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> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Essentially nothing of OCX will be retained. This isn't really unusual in the DOD.

TitaRusell 4mo ago
None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway. Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.
- jimt1234 4mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?
  - TitaRusell 4mo ago
    Trump was famously elected as the big isolationist candidate and we know how that went...
    - watwut 4mo ago
      He was pro-Russian, thus against help to Ukraine. That is literally the extend of his isolationism. The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.
      - jimt1234 4mo ago
        But what about the Board of Peace? https://boardofpeace.org/ https://boardofpeace.org/ ... I love the quote: "...the war in Gaza is over." If people weren't dying, that would be hilarious!
asveikau 4mo ago
I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea. Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.
- lesuorac 4mo ago
  I guess it depends on what you see as waste. As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.
ajmurmann 4mo ago
You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.
- EthanHeilman 4mo ago
  Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...
kridsdale1 4mo ago
Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.
- gowld 4mo ago
  Consent matters.
- pocksuppet 4mo ago
  It kind of is, where do you think Big Tech gets its money from? essential products and services are more expensive because of the waste. Like a can of Coke (or packet of rice) is more expensive because they buy ads through Google and Google wastes that money.
sedawkgrep 4mo ago
My spouse works in the DOI and while there maybe some inefficiencies, particularly in process, it isn't the people themselves which are the problem. Her group operates on razor-thin budgets and personnel constraints. They suffer the frustrations because they believe in the work.
- mothballed 4mo ago
  Government doesn't turn a profit, so the main way for middle management to gain influence and seniority is to have more employees. Thus you have the interesting situation that they always have razor-thin budgets for employees in order to maximize the employee count under them and they spend a huge portion of time doing inefficient processes.
  - monknomo 4mo ago
    hang on, isn't that true in private for profit companies too? Is not the path to VP from director typically grabbing more teams that report to you?
    - mothballed 4mo ago
      Depends on the company, but there is another possibility, to produce more profit rather than more reports.
  - sedawkgrep 4mo ago
    This is a profoundly dismissive and even circular take...or at least an intentional misrepresentation of what I said. When I say personnel constraints, I mean there are almost not enough people to do the work that needs to be done. When I say budget constraints, I mean the budgets and projects are funded so lean, that they're always having to cut sections out of projects to get what they can done with the budget they're given. I have no idea where you've gotten this idea that the waste in government is from employing too many people, but in the areas I am familiar with, it's nowhere close to an accurate read.
boscillator 4mo ago
Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term. *edit: spelling
- Jtsummers 4mo ago
  > OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's preview I 100% agree (purview, by the way, not preview). > sometimes you need to update legacy systems I also agree, 100%. The problem with OCX and many similar systems is that they didn't try to update a legacy system, they tried to replace the legacy system. This is a very important distinction. Upgrading should be an in-place thing (edit: for large, complex systems), and is often deliberately incremental (think "strangler fig pattern" or Ship of Theseus). Replacing may or may not be incremental, but as the OCX effort was conducted, it was decidedly not in-place and that's largely why it failed. It was a large system that tried to deliver everything in a big bang, instead of aiming for either a side-by-side (with the prior system) series of incremental releases to prove itself out or upgrade-in-place (possibly with subsystems done in a side-by-side release fashion, or just replaced). That big bang was always going to fail and the DOD loves to put out these contracts. Unsurprisingly, the DOD has not done any effective large scale IT replacement projects that did not either outright fail (like OCX) or significantly grow in their cost and timelines (as OCX did before it failed) even if they eventually succeeded in delivering a replacement.
  - boscillator 4mo ago
    Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia. Yah, the government has a big problem with trying to do big upgrades when a ship-of-theseus would work. I suspect this can be traced all the way up to how congressional appropriations work and the acquisitions/sustainment distinction, in addition to usual resume-engineering and second-system-syndrome.
SubiculumCode 4mo ago
That's the thing. The waste isn't in Federal beuracracy, it's in Federal contracts to private industry without strong self-interested oversight. The privatization trend takes a highly motivated group (companies) to milk money from an inefficient overseer.
- kotaKat 4mo ago
  This. Why the hell are we propping up private "veteran owned" companies that repackage a few things into a Pelican case and call it a revolutionary new product and sell it for tens of thousands over MSRP? (I've seen one too many local 'defense contractors' building 'enabler kits' which are literally just a couple laptops in a Pelican case for way too much money.) I keep seeing this with little tiny IT companies in the fed landscape and it slightly irks me. This is just the modern form of the $400 hammer...
  - ThinkingGuy 4mo ago
    While your point is perfectly valid, there's a little more nuance to the $400 (or $600) hammer story: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/ https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
  - alistairSH 4mo ago
    This. I live outside DC, lots of friends who are contractors in IT/software. More than a few have been on the same contract, doing the same work, for years or decades. It's effectively a full-time permanent position, or could be. Not sure how there's any efficiency there when the contracting firm's owners need to make a cut.
- icedchai 4mo ago
  Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.
Spooky23 4mo ago
You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you. The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing. IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses. DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
devin 4mo ago
There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.
TSiege 4mo ago
The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not

TitaRusell 4mo ago

None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway. Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.

jimt1234 4mo ago
I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?
- TitaRusell 4mo ago
  Trump was famously elected as the big isolationist candidate and we know how that went...
  - watwut 4mo ago
    He was pro-Russian, thus against help to Ukraine. That is literally the extend of his isolationism. The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.
    - jimt1234 4mo ago
      But what about the Board of Peace? https://boardofpeace.org/ https://boardofpeace.org/ ... I love the quote: "...the war in Gaza is over." If people weren't dying, that would be hilarious!

asveikau 4mo ago

I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea. Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.

lesuorac 4mo ago
I guess it depends on what you see as waste. As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.

ajmurmann 4mo ago

You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.

EthanHeilman 4mo ago
Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...

kridsdale1 4mo ago

Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.

gowld 4mo ago
Consent matters.
pocksuppet 4mo ago
It kind of is, where do you think Big Tech gets its money from? essential products and services are more expensive because of the waste. Like a can of Coke (or packet of rice) is more expensive because they buy ads through Google and Google wastes that money.

sedawkgrep 4mo ago

My spouse works in the DOI and while there maybe some inefficiencies, particularly in process, it isn't the people themselves which are the problem. Her group operates on razor-thin budgets and personnel constraints. They suffer the frustrations because they believe in the work.

mothballed 4mo ago
Government doesn't turn a profit, so the main way for middle management to gain influence and seniority is to have more employees. Thus you have the interesting situation that they always have razor-thin budgets for employees in order to maximize the employee count under them and they spend a huge portion of time doing inefficient processes.
- monknomo 4mo ago
  hang on, isn't that true in private for profit companies too? Is not the path to VP from director typically grabbing more teams that report to you?
  - mothballed 4mo ago
    Depends on the company, but there is another possibility, to produce more profit rather than more reports.
- sedawkgrep 4mo ago
  This is a profoundly dismissive and even circular take...or at least an intentional misrepresentation of what I said. When I say personnel constraints, I mean there are almost not enough people to do the work that needs to be done. When I say budget constraints, I mean the budgets and projects are funded so lean, that they're always having to cut sections out of projects to get what they can done with the budget they're given. I have no idea where you've gotten this idea that the waste in government is from employing too many people, but in the areas I am familiar with, it's nowhere close to an accurate read.

boscillator 4mo ago

Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term. *edit: spelling

Jtsummers 4mo ago
> OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's preview I 100% agree (purview, by the way, not preview). > sometimes you need to update legacy systems I also agree, 100%. The problem with OCX and many similar systems is that they didn't try to update a legacy system, they tried to replace the legacy system. This is a very important distinction. Upgrading should be an in-place thing (edit: for large, complex systems), and is often deliberately incremental (think "strangler fig pattern" or Ship of Theseus). Replacing may or may not be incremental, but as the OCX effort was conducted, it was decidedly not in-place and that's largely why it failed. It was a large system that tried to deliver everything in a big bang, instead of aiming for either a side-by-side (with the prior system) series of incremental releases to prove itself out or upgrade-in-place (possibly with subsystems done in a side-by-side release fashion, or just replaced). That big bang was always going to fail and the DOD loves to put out these contracts. Unsurprisingly, the DOD has not done any effective large scale IT replacement projects that did not either outright fail (like OCX) or significantly grow in their cost and timelines (as OCX did before it failed) even if they eventually succeeded in delivering a replacement.
- boscillator 4mo ago
  Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia. Yah, the government has a big problem with trying to do big upgrades when a ship-of-theseus would work. I suspect this can be traced all the way up to how congressional appropriations work and the acquisitions/sustainment distinction, in addition to usual resume-engineering and second-system-syndrome.

SubiculumCode 4mo ago

That's the thing. The waste isn't in Federal beuracracy, it's in Federal contracts to private industry without strong self-interested oversight. The privatization trend takes a highly motivated group (companies) to milk money from an inefficient overseer.

kotaKat 4mo ago
This. Why the hell are we propping up private "veteran owned" companies that repackage a few things into a Pelican case and call it a revolutionary new product and sell it for tens of thousands over MSRP? (I've seen one too many local 'defense contractors' building 'enabler kits' which are literally just a couple laptops in a Pelican case for way too much money.) I keep seeing this with little tiny IT companies in the fed landscape and it slightly irks me. This is just the modern form of the $400 hammer...
- ThinkingGuy 4mo ago
  While your point is perfectly valid, there's a little more nuance to the $400 (or $600) hammer story: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/ https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
- alistairSH 4mo ago
  This. I live outside DC, lots of friends who are contractors in IT/software. More than a few have been on the same contract, doing the same work, for years or decades. It's effectively a full-time permanent position, or could be. Not sure how there's any efficiency there when the contracting firm's owners need to make a cut.
icedchai 4mo ago
Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.

Spooky23 4mo ago

You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you. The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing. IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses. DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

devin 4mo ago

There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.

TSiege 4mo ago

The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not