The business model has been running for decades and it works like this: the government funds basic research, builds institutional infrastructure, develops operational frameworks, and trains a workforce in their implementation. A private contractor enters, wraps the existing public infrastructure in proprietary software and branded methodology, and sells it back to the government at a markup that captures the value of the original public investment as private revenue.
This is not a fringe observation. It is the documented business model of the federal consulting complex, visible in every major contract award, every DOGE cancellation notice, and every Inspector General audit that has ever asked where the deliverable was.
Palantir was built substantially on government contracts. Its foundational data infrastructure was developed in partnership with intelligence agencies using public resources. The product it sells back to those same agencies — and to dozens of other government clients — is a proprietary layer over data architectures that the government helped build. The value capture is real. The public investment that enabled it is not acknowledged in the pricing.
Booz Allen Hamilton generated more than $10 billion in annual revenue, approximately 97% of it from government clients. Its principal product is the analytical workforce it recruits from government agencies, trains on government contracts, and deploys as consultants to the same agencies that trained them. The government pays to develop the capability, then pays again to access it through a private intermediary that captures the margin.
Maximus processes government benefits on behalf of federal and state agencies. Its revenue comes from administering programs funded by the same taxpayers who receive the benefits. The administrative margin — the Ghost Load™ between the public dollar and the benefit delivered — is Maximus’s profit. The company has no incentive to simplify the programs it administers, because simplification would reduce processing volume and therefore revenue.
The MARLOWE framework names this as the Consultant Carousel Pattern: a rotating system in which public institutional knowledge is converted into private intellectual property, sold back to public institutions at a premium, generating returns that are distributed to private shareholders rather than to the public whose resources funded the original capability.
The DOGE cancellations — $853 million+ in terminations documented in early 2026 — confirmed the framework’s analysis in real time. The contracts were not cancelled because the deliverables were complete. They were cancelled because the gap between contracted deliverables and documented outcomes had become indefensible. The Ghost Load was named. The cancellations followed. The framework had named the mechanism 10 weeks before the institutional action confirmed it.