USCIS spent $3B to digitize 1 form

The following was written in response to a recent debacle by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous.

Somewhere in Nebraska and Vermont, they had hired Accenture and IBM who, like preparing for the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, brought 7000 managers, 3000 onshore US consultants and 1 million mostly offshore indian programmers to the project — thus creating the largest powerpoint file known to man. It was saved on a 2 petabyte AWS cluster running Microsoft sharepoint and had 300 million slides much of it sourced at lightening speed from projects the managers did in their prior jobs — at Deloitte, CGI, KPMG and Pricewaterhouse.

1.5 million printers worked for 18 months non stop to print the entire deck which would then have been circulated among committees and scrum teams. Like Iran’s religious police these manager imams would shepherd their 3000 rotating consultants into ‘bi-hourly checkpoints’ — 5 times a day. Fridays, they’d raid the local airport of all its wine, beer, and sliders supply. Gas stations would run out of fuel filling up rental cars. Uber finally became profitable.

It was a complete account of how USCIS should modernize, digitize, and reform their IT infrastructure to implement a robust but simple “IT strategy” leveraging a combination of ‘open source standards’ and ‘best of breed’ systems. Every programming language since the 1940s was mentioned and nothing was spared. Encryption, high availability, fail-fast, self correcting errors, big data, kerberos, micro-batching, BDR, replication, multi-master writes, polyglot persistence, RAID-5, horizontal distribution, sharding, multi-lingual unicode translations, machine learning and a japanese exaflop super computer that will be invented in 2028 were in the final application design proposal.

Outside “Experts” that weren’t even required — User interface, SAP, String theory, and someone who worked on the genome project were flown in on a emergency contingency every time USCIS threatened to sue.

But (most likely) an intern created a web form and inadvertently made it public backed by JSP code writing to a maria db instance. For about 75$ she created the most useful application in the history of the department.