US federal IT spending: a wasteland of misbegotten contracts

Here's another barn-burner of a speech by rogue archivist Carl Malamud, addressing the Gov 2.0 Summit 2010. Carl sez, "Washington, D.C. has become a vast wasteland of computer contracts. The U.S. government spent $81.9 billion in 2010 on information technology and much of that money is misspent, crippling the ability of government to do the jobs with which it has been entrusted. How can we deal with a global environmental crisis or a renegade financial industry or rescue the vast works that lie fallow in our national libraries when the basic machinery of government does not work?"

The Currents Of Our Time

(Thanks, Carl!)