Bureaucracy and the Search for Truth

Good analogy.  Yes, I see what you see.

Another drawer example is cloud services including infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and platform as a service.  Pricing, funding, and validating work for payment is confusing trying to fit into an existing drawer.  Must of this involves use of supply items, either in whole or shared, but priced as services often on a rate per resources consumed basis.

Don Mansfield said:

We need a drawer for "evaluation of competitive cost-reimbursement proposals" that recognizes that we are not dealing with fixed prices, but we instead hold cost estimate competitions and make tradeoff decisions as if the Government's determination of probable cost is what the Government will actually pay (without ever validating the accuracy of the probable cost).

While I understand where Don is coming from, I don't entirely agree. For one thing, I don't think you can put all cost-reimbursement procurements into a single "drawer". For instance, I don't think a competitive procurement for the development of a major system (a new fighter or a new submarine) belongs in the same "drawer" as a procurement of one year plus four one-year options of analytical support services just because they will both be procured under a cost-reimbursement contract and are thus subject to cost realism analysis. There are political factors at play in the source selection and funding of a major systems acquisitions that affect competition and proposal strategy that simply are not present in analytical support services procurements.

Also, I don't agree that such procurements are cost estimate competitions. They are, instead, cost presentation competitions.

Anyway, Don and Matthew Fleharty have telling me to read Harari's books for a couple of years, and maybe I'll read this one. I've added it to my Kindle (along with Harari's others, largely unread). (I'm suspicious of massively popular nonfiction books.) I must point out that if you search for at Google Scholar you'll soon realize that the only things that have been written about more often are sex and death.

My point is that the acquisition bureaucracy is guilty of forcing the world into existing drawers instead of creating new ones. Whether there should be more than one drawer for "evaluation of cost-reimbursement proposals" is beside the point, but worthy of a separate discussion.

On 3/21/2025 at 8:54 AM, Don Mansfield said:

My point is that the acquisition bureaucracy is guilty of forcing the world into existing drawers instead of creating new ones. Whether there should be more than one drawer for "evaluation of cost-reimbursement proposals" is beside the point...

Uh... Okay.

On 3/20/2025 at 9:15 AM, Don Mansfield said:

Bureaucracy literally means "rule by writing desk." The term was invented in eighteenth century France, when the typical official sat next to a writing desk with drawers--a bureau. At the heart of the bureaucratic order, then, is the drawer. Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer.

The principle remains the same regardless of whether the document is placed in a drawer, a shelf, a basket, a jar, a computer folder, or any receptacle: divide and rule. Divide the world into containers, and keep the containers separate so the documents don't get mixed up. This principle, however, comes with a price. Instead of focusing on understanding the world as it is, bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world. Bureaucrats begin by inventing various drawers, which are intersubjective realities that don't necessarily correspond to any objective divisions in the world. The bureaucrats then try to force the world to fit into these drawers, and if the fit isn't any good, the bureaucrats push harder.

@Don Mansfield That, I believe, is a quote from Harari's book. Let me know if I'm wrong.

What strikes me is that Harari has gone out of his way to avoid the word categories, using "drawers" as a metaphor. I guess he thought category was too complicated a word for his audience.

Bureaucrats categorize the phenomena of their worlds in order to match them up with rules imposed on them by Congress and rules they create for themselves and the public. They then make decisions about the use of particular processes, procedures, and methods with respect to particular phenomena in accordance with the applicable rules, document their decisions, and put their documents into files.

Some of their categories are artificial, even arbitrary, e.g., small businesses versus large businesses; disadvantaged businesses versus non-disadvantaged businesses, responsible businesses versus nonresponsible businesses, realistic estimated costs versus nonrealistic estimated costs., etc.

You're saying they're guilty of inadequate or faulty categorization, i.e., "drawer" creation and choice.

On 3/21/2025 at 8:54 AM, Don Mansfield said:

My point is that the acquisition bureaucracy is guilty of forcing the world into existing drawers instead of creating new ones.

You want to know if I see that.

Yes, I do. But in what follows I'll use the word categories instead of "drawers".

You want to  know whether—in addition to faulty categorization for the purposes of evaluating cost-reimbursement proposals—I can think of other examples.

Yes, I can.

Categorization for the purposes of taking action is essential to almost all human activity, including bureaucratic activity. (Yikes! Is that a gopher snake or a rattlesnake? Is that dog friendly?) A great many acquisition tasks entail the recognition of artificial categories, such as commercial versus noncommercial. Max Weber explained that long ago:

Quote

The management of the office follows general rules, which are more or less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which can be learned. Knowledge of these rules represents a special technical expertise which the officials possess. It involves jurisprudence, administrative or business management. The reduction of modem office management to rules  is deeply embedded in its very nature. The theory of modern public administration, for instance, assumes the authority to order certain matters by decree—which has been legally granted to an agency—does not entitle the agency to regulate the matter by individual commands given for each case, but only to regulate the matter abstractly.

Weber, Bureaucracy (1921). Emphasis added. Abstractly, i.e., categorically.

It also doesn't allow them to make mistakes when making decisions, such as a decision as to whether or not an electronically submitted proposal was "late" instead of "timely".

Acquisition is done by a bureaucracy, which must order certain matters by decision. The acquisition bureaucracy writes rules and establishes categories pertaining to the use of processes, procedures, and methods. The categories are abstractions.

Sometimes the categorization is faulty. It doesn't match reality. (Think of how T&M contracts were once wrongly categorized as "cost-type" contracts.) Sometimes the placement of a particular case into a category is faulty. Either way, in cases of faulty categorization a choice of process, procedure, method, or technique might be unwise or unsound.

Faulty categorization ("category mistake") is an old and common human problem.

Sometimes a bureaucratic phenomenon doesn't really fit into any existing category. For instance, FAR 15.306 and bid protest case law make rules for only three categories of "exchanges" between the government and offerors during source selection... clarification, communication, and discussion. Clarification is ill-defined; communication is limited to establishment of a competition range; and discussion, said to involve negotiation, i.e., bargaining, is too all-encompassing. Are there no other kinds of communication? How about a fourth category: adjustment or correction?

So there is another example for you, as is, in my opinion, considering all competitive cost-reimbursement procurements to be in same category for purposes of cost realism analysis because they are cost-reimbursement, regardless of what is being bought and the sources of cost uncertainty and the degree of risk.

Maybe one way to look for additional examples is to look at FAR "applicability" sections.