By that logic we should expect all governments to regress to totalitarianism, which hasn’t happened, and isn’t what’s happening here.
The question isn’t if some would attempt these behaviors, but rather if we and our democratic structures empower those people or fail to constrain them.
As someone who does this sort of work (but posting personally, not officially), you're 100% right. There are groups of already-networked folks you can join like USDS or 18F that are already connected to the problems. The post reminds me of some of the stuff you might see in gov, though I've never seen someone save money and be punished like this.
They accepted edits via pull request when that was in the works! [1] Such a better model of giving feedback or suggesting edits compared to sending in a marked-up PDF.
> Places where no one is sure who owns what, or who is responsible for what are unlikely to have proper monitoring and much more likely to be two or three upgrades behind. The seams are where things get lost, sometimes for years. So if your mandate is security or availability the seams are your best bet of finding a big pay off.
So true. Sometimes there's a person behind the scenes keeping it all working with bailing wire and elbow grease, but that person is also a huge point of failure.