Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 May 15

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May 15

How does a little company build a Great Wall of Trump?

This story says that the "Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Southwest Valley Constructors" will design and build a replacement border wall in Arizona by January 31, 2020. That is 7 1/2 months from now. I thought that was a remarkable feat, so I looked it up on Google Maps, found nothing that I thought was a sure match, looked up on a general search and found this entry in a database of unknown reliability that claims it has 99 employees and $2.5 million annual revenues. The DOD contract is for $646 million. It gives an address for them, which looks like an office building with no parking spaces for semi rigs, so presumably that isn't the whole operation. But still .... how? Is this some bureaucratic fantasy, or is there some construction industry magic so decentralized that you can just make a border wall spring up with no giant central location or huge crew of company specific workers? Wnt (talk) 21:59, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Subcontracting. General Ization ^Talk 22:02, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Who to? Seaborne Freight? Andy Dingley (talk) 23:54, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

This isn't so uncommon. The $300,000,000 no-bid contract for the rebuilding of Puerto Rico's entire energy grid after Hurricane Maria went to a company from Montana that had exactly two employees.(Whitefish Energy) They apparently planned to sub-contract out to other companies, but in general they completely botched it.

The fact that the CEO was personal friends of the Secretary of the Interior, and their owner was a major campaign contributor to our president is surely a coincidence.

The public noticed this time, because of how spectacularly the P.R. relief effort went bad, but I'm pretty sure this sort of thing happens a lot.

ApLundell (talk) 06:16, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

How did this come to be done so differently from research grants? I mean, if you want to get a grant to study some gene, you have to say where the work will be done and who will do it complete with resume qualification information and how the company you buy the antibody from is going to treat the mice to make sure they don't feel pain and suffering. Whereas this sounds like an absolute pig in a poke. Wnt (talk) 16:18, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Research grants are often administered by scientists (current or ex-) and/or people sympathetic to and somewhat knowledgeable about science, who are used to making rational, logical assessments (see Scientific method) and who are accustomed to being cross-checked by others with a similar level of expertise (see Peer review). Moreover, the terms set up by the grants' sources often build in a degree of openness and objectivity, an ethos fundamental to the processes of scientific research in the first place.

By contrast, the awarding of contracts such as this are often made by politicians or political appointees with little understanding of the contracts' areas of application, who make policies and decisions based on appeal to their constituency so as to get re-elected (see Pork barrel), and on benefitting themselves and their friends/relations/cronies (see Corruption). The processes of such activities may be deliberately obfuscated to allow them to be perpetrated by whoever happens to be in power, because sooner or later all sides will get their turn. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.2.132 (talk)