Congress. The big stink would go from "we bought four $52k trash cans" to "we bought hundreds of trash cans we won't need for a decade, if ever!"
Examples:
Rand Paul complaining about things like $8M in unused solar panels: https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-sen-rand-paul-highlights-18...
Bobby Jindal saying "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.": https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/bobby-jindal-...
Unfortunately, both of those things frequently happen simultaneously.
4 extra =/= hundreds extra
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And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels? I could have gotten 26,000+ trash cans at $300 each!
> And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels?
Spares? A lower than expected defect rate? Who knows? Paul doesn't provide useful specifics, just the politically sexy top-level numbers.
In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
> In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
And yet a fraction of that amount is front page HN.
Clearly a lot of other people believe differently.
A lot of people believe incorrect things about stuff they don't understand, yes. HN most certainly isn't immune.
Outrage bait is hardly a new phenomenon. The unit cost looks insane because it's a side effect of the fact that a defense contractor won't get out of bed without a minimum of a couple hundred grand in the contract to cover the program.
There's also some foresight involved here. I used to work for a company that delivered computers for industrial applications such as ASML and FEI (lithography machines and electron microscopes). They had very precise requirements: "we want Intel Xeon 5119 Rev 3 CPUs for the next 4 years, not Rev 2, not Rev 4, the revision shall be 3 and 3 shall be the revision. Rev 5 is right out". The same applied with mainboards, memory, etc. There was also an entire testing procedure involved for many of these things and not all components passed.
So, we charged them more for this then $random_person buying a component, obviously, but we also talked to them beforehand and knew roughly how many they needed, overbought components in bulk beforehand before they were EOL, and sold the rest afterwards fairly cheaply (because by then they were pretty old components). The volumes for these kind of machines is low (on the order of dozens or hundreds a year) so this was all practical. We made a fair but far from exuberant profit from this.
I see no reason why this couldn't have happened here: "oh, your trash cans are going EOL; we expect to need 40 of them in the next 30 years, please produce them before you EOL them".
I don't know which party failed on this part, but someone did. Possibly both. Even ordering two new-price trash cans leaves you with 250 of them at the old price. Storage isn't free either so let's assume 150 of them.