LEIF LARSON: Government’s IT Crisis And The Fleecing Of Taxpayers

Government entities at every level fail to modernize critical information technology systems, then blame private contractors when projects collapse. This is not incompetence. It is a racket—a deliberate, systematic fleecing of the American taxpayer while bureaucrats face zero accountability and zero consequences.

The problem is structural and deliberate. Government bureaucracies face no competitive pressure. None. Corporate leaders who fail to modernize lose market share, lose customers, and lose their jobs. Government officials who preside over technological disasters get promoted, retire with fat pensions, or shift blame to vendors. The system does not merely tolerate failure. It rewards failure. It incentivizes failure. It protects the people responsible for failure while punishing the private sector companies hired to fix the mess.

The numbers are damning. The Government Accountability Office reported on March 12, 2025 that the federal government spends more than $100 billion annually on IT systems. The result? As GAO noted, “too frequently, efforts to replace old IT systems fail or are over budget and delayed.”

One hundred billion dollars. Every year.

Let that sink in. The American taxpayer hands over $100 billion annually, and the federal government still can’t modernize its technology efficiently, technology the private sector replaced decades ago.

The GAO found that pilots and air traffic controllers communicate using systems more than 30 years old. The FAA will not finish replacing this infrastructure until 2035. Veterans’ health records, the medical files of Americans who bled for this country, sit in systems three decades old. The State Department processes passports through antiquated legacy systems. Americans trust their lives and their data to technology that belongs in the Smithsonian.

This is not an isolated failure. It is systematic looting of the American taxpayer by a bureaucratic class that cannot be fired, cannot be held accountable, and cannot be bothered to modernize. These are not public servants. They are public parasites feeding on taxpayer dollars while delivering garbage.