Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem. I'm pretty sure everyone could come with many anecdotes of waste in the private sector. I also worked in the public sector (not in the US) and frankly, I think it was pretty efficient. Most employees were competent and weren't paid very well.

The problem with reducing costs with a heavy hand is that you will cut things which are actually useful. And probably, the saving will be very little compared to the overall budget. I think DOGE is primarily a demagogical operation.

View on HN

I see this take a lot in this thread, I think people do not comprehend the scale.

Your company sends people in business class needlessly, ok. The government sends people in private jets needlessly -- there are dozens of separate aviation programs just within Dept. of State each with their own planes and contracts to staff and supply those planes. We have hundreds of posts around the world, many people are getting to those mainly on charters, private legs, or in the contractor case, business class tickets billed at 2x rate under T&L.

This is just one specific example; it applies across the board, when the government spends it is on an exponentially different scale to commercial. A single database will easily cost them 5M$ -- that is ~10x the cash moved on the floor of a major casino during a busy night.

> I also worked in the public sector (not in the US)

Yes, key phrase not in the US. As a comparison, the largest spending item in our budget is Medicaid -- ineffective healthcare that applies to less than 20% of our population. We spend 4x more on Medicaid somehow than the UK spends on the entirety of the NHS.

Well do remember that you have 5x the population of the UK, and the NHS is effectively limited to about 20% of our population given that our "ambitious" target is to get the delay between referral and treatment down "only" 18 weeks in most cases. About 10% of the population is on an NHS waiting list as we speak, which should be pretty much everyone that needs it.

Medicaid applies blanket to less than 20% of the population while providing less coverage and having worse outcomes than the NHS.

I picked the NHS because it serves the same size population (70M) while having more coverage and better outcomes.

Having lived in the UK yeah the waiting times suck, I went to a doctor actively bleeding out with an infection and they gave me a dressing and said to wait 3 months for a surgeon. That’s insane but the same outcome people on Medicaid will get in the US.

In the above anecdote I just flew back to the US the next day and was treated and “cured” 4 hours after landing. But, I did that on private insurance, not Medicaid. When americans shit on the NHS they are comparing it to their private insurance, not to the state funded healthcare options (Medicaid/Medicare).

How does that compare to the scale of the federal government as a whole?

Federal revenue in one year is more than the market cap of the most valuable US company. It’s an enormous organization. If waste is as a similar level proportionally, it’ll be similarly enormous. Is it actually more than that?

Large private sector companies operate on a 30% profit margin and have exponentially lower capex and opex compared to the federal government.

The federal government with exponentially higher revenue that exceeds the entire market cap of these valuable companies actually runs a deficit while predominantly providing inferior services in competing categories; while having insanely high opex and capex.

This inefficiency passes everywhere, including to their contractors — because of all the random shit, compliance, regulations in government contracting, the average margin is somehow only 10-30%. They charge often 3-100x the price of a good or service when provided to the private sector yet make 3x >less< profit.

The scope of the inefficiency is unimaginable, something we must absolutely not accept under any circumstances if we want to have a future as a country that does not involve being a permanent debtor to other economies.

Contractors aren't allowed to have excessive margins or profits because that would be gouging... so they inflate the number of necessary staff so that their capped overhead costs deliver the amount of profit they want.

>>All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem.

The difference is that businesses that are inefficient are wasting revenue, and eventually go bust. There is no self-correcting mechanism for government.

There technically is because the interest on the deficit alone is about to exceed total defense spending, over time we will eventually just become a debt slave society paying to other economies.

But practically the self correcting mechanism is democracy, our elected officials have been failing us. Like it or hate it, DOGE has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else conbined incl 5 other agencies over the last 20 years. The reaction from the bureaucracy and political machine should tell you everything you need to know about our prospects in the absence of DOGE.

> over time we will eventually just become a debt slave society paying to other economies.

This is categorically false. 70% of our debt is held by US entities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com