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>Most US Gov agencies are underfunded Doesn't the US outspend in terms of dollars almost every single developed country on the planet at absolutely everything,

>Most US Gov agencies are underfunded Doesn't the US outspend in terms of dollars almost every single developed country on the planet at absolutely everything, even in per capita statistics, from military, police to education and healthcare? How could it be underfunded?

lazide 2y ago
The first thing you learn in government is that you’re always underfunded. If you aren’t, your budget will go to someone who is.
throwway120385 2y ago
The US is really really big. People way underestimate how huge it is in terms of land area. You could fit Europe inside the US. So the reason Germany or France underspend the US has more to do with the area they have to cover and the number of people they have in their borders.
- dmix 2y ago
  > even in per capita statistics
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    The argument is density. Things tend to be cheaper per capita, when density is high. I don't buy it thought. I think the reason why the spend is less in Europe is due to higher salary equality - good people take job in government because the salary is only 50% higher in private sector (for tech, even less for other areas).
    - vidarh 2y ago
      There are only a couple of US states less dense than e.g. Norway, and even in those states the vast majority of the population live in small, higher density areas. The areas where the vast majority of Americans actually live are fairly high density. Some cost might come down to density, but not much.
      - tossandthrow 2y ago
        Agreed, only trying to make the comment justice - not agreeing. Arguable, Denmark has a super low density also if you count in Greenland. As also written, I don't buy that argument. I think the core is inequality.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >You could fit Europe inside the US. If we're considering contiguous US, then no. Europe is 3.93 million square miles. Contiguous US is 3.15 million square miles.
  - saalweachter 2y ago
    I'm guessing the poster was thinking of "Europe" as more like "the EU" or "Europe minus Russia"; 1.1 million of Russia's 6.6 million square miles are part of Europe's 3.93; take it away, and "Europe" drops to more like 2.8 million square miles, a smidge less than the contiguous US.
  - Armisael16 2y ago
    Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation? Alaska still isn’t quite enough to push the US up, but it’s good for another 20%-ish increase in land area over the contiguous number.
    - coldtea 2y ago
      >Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation? As a non-contiguous later addition, with a small population, where statistically nobody lives there per sq mile, and is not pertinent to the discussion of population density as related to infrastructure problems? Except in what's holding US bureucratic efficiency down (what we were discussing), and requires spending inflated federal budgets for little returns, Alaska is a big factor relative to its size...
Jtsummers 2y ago
In total the US executive is very well funded, but individual agencies aren't always well-funded and often lack the specific skillset to properly utilize funding even if they have it, especially wrt IT systems when that's outside their main field of expertise.
- dmix 2y ago
  Yes the should try having less of them. There’s 438 total, it’d probably take CISA years to red team all of them.
  - oneplane 2y ago
    So your solution to a problem that exists because there isn't enough capacity to go around is to compound that problem by having even less capacity?
    - nradov 2y ago
      The federal government does too much. We could simply eliminate many of those agencies and save money for taxpayers, or redirect those resources to more important functions. There is excess capacity, it's just in the wrong places. As for IT functions, all of that should be centralized under the GSA with proper security controls. There's no benefit to having every agency maintain its own IT infrastructure. Most of those staff are redundant and could be laid off.
      - notaustinpowers 2y ago
        I worry for having a centralized IT infrastructure as that now puts every single agency at risk from a single attack. No one would call a neighborhood "secure" if every home used the same key.
        Jtsummers 2y ago
        It's getting centralized anyways, just not inside any federal agency. Instead they're outsourcing it to companies like MS and Google who provide hosted services. This gives the agency cover so long as they do their part (like making use of MFA, using encryption on email). Then they can offer a claim of making their best-effort and going with industry "standards" (standard as in common, not as in ISO, ANSI, or others).
mrguyorama 2y ago
The US government is broadly disallowed, for political reasons, from doing anything. So they have to buy services on the open market, where they get charged through the nose. Our state legislature recently voted down adding a new Data Analyst position to one of their departments. That department cannot function without that position, so instead it has to use it's funding to buy that same position from a 3rd party contractor for 3x the price or more. The result is that we pay more than anyone else for basically everything we do.
- iisan7 2y ago
  I generally agree that the government often hamstrings itself. But consider also that you can't terminate state employees easily, and their benefits packages often cost more than 100% of their salary. The salary itself and the working conditions often don't attract the best talent. Thus it's not always so cut and dry in terms of what's the best outcome for the public interest.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ndriscoll 2y ago
My understanding is that regardless of funding, the US federal government has standardized pay scales that top out way below what private industry pays, so even well funded agencies can only possibly get junior developers/IT or people that are willing to take a significant (50-80%) pay reduction. The very most you can possibly make as a GS15 in 2024 is 191,900, and they have locality-adjusted pay with most localities being below that. They might also generally still drug test? I don't even do drugs, but I'm not going to pee in a cup for someone to effectively do charity lol. Good luck recruiting a professional with decades of engineering experience when you treat them like they're a 16 year old working at Taco Bell. Even someone with 0 years doesn't have to deal with that kind of treatment in industry.
- SanderNL 2y ago
  Charity? I sympathize somewhat, but I’m also disgusted by the utter lack of respect for government and societal service in general. That shit means something. I wish to believe there are still people that don’t care about making Yet Another few hundred thousand and just want to actually contribute to society instead of working on ad tech or whatever bullshit.
  - arcimpulse 2y ago
    Regardless of whether or not one personally enjoys the work one is doing, if one really is contributing to society, one should get fairly compensated for it. Additional requirements not common in the private sector, such as rigorous drug testing, ethics codes, requirements on gift reporting, increased surveillance, etc., should come with additional benefits to compensate. Instead, government workers submit to these requirements and a substantial pay cut. That's mostly because conservatives 1) desire tax cuts at any cost and 2) want to demolish the entire administrative state. The stability and consistency that comes with a well-funded civil servant class are an obstruction to their stated goals.
    - jholman 2y ago
      I vouched your comment, because I think you're precisely making the relevant point in the first two paragraphs. However, I think you're wrong, at least in part, in your third paragraph. I mean, I think the word "mostly" is wrong in that paragraph. Politicians from all political factions are (quite reasonably) under pressure to lower the cost of doing the work of government, and (quite reasonably) to raise the integrity of the process. Combined with some of the dysfunction inherent in agent-principal problems, I think that's more than enough to cause the problem you're talking about. I experience this firsthand in a jurisdiction that has much less of the "demolish the entire administrative state" that afflicts the American right wing (which I'm guessing is your point of reference). Mind you, I am not claiming that the problem is not badly worsened by American right-wing politics. I wouldn't know. I'm just claiming that the problem is semi-intrinsic to the situation, and I strongly doubt that it's "mostly" caused by those particular political issues.
segasaturn 2y ago
The military? Yes. They get more money than they know what to do with - I heard a story about how there's a base where all they do is build M1 Abrams tanks on an assembly line, then disassemble the tanks, and re-assemble, and then disassemble, Ad Infinium, in order to spend all the money they're allocated. It's always a political winner for Congress to give more money to the military, so their budget has become astronomical and only continues to grow. Every other agency and branch of the US government? Absolutely not.
- jlund-molfese 2y ago
  Do you have any source for the claim that there is a factory with the sole purpose of assembling and disassembling M1 Abrams tanks without actually delivering or upgrading any of them? That sounds very implausible, bordering on conspiracy theory.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    It’s bullshit. I write software for autonomous tanks. Part of our contract is to have procedures for literally everything, which includes how to take apart and put back together the robot in order to be able to maintain them. We of course run these procedures while writing and formally verifying them, before handing them to the customer, not running them would be folly. Whatever this story is sounds like the worst kind: a small nugget of truth surrounded in a giant ball of shit. Even more than that, a customer doesn’t just hand us a pile of money and say “talk to you again in 2 years” far from it. They literally “status the status” once or more weekly. If the answer to the question of “what is the plan this week” has the answer of “we’re out of work so we’re just charging you pad our profits” won’t play. Also, building tanks is fucking hard, I sincerely doubt any company in the industry isn’t using every penny they have to solve problems and deliver a good product. For those that scoff at the last bit: companies are in the business of making money, and if you deliver an inferior product, you won’t get another contract.
- kube-system 2y ago
  I'm not sure about that particular story, but many similar stories are rooted in a very real issue of maintaining domestic supply chain expertise. While centrally managed economies can just mandate that state-owned factories continue to exist, private markets won't do this. If you don't order tanks and missiles, the factories that make tanks and missiles will cease to exist, and the market will reallocate resources elsewhere.
nitwit005 2y ago
When political candidates vow to "trim the fat" of the US government, the military is typically off limits, but the other government departments certainly aren't.
Denvercoder9 2y ago
You'd have to look at purchase power, not dollars, to see how much they can actually do with all that spending. You get a lot further with $5 in a place where wages are $1, than with $20 in a place where wages are $15.
acdha 2y ago
You can only spend money on what your budget specifically allows. If you’re in the military, the fact that you are authorized to procure $1B aircraft doesn’t mean you can hire a $200k IT security engineer to protect your HR system and you can go to jail if you try to pay for an application upgrade out of that budget unless it’s directly linked to that program. If you’re not in the military, the fact that someone else has a big budget doesn’t help you any more than your neighbor having a Mercedes helps pay your internet bill. There are general budgets and people build in support costs, of course, but it’s terribly easy to find people who have been asking for budget to replace something years before its end of life but keep getting turned down in the congressional budgeting process. Politicians want to fund things their constituents like, but the unloved internal support app is just as much of a risk to have on your network.

lazide 2y ago

The first thing you learn in government is that you’re always underfunded. If you aren’t, your budget will go to someone who is.

throwway120385 2y ago

The US is really really big. People way underestimate how huge it is in terms of land area. You could fit Europe inside the US. So the reason Germany or France underspend the US has more to do with the area they have to cover and the number of people they have in their borders.

dmix 2y ago
> even in per capita statistics
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  The argument is density. Things tend to be cheaper per capita, when density is high. I don't buy it thought. I think the reason why the spend is less in Europe is due to higher salary equality - good people take job in government because the salary is only 50% higher in private sector (for tech, even less for other areas).
  - vidarh 2y ago
    There are only a couple of US states less dense than e.g. Norway, and even in those states the vast majority of the population live in small, higher density areas. The areas where the vast majority of Americans actually live are fairly high density. Some cost might come down to density, but not much.
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      Agreed, only trying to make the comment justice - not agreeing. Arguable, Denmark has a super low density also if you count in Greenland. As also written, I don't buy that argument. I think the core is inequality.
coldtea 2y ago
>You could fit Europe inside the US. If we're considering contiguous US, then no. Europe is 3.93 million square miles. Contiguous US is 3.15 million square miles.
- saalweachter 2y ago
  I'm guessing the poster was thinking of "Europe" as more like "the EU" or "Europe minus Russia"; 1.1 million of Russia's 6.6 million square miles are part of Europe's 3.93; take it away, and "Europe" drops to more like 2.8 million square miles, a smidge less than the contiguous US.
- Armisael16 2y ago
  Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation? Alaska still isn’t quite enough to push the US up, but it’s good for another 20%-ish increase in land area over the contiguous number.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation? As a non-contiguous later addition, with a small population, where statistically nobody lives there per sq mile, and is not pertinent to the discussion of population density as related to infrastructure problems? Except in what's holding US bureucratic efficiency down (what we were discussing), and requires spending inflated federal budgets for little returns, Alaska is a big factor relative to its size...

Jtsummers 2y ago

In total the US executive is very well funded, but individual agencies aren't always well-funded and often lack the specific skillset to properly utilize funding even if they have it, especially wrt IT systems when that's outside their main field of expertise.

dmix 2y ago
Yes the should try having less of them. There’s 438 total, it’d probably take CISA years to red team all of them.
- oneplane 2y ago
  So your solution to a problem that exists because there isn't enough capacity to go around is to compound that problem by having even less capacity?
  - nradov 2y ago
    The federal government does too much. We could simply eliminate many of those agencies and save money for taxpayers, or redirect those resources to more important functions. There is excess capacity, it's just in the wrong places. As for IT functions, all of that should be centralized under the GSA with proper security controls. There's no benefit to having every agency maintain its own IT infrastructure. Most of those staff are redundant and could be laid off.
    - notaustinpowers 2y ago
      I worry for having a centralized IT infrastructure as that now puts every single agency at risk from a single attack. No one would call a neighborhood "secure" if every home used the same key.
      - Jtsummers 2y ago
        It's getting centralized anyways, just not inside any federal agency. Instead they're outsourcing it to companies like MS and Google who provide hosted services. This gives the agency cover so long as they do their part (like making use of MFA, using encryption on email). Then they can offer a claim of making their best-effort and going with industry "standards" (standard as in common, not as in ISO, ANSI, or others).

mrguyorama 2y ago

The US government is broadly disallowed, for political reasons, from doing anything. So they have to buy services on the open market, where they get charged through the nose. Our state legislature recently voted down adding a new Data Analyst position to one of their departments. That department cannot function without that position, so instead it has to use it's funding to buy that same position from a 3rd party contractor for 3x the price or more. The result is that we pay more than anyone else for basically everything we do.

iisan7 2y ago
I generally agree that the government often hamstrings itself. But consider also that you can't terminate state employees easily, and their benefits packages often cost more than 100% of their salary. The salary itself and the working conditions often don't attract the best talent. Thus it's not always so cut and dry in terms of what's the best outcome for the public interest.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ndriscoll 2y ago

My understanding is that regardless of funding, the US federal government has standardized pay scales that top out way below what private industry pays, so even well funded agencies can only possibly get junior developers/IT or people that are willing to take a significant (50-80%) pay reduction. The very most you can possibly make as a GS15 in 2024 is 191,900, and they have locality-adjusted pay with most localities being below that. They might also generally still drug test? I don't even do drugs, but I'm not going to pee in a cup for someone to effectively do charity lol. Good luck recruiting a professional with decades of engineering experience when you treat them like they're a 16 year old working at Taco Bell. Even someone with 0 years doesn't have to deal with that kind of treatment in industry.

SanderNL 2y ago
Charity? I sympathize somewhat, but I’m also disgusted by the utter lack of respect for government and societal service in general. That shit means something. I wish to believe there are still people that don’t care about making Yet Another few hundred thousand and just want to actually contribute to society instead of working on ad tech or whatever bullshit.
- arcimpulse 2y ago
  Regardless of whether or not one personally enjoys the work one is doing, if one really is contributing to society, one should get fairly compensated for it. Additional requirements not common in the private sector, such as rigorous drug testing, ethics codes, requirements on gift reporting, increased surveillance, etc., should come with additional benefits to compensate. Instead, government workers submit to these requirements and a substantial pay cut. That's mostly because conservatives 1) desire tax cuts at any cost and 2) want to demolish the entire administrative state. The stability and consistency that comes with a well-funded civil servant class are an obstruction to their stated goals.
  - jholman 2y ago
    I vouched your comment, because I think you're precisely making the relevant point in the first two paragraphs. However, I think you're wrong, at least in part, in your third paragraph. I mean, I think the word "mostly" is wrong in that paragraph. Politicians from all political factions are (quite reasonably) under pressure to lower the cost of doing the work of government, and (quite reasonably) to raise the integrity of the process. Combined with some of the dysfunction inherent in agent-principal problems, I think that's more than enough to cause the problem you're talking about. I experience this firsthand in a jurisdiction that has much less of the "demolish the entire administrative state" that afflicts the American right wing (which I'm guessing is your point of reference). Mind you, I am not claiming that the problem is not badly worsened by American right-wing politics. I wouldn't know. I'm just claiming that the problem is semi-intrinsic to the situation, and I strongly doubt that it's "mostly" caused by those particular political issues.

segasaturn 2y ago

The military? Yes. They get more money than they know what to do with - I heard a story about how there's a base where all they do is build M1 Abrams tanks on an assembly line, then disassemble the tanks, and re-assemble, and then disassemble, Ad Infinium, in order to spend all the money they're allocated. It's always a political winner for Congress to give more money to the military, so their budget has become astronomical and only continues to grow. Every other agency and branch of the US government? Absolutely not.

jlund-molfese 2y ago
Do you have any source for the claim that there is a factory with the sole purpose of assembling and disassembling M1 Abrams tanks without actually delivering or upgrading any of them? That sounds very implausible, bordering on conspiracy theory.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  It’s bullshit. I write software for autonomous tanks. Part of our contract is to have procedures for literally everything, which includes how to take apart and put back together the robot in order to be able to maintain them. We of course run these procedures while writing and formally verifying them, before handing them to the customer, not running them would be folly. Whatever this story is sounds like the worst kind: a small nugget of truth surrounded in a giant ball of shit. Even more than that, a customer doesn’t just hand us a pile of money and say “talk to you again in 2 years” far from it. They literally “status the status” once or more weekly. If the answer to the question of “what is the plan this week” has the answer of “we’re out of work so we’re just charging you pad our profits” won’t play. Also, building tanks is fucking hard, I sincerely doubt any company in the industry isn’t using every penny they have to solve problems and deliver a good product. For those that scoff at the last bit: companies are in the business of making money, and if you deliver an inferior product, you won’t get another contract.
kube-system 2y ago
I'm not sure about that particular story, but many similar stories are rooted in a very real issue of maintaining domestic supply chain expertise. While centrally managed economies can just mandate that state-owned factories continue to exist, private markets won't do this. If you don't order tanks and missiles, the factories that make tanks and missiles will cease to exist, and the market will reallocate resources elsewhere.

nitwit005 2y ago

When political candidates vow to "trim the fat" of the US government, the military is typically off limits, but the other government departments certainly aren't.

Denvercoder9 2y ago

You'd have to look at purchase power, not dollars, to see how much they can actually do with all that spending. You get a lot further with $5 in a place where wages are $1, than with $20 in a place where wages are $15.

acdha 2y ago

You can only spend money on what your budget specifically allows. If you’re in the military, the fact that you are authorized to procure $1B aircraft doesn’t mean you can hire a $200k IT security engineer to protect your HR system and you can go to jail if you try to pay for an application upgrade out of that budget unless it’s directly linked to that program. If you’re not in the military, the fact that someone else has a big budget doesn’t help you any more than your neighbor having a Mercedes helps pay your internet bill. There are general budgets and people build in support costs, of course, but it’s terribly easy to find people who have been asking for budget to replace something years before its end of life but keep getting turned down in the congressional budgeting process. Politicians want to fund things their constituents like, but the unloved internal support app is just as much of a risk to have on your network.