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I'm not arguing with this view, but I want to emphasize, that as someone who once worked in the Federal sector in numerous different agencies, that they waste t
by JPKab 6y ago
I'm not arguing with this view, but I want to emphasize, that as someone who once worked in the Federal sector in numerous different agencies, that they waste tremendous amounts of money on things that have nothing to do with their core mission. The Pentagon is obviously horrendous, but other agencies that I expected to be better stewards of their dollars (EPA, DoE, IRS, and yes, NOAA) were horrifically wasteful, on dozens of fronts.
The hiring is always a problem, even when there isn't a hiring freeze, but they don't fire enough lazy people, which demotivates hard workers who end up bailing for the private sector.
As taxpayers, we should be furious at the GOP for the Accuweather bullshit, but we also need to be furious at any government agency which tolerates the level of fraud, waste, and abuse that most of these agencies perpertrate.
As a person who happens to want universal healthcare like the NHS in Britain, it's infuriating to me that these agencies tolerate such constant mediocrity in their ranks (mixed in with the talented of course!!!) and are so bad with their spending efficiency.
Bezos had something to say about the Seattle city government last year:
"They don't have a revenue problem, they have a spending efficiency problem."
It seems like we always get political about this, with one side wanting to "starve the beast" (as if government is this evil beast), and the other side just always letting them get away with the excuse that they need more revenue.
Where are the people who BELIEVE in government that will demand that it be efficient?
Edit:
I love how people think that because corporations are inefficient, they assume that all organizations are equally ad inefficient as the US Federal Govt. The rate at which people are involuntarily terminated in the Fed Gov is far, far too low, because incompetence is routinely tolerated where it wouldn't otherwise be anywhere else. Why? Not because a person's supervisor in the Fed doesn't recognize the incompetence, but because the firing process is so difficult that they don't want to or can't expend the energy to do so. If you want government to have a bigger role in people's lives, but are so delusional as to not recognize how bad it is, then you aren't furthering your cause.
The FDA still hasn't approved the Pfizer vaccine, while the NHS already did. Pfizer is an American company. That's a national embarrassment.
- cratermoon 6y agoNone of those inefficiencies are unique to government agencies. They all happen in the private sector two but you don't hear about them because corporations are not subject to an open records act. And that "oh but the free market will ensure inefficient companies fail" response some are about the write is total bs. Companies fail for all kinds of reasons, inefficiency is just one of several things and not always deadly to a corporation.
- JPKab 6y agoHave you ever worked in a Federal Government agency? Edit: Why is this question being downvoted?
- verisimilidude 6y agoI have. State government too. Also a couple BigCo orgs. I can confirm that all are absurdly wasteful. The incentives, culture, and flavor are different but the results are the same.
- JPKab 6y agoI've been a on several "tiger teams" (super cheesy, i know!) that were parachuted in from a consultancy to bail out Federal Gov projects that had gone bad. I've been tasked to state governments as well, and was always blown away by the huge variation between different states. Virginia, for example, at least around 2010, had a very well-run government. Illinois is a steaming pile of garbage as far as being a black hole for money. New Jersey is even worse. They recently, in the beginning of the COVID crisis, blamed their COBOL system for the unemployment check backups. The expert team that was brought in quickly determined that the system wasn't the issue, and the bottleneck was bad management. I think that, like governments, companies are not all equal in their efficiency. I work with a several people who used to work on the factory robots at Ford, and the level of efficiency at Tesla dramatically exceeds that at Ford. As organizations age, they get more and more corrupted, unless reforms are periodically pursued. Think about what IBM used to be, vs what it is today. I think the problem with the Federal Government agencies is that they started out very efficient, and filled with bad asses who were hungry. They are never actually reformed though. They just go through periods of politicians who starve them of money then to other politicians that give them plenty, and there's no consistency party wise of course. GOP throws money at their pet agencies, Dems at theirs. But starving them of money and then throwing it at them again isn't any kind of reform. The result is they have remained stagnant, and filled with people who substitute meaningful work for work that generates great optics. In late 2017, I was chosen to be on a team to go engage in a Hackathon for the Department of Health and Human Services that was focused on developing solutions to help combat the opioid crisis in the US. My company actually pushed to organize it, and therefore my team wasn't allowed to be considered for a prize, but we did participate. The rules were that the teams would all get in the building, sign NDAs, and then be given data that wasn't available to the public, and have 24 hours to build a solution. We walk in, and they had changed the name to a "Codeathon", because high ups in HHS didn't like having the word "Hack" in the title. They had a massive room filled with suits, watching presentations about the opioid crisis and what HHS was doing to solve it, and pushed the actual competitors into side rooms that were incredibly uncomfortable, with card tables and folding metal chairs. We then ended up having to wait because they had delays in getting the USB drives with data out to the contestants. The person whose job it was to make the drives forgot to do it the week before. We waited for 5 hours for the drives to be distributed. Eventually, we got the data, and started the work. Built some very cool solutions and presented them. The suits who had been sitting in the main room watching the presentations by HHS didn't show up to watch the presentations, because they were at 3PM on a Thursday, and we were told that the traffic in DC is bad, so most of them had bailed out back to Virginia and Maryland by then. The hackathon (or codeathon) had no food provided. We had to periodically leave the building, buy food, and re-enter through the security checkpoints. The sad part is that unlike me, the rest of my team had never seen the Federal Gov in action. They were all shocked at how incompetent everything seemed to be, and how many people in fancy suits seemed to do nothing. Hundreds of them, watching presentations. They had a long discussion on the flight back about how dismayed they were with the whole experience.
- jfrunyon 6y agoI find it funny when people think that big business isn't far more wasteful.
- sokoloff 6y agoWhataboutism doesn’t work well here either. When a company wastes their shareholders’ money, the shareholders have an easy path to sell their shares and stop being harmed by the waste. When a government wastes taxpayer money, there is not the same timeline nor precision in ability to stop directly supporting that waste so you reasonably see taxpayers seeking other avenues to attempt to curtail the waste.