- Government spends a lot of money tackling the toughest least profitable problems
- Govt has trouble recruiting the best hackers , computer scientists and statisticians (data science community) as they generally get a lot more salary in private sector for far more easy problems ( which ad do I want them to click)
- Private companies in USA can also outsource or get H1 visa workers for analytical needs while even USA government has to rely on US citizen data scientists for small non-sensitive departments like calculating subsidies for factory farms for Department of Agriculture.
- Meanwhile the budget for IT digitization for electronic government and Data Science is quite small
- Govt has lot more bureaucracy and lack of speed to get things done which is a big turn off for companies trying to be new data science vendors thus leaving a big hand to pricey players like AH BEE HUMMhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25QyCxVkXwQ
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25QyCxVkXwQ
- In election season, data scientists are in even more shortage as they work for analyzing and calculating odds for winning states or even work in teams for candidates ( political parties pay everyone working for them by cheque in US )
- Information security is one more area where they lack enough recruitment strategy
- Hackers have a general aversion to working for any Government ( for less salary) unless they are endowed with equity ( here successes companies like INQTEL (https://www.iqt.org/) can be replicated not just for Intelligence but for other departments as well by startup funds in hacker
- Software interfaces need to be updated for better data visualization and analytical communication across departments
- More money can be invested in training existing Federal Employees in analytics, analytical way of thinking or even basics of data science
One more note- US government can repair its relationship by the hacker activist community even by small courtesies and track 2 diplomacy. That can help not just with business as usual data science (like where is rain going to fall in Florida and Lousiana for Department of Agriculture) but also special areas of mutual concern (identifying hateful events through crowd sourced intelligence across public social media data