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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

This is not a very charitable view.

Keep in mind that at least in the Anglosphere, a point often raised about the government is that they are incompetent, that they need to be starved out, so usually

- they don't have the resources or backing to hire people who are up to date at competitive compensation levels

- the people left are those who have been able to survive such onslaught from their bosses, so they are presumably very jaded, cynical, and careful about new proposals

Our politicians do not empower the bureaucracy to be nimble, there is no reward for doing so. So I wouldn't expect it to be.

The incentives for government consultants are also generally not aligned to deliver quickly or competently.

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There seems no way to win with government, unfortunately. If you de-fund it, you get cost cutting, reduced workforce, reduced capability, corruption, and disfunction. If you fully fund it, you get inflated costs, a bloated workforce, inefficiency, waste, grift, and more disfunction. No matter how you fund it, you get disfunction at the end of the day.

You classify it as strategic readiness and have something like a Core of Engineers do the work.

Really the US military forces need an additional branch, the Civilian Core of Engineers. They would be held to high ethical standards (on the job), and all work they do for the government would become public domain. I imagine this could be combined with a New New Deal where public-works projects are generally funded, as well as a job guarantee / internship place to build a resume and gain social connections through.

As a minor nitpick, the word is "Corps".

I actually did mean Core as inspired by the Corps*. The distinction being that this group of individuals would be more like a not-for-profit company than the military, and thus, they aren't a Corps.

"In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps

High ethical standards and the US Military do not go hand-in-hand.

This seems rather myopic.

Singapore is, by a lot of accounts, a well-functioning government with competent bureaucrats.

It's also a dictatorship.

Maybe more funding to increasing salaries for government employees would be a good start instead of more funding in order to hire more people/bloat the system. I think it could over time make government agency work more attractive and prestigious and in turn attract the best talent.

Maybe government shouldn’t exist in steady state?

It’s possible that people don’t have the ability to be consistent and you have to tack between the two strategies.

The way to win is to refactor and reorganize properly. Unfortunately that is a difficult task in both management and politics as every special interest involved with the power to change is selfish towards their own goals. How democratic vs dictatorial only changes how the interests are distributed.

Look into the Judicial Council of California’s case management boondoggle. A few billion was spent with nothing to show for it. I’m pretty sure every “there isn’t enough funding” argument can be countered with real examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.

It's possible for both things to be true.

Money doesn't magically fix management issues caused by a lack of money; people who are not used to spending money may not know how to spend it well once they get it. Lottery winners generally fizzle out their winnings after a few years.

This is also a problem if you spend billions on consultants rather than shoring up the civil service; consultants aren't incentivized properly to deliver a good system on time.

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