**CORRUPT SATURDAY** Let's launch these rockets on time under budget.. For decades, one of the dirty secrets of government contracting has been that winning the contract could matter more than delivering the product. Get inside. Become indispensable. Miss the schedule. Come back for more money. Stretch development another year, then another, and the taxpayer keeps paying. This is not a conspiracy theory. The government’s own auditors have been documenting the problem for decades. The GAO put DoD weapons acquisition on its High-Risk List in 1990, and it is still there. Today the Pentagon expects to spend nearly $2.4 trillion developing and acquiring its most expensive weapons programs. The average time to deliver even an initial capability is almost 12 years. The F-35 makes the pattern almost impossible to ignore. In 2024, aircraft were delivered an average of 238 days late. Every one of them late. Yet GAO found that the government kept paying contractors hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives while delivery performance got worse. That is not capitalism. Capitalism requires something government procurement too often managed to eliminate: competition. I recently attended a NASA procurement event at Kennedy Space Center, and what I heard was remarkably different. The message was essentially that they are trying to change this. NASA procurement leadership talked about competition, commercial products, simplified acquisition, earlier industry involvement, and making contractors actually compete for the work. One current NASA acquisition shows what that can look like. Rather than handing the future commercial-space-station program to one winner and hoping for the best, NASA plans full and open competition with multiple firm-fixed-price awards. Two or more contractors can continue through early development, then compete again for later work. You don’t win once and own the government. You have to keep earning it. And under a firm-fixed-price contract, overrunning your estimate does not automatically become the taxpayer’s problem. The FAR puts far more of that cost risk on the contractor. Then came another moment at Kennedy that caught my attention. The speaker asked the veterans and small-business owners in the room to raise their hands, then told the room, in substance, that the color of your skin or whether you wear a dress was not going to win the work. Merit was. Can you perform? Can you deliver? Can you get it right, on time, for the price you promised? Then I attended a Navy Surface Warfare meeting- exact same message we are looking to change our ways and be more nimble, they said. Federal contracting rules have changed too. Racially discriminatory DEI practices in federal contracting are now specifically prohibited. Small-business and other statutory programs have not disappeared. But the direction I heard from NASA could not have been clearer: compete, perform, deliver. The most important change for companies that actually build things may be this. NASA told industry to engage before the requirements are finalized. Tell them when a specification doesn’t make sense. Bring them commercial technology that already works. Challenge unnecessary requirements. Help define a better solution instead of waiting for a 300-page solicitation written around yesterday’s technology. That is how government should buy. It does not need another contractor whose business model depends on getting embedded so deeply that failure produces another modification, another appropriation, and another five years of work. It needs companies that are afraid that if they don’t perform, someone better will take the next contract. Competition isn’t cruel. Competition is how you protect the taxpayer. And when the customer is the American warfighter, astronaut, veteran, or first responder, speed and performance are not accounting metrics. They can be the difference between coming home and not coming home. Sources: U.S. Government Accountability Office; NASA; Federal Acquisition Regulation / Acquisition.gov @ChiefEngineerCE

There should be zero H1B renewals. If the U.S. Navy can take a civilian off the street and train them to operate a nuclear submarine in under three years, Amazon can train an American for a tech seat in the same window. Every H-1B renewal is a confession. The job was never temporary. The company had years to recruit, hire, or train a citizen. It renewed the visa instead. There is no shortage of American labor. That is a preference for lower pay and the compliance that comes from hiring VISA labor from a trillion dollar company with record profits. Dump the renewal path. Hire and train Americans. They Don't Work For You. If you trained your replacement or watched a renewal lock a seat that should have opened, say so in the comments. Like share and bookmark this. Follow for more.