MONEY

NY Times - Toilets seats, $14,000 each. Drinking cups, $1,280 each. Soap dish covers, $117 each. These purchases by the federal government over the years would be laughable if they weren’t so outrageous. But, fair or not, they have come to symbolize waste in the procurement process the federal government uses to buy goods and services for its vast and diverse operations.

Of course, it is a lot more complicated than that. The government also spends huge sums on highly complex technologies. One of every 10 dollars spent by the United States government goes to contractors and vendors.

The system has long been criticized for being too prescriptive and ponderous. In most cases, the government tells bidders precisely what it wants, rather than asking them how they might best provide what the government is looking for or how to solve the problem the government wants to resolve. And it can take so long to complete the process that by the time the government gets the technology it has specified, it’s already woefully behind the times. Fixing this process could save taxpayers a lot of money, especially at a time when the incoming Trump administration is talking about wholesale cuts across government that could eliminate thousands of jobs and reduce services.

In a guest essay, Cara Eckholm writes about two states, California and New York, that are exploring new ways to procure the technology they need. She spent the past two years at Cornell Tech studying how to make New York City a global hub of urban innovation and writes that those two states “are showing how the government can do a better job of supporting new ideas and keeping pace with technology, in fields such as artificial intelligence and climate change.”Read the full essay.