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Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50
by alaithea 2y ago
Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
- eitally 2y agoThis is the equivalent level of pettiness as removing free coffee from offices.
- alaithea 2y agoMany government offices had no free coffee already. This was the case in the mid-teens at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which houses the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where the federal CTO and CIO sit, and the National Security Council, just to name a couple.
- vonmoltke 2y agoI spent the first 9.5 years of my career at a large defense contractor. We never had free coffee.
- sitkack 2y agoJust one person taking a coffee break to go get coffee obviates any savings. The free coffee isn't there for the staff, it is there to save the org money.
- selectodude 2y agoThe federal government is so worried about the appearance of spending excess taxpayer money that employees set up water clubs and coffee clubs where the employees all chip in for a water cooler and a coffee machine every month.
- fallingknife 2y agoIf only they extended this frugality to not hiring 10 people to do a job that could be done by 2.
- watwut 2y agoIt does not matter how efficient they are, people like you will a use them of inefficiency.
- vonmoltke 2y agoSo, this particular contractor was big into efficiency and cost savings, to the point that we were all required to do a project where we made something more efficient and documented how much money we saved in doing so. The whole thing was mostly bullshit, but one of the interesting things I learned by doing it was that saving engineering time was essentially $0, because from the company's perspective we were all salaried, and as long as the time we were saving was charged to the same contract we would be charging our other work to, it didn't matter. From that perspective, which I do not agree with, the cost of coffee breaks was also $0, while the cost of providing it was not, so no coffee. On one program I was on we at least managed to get facilities to install a commercial Bunn machine for us, but we were still responsible for buying all the supplies.
- sitkack 2y agoUnder that simplistic model there is no space for higher quality, higher reliability, etc. Then "efficiency" is one dimensional and you have basically no agency. The cost model should be agreed upon collectively. -2000 lines
- vonmoltke 2y agoYou're right, and there were definitely situations where we could have done things better, but didn't, because the impetus wasn't there. It was really frustrating, and I wish I'd been able to get out sooner. > -2000 lines Not sure what this is a reference to, but one of the fun things I tripped over while there was that code changes were valued on dollars per LOC. Changesets with net negative LOC were... problematic. I think I once had a change that was near -2000 LOC net.
- kirubakaran 2y agohttps://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
- rodgerd 2y ago"We need you in the office for CoLlAboRaTIon." "OK, we'll have coffee after our morning standup." "Absolutely not."
- wooger 2y agoAnd coffee itself is chiefly a productivity aid, to benefit the business.
- matsemann 2y agoI've seen news articles like "here the government spent $5000 on a party" like it's some crazy story of wasted money. And then it was like their annual Christmas party, with 100+ people paying less than ~$50 per plate and they had to bring their own beer. Like, hardly affluent spending. Or "government sent their workers to this hotel on tax payers' dime!!" with a picture of some suite, and turns out they just attended a conference about their area and they only saw the conference rooms. I don't get why spending money on government workers is so frowned upon. They deserve conferences, a nice office and some social stuff just as much as anyone. My Christmas parties as a government consultant cost probably 5x as much, never heard anything, and also paid with tax payer money, just through a layer of privatization...
- TheCoelacanth 2y agoEven dumber than that. The cards are there to make sure that the federal government doesn't pay state taxes. This is literally going to cost the government more money.
- alabastervlog 2y ago[flagged]
- leptons 2y agoIt's not going to cost the government anything, when they destroy the government. That is exactly their intent. "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist, an unelected person, who many Republicans in congress signed a pledge to. We're at the "small enough" phase, and soon enough we'll be at the "drowning" phase. This is their dream come true, unfortunately it's going to be a nightmare for everyone but the most wealthy.
- randyrand 2y ago[flagged]
- alaithea 2y agoHave you worked for the federal government? Employees literally have to fill out forms and follow a strict process to buy anything when they don't have these charge cards.
- randyrand 2y ago[flagged]
- alaithea 2y agoSo, remove the checks and balances that were already put in place over decades to make sure employees are spending responsibly. Um, sure. With the employee cards, all the transactions are traceable and can be monitored with a minimum of red tape. How exactly would one improve upon that? It's literally the technologically-enabled solution.
- alabastervlog 2y agoRe-discovering why things worked the way they did (waste, corruption, and fraud prevention) is gonna be fun.
- morcus 2y agoWouldn't it be prudent to do that before rolling out such a change?
- gaganyaan 2y agoYou have quite the imagination. Your fantasy of Musk's competence is unmoored from reality
- johnnyanmac 2y agoDo you shut down your entire business before rolling out a new system?
- duxup 2y agoI worked for a company that at one point was worried about wasteful expenses. Eventually to solve this resulted in a system where a $40 pizza lunch went to a committee of completely disconnected morons who debated it and would then forward it to a VP to make the final call. Probably a couple thousands in time costs with the paperwork and people time involved … for $40 of pizza. Oh and they had lunch while they debated. I got an email from the committee once, I told them to forget it and I would buy my team pizza with my own money…. they actually tried to get me in trouble for that. These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end. Thankfully we were bought and the new CEO did away with it.
- sitkack 2y agoThat is exactly why there are discretionary spending limits, if the overhead for sending the $40 pizza to a committee isn't priced in, then every cost will blown out. Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock. They don't care, destruction of the federal government is the point. Congress needs to do their job.
- Henchman21 2y agoThe majority in Congress have — rather obviously — been paid off with luxury trips and RVs and trips to Russia. We are truly fucked, you know?
- duxup 2y agoHey man Thomas is totally proud of that RV he paid for …. well didn’t pay for… also didn’t pay to park it…
- hunter-gatherer 2y agoYeah, I was telling my wife last night that if we live long enough we might get to read some really interesting books from (to be) former SVR/GRU types about the time they made assets from most of th oval office.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoNo. Now workers will not spend the $50 on office supplies, either paying for them out of their own pocket, or doing without. Either way, they're saving $50, either by stealing it from the employees who'd rather pay themselves to be able to do their job, or by causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the productivity because someone spends 2 hours hunting for an unused pen instead of just grabbing one from the supply box in the corner.
- lenerdenator 2y agoThat's the point. These are people who want to prove, regardless of anything, that government is less efficient than private enterprises... particularly their private enterprises, who would be happy to help you with your problem, dear citizen, for a nominal fee.
- amatecha 2y agoIt blows my mind how many people like "that's so inefficient!" or "that will create so many problems!", giving even a shred of consideration to this fake org that its goal has literally anything to do with what it says publicly. It's a complete farce.
- tombert 2y agoI've said this a dozen times here now, but the word "efficiency" doesn't really mean anything in isolation; "efficiency" only really makes sense if you define what you're optimizing for. Since they don't really do that, they can then define the term to mean whatever they want and then declare it as "successful".
- sejje 2y agoWell if it isn't clear, I can help out: they mean financial efficiency. That's why everything they mess with is about money.
- tombert 2y agoIt's absolutely not clear that that's true, and "financial efficiency" doesn't make sense either in isolation. You could only make the argument that what they're doing is "more efficient" if we're getting the same output while spending less money, but since they're cutting entire programs then I don't think it's fair to assume at all that we are getting the same output. It is absolutely not implied that spending less money and reducing the federal workforce is going to be "more efficient" by literally any definition of the term that I can think of. And it's really odd the DOGE hasn't found any "inefficiency" in the contracts that Tesla and SpaceX has with the federal government. I would personally think that spending $400 million on a bunch of famously unreliable cars pretending that they're tanks is a waste of money, but I'm not the richest person alive, so what do I know. ETA: Looks like I was wrong about the Cybertruck stuff: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2025/02/14/elon-musk-tesla-400-million-contract-cybertrucks-politifact/78614231007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2025... I stand by the rest of what I said.
- asah 2y agothere's a bit of legit thinking that it'll scare employees into not charging things, to avoid the paperwork...
- rgbrgb 2y agoWorth noting that it is not at all dumb if your objective is to degrade the power and effectiveness of the US government. There are effective people in charge this time who know exactly what they're doing here.
- reaperducer 2y agoNow workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies. Sounds like my company. It finally got rid of the travel agency contract, so for my meeting last week I ended up spending $600 in salary hours making my own arrangements so the company could save a $50 commission to a travel agent. Penny wise and pound foolish.
- RandallBrown 2y agoI've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency, but my work travel has always been pretty simple.
- stephen_g 2y agoI've had the same experience, especially with making changes - places I've worked where we could arrange the travel, changes would be easy since we'd book flexible, make changes through the airline's web site and not pay fees, but with the travel agent we'd often have to call, so we couldn't easily make changes out of business hours (when we often needed to) and then we'd have to pay the agent a fee for the service of doing something we could have just done on the airline's web site ourselves.
- reaperducer 2y agoI've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency But that's the point. With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work. One day you just got an email with your flight, car and hotel information. The travel agency handled everything. There was no "working with" an agent. Employees focused on their work, not figuring out travel arrangements. That you worked with someone tells me we're talking about different things.
- RandallBrown 2y ago> With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work. I've never worked anywhere where they just sent me flight and hotel information with no input from me. I've always coordinated with the travel agent so I could at least pick a travel time that worked for me.
- jeroenhd 2y agoPlacing back the red tape and requiring everyone to follow the rules is step one in a malicious takeover. It makes everything slow and inefficient, making every department fail their objectives and deadlines, providing an invented basis for reducing/upending/replacing/getting rid of whatever policy/program/department you want to get rid of. The goal isn't to reduce spending. It's to create bad press to get rid of parts of the government that get in the way of the cronies in charge.
- tway223 2y agoExactly. This is all about power grab without going through a proper due process. The government is shitty and inefficient but DOGE is not the way to fix it.
- timewizard 2y agoRequiring people to "follow the rules" is malicious? Why did we even make the rules in the first place? What is this mythical idea that a government without red tape will automatically be operating in your interest? This is a Capraesque idea of Washington D.C..
- TZubiri 2y agoThis argument exists even if there is no bureocratic process for the purchase, assuming that the purchase is not done. Suppose a 500$ monthly expense for taxi, where the employees need to use public transport in its absence. Or a software tool that saves 1 hour per week, and costs 20$/ month. In both cases the employees need to spend more time and the costs are reduced. But the salary cost is fixed (for the most part, whatever cuts where possible were already done), so the workload goes up in this phase. And I'm assuming they are just trying to crack the whip. It's just a typical business management tactic of reducing costs, and maximizing workload per employee, (and increasing income usually, but in this case I think they'll translate it to reduced income as tax cuts, the increased income is for the private sector) At least that's my take, pretty straightforward.
- Terr_ 2y agoWe had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers. The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.
- ChrisRR 2y agoDumbest change so far*