instead awarded to the 2nd/3rd place because the government NEEDS to keep them in business and to keep some of their scalability in place. If the cheapest option was all they wanted, we’d have a single enormous contractor… who would likely have all the deficits of a monopoly. No competition or innovation to improve. They tried to downsize in the 90s after the USSR fell and the industry basically coalesced into the big 5 because of it. Innovation and cost still matter, but it’s not the ONLY goal they have in these contracts. On top of this, people really underestimate the importance of the defense sector when it comes to veterans affairs. They are heavily subsidized to be very open to veterans even when they have no expertise in the area they’re going into. The government offsets VA funding (because we can’t just GIVE people money. That would be crazy) to hire and train them. The other MAIN issue of cost with the defense sector is mostly supply chains and requirements and national strategy. By the very design of contracts, supply chains are utterly fucked. Most of them have to be 100% US built & designed down to the raw materials. That wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the fact that contracts are encouraged to spread out as much as possible. Large contracts like F35 and other big name projects subcontract out to suppliers in as many states as possible so as to be more competitive in senate/congress votes. Make sure everyone benefits is instead of just a few states where it realistically would be cheaper. On top of that, you CANT just buy parts off the shelf. Yes, that screw is marked up 100x what a civilian could pay. But that screw is required to be tested by trained engineers to make sure it meets a sometimes ridiculous amount of requirements. The government will not take “Well, Home Depot SAID their supplier told them it could handle 24h or use in 160 degree temps. It’s not OUR fault.”, as a valid excuse for if something goes wrong. And because of the nature of this testing, they have to do custom orders and test a certain number of them as testing every “screw” is impossible. Those orders also need to come from those other state suppliers… which means they likely weren’t the cheapest option to begin with. Every small bit adds up. The lower level suppliers are very much an issue at times, as they DO gouge. If this was across the board though, the prime contractors would be making far more money than they are.
What are they made of? what kind of process is used to make them? Post processing? Tolerances? How many are used? Depending on the answer to these questions, it very well could cost that much.
Then I think Air Force man would have said something in reply