Nonprofit's Leader Convicted of Siphoning Off $240M in Federal Food Aid

You have some good points, but this store also has an outsized role in the community and a large shock will drastically affect the community. Take a patient who has an infected wound. I guess you would say the prevailing approach was to putter around, let the patient develop gangrene and slowly die. I wouldn't entirely disagree, although I would tone down the severity. What DOGE is doing as reform is way too extreme to me, amputating the patient excessively and without proper care. Ironically, I was calling out "middle grounders" in my sibling reply, but I will say here that surely a middle way is most appropriate. But then DOGE as it currently stands wouldn't exist, and I don't see this administration taking such a route. This is all within expectations when we discuss broken systems. It is easy to take the extreme of standing by the system no matter what. And it is easy to take the extreme of burning it down. Culture and counterculture. The rule and the revolution. These are comfortable, if not likeable. But we should always seek a golden mean. Now whether one administration or the other is better suited for that is an entirely different discussion.

Thanks for your analogy. It doesn't actually fit the situation well but it can serve as a good starting point as a useful generalization.

I'm stepping into it with the assumption that the store is the federal government and that the federal government has a reputation for being dirty, inefficient, easy to exploit, etc. and this reputation is well-earned and has persisted for decades.

Let's tighten this up with a quick explanation of players in the game and then maybe we can add some edge cases to form a more appropriate model input.

You (the people) own a store (elected representatives and their appointees who manage collection and distribution of stored assets based on guidelines they are responsible for establishing and upholding).

The store has a reputation for being dirty (the owners of the store do not trust those they have hired to manage the store operations because they have evidence that business is not being conducted lawfully or in their own best interests by those who have been given the management tasks).

People make memes about it, have for decades. (Everyone acknowledges the long-term mismanagement because it has become a well-worn punch line any time the subject comes up).

Chuckle about it instead of changing it to be better is the commonly applied solution. There are situations though where those owners, through their own biases, will rabidly defend the broken system if the current management aligns with their own biases in some other unrelated domain.

We need to add edge cases to enhance this model a bit to fit our present reality so that you can possibly see that the cleaners (the OIG and audit staff) are not the source of the problem but can be a useful part of a durable solution.

>Firing the cleaners and replacing them is proportional and reasonable response.

Consider this scenario:

The cleaners (OIG and auditors) are the ones who know the store inside and out. They have read all the owner manuals for every asset (Congressional mandates and program guidelines) they manage and understand how to keep it all running smoothly. They are professionals in every sense who are required to maintain high standards knowing that they will be held accountable by the organizations to which they belong if they step out of line. Too bad they are not able to function independently, following evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse wherever it leads and there are several reasons for this reality.

Budgetary constraints on their department, something they have minimal control over, have left them understaffed for a long time with hiring freezes making replacement of those transferring to other departments, private sector employment, or retirement more difficult than it should be. Recent hires who had completed onboarding and were actively contributing to audit operations could've improved performance in those understaffed agencies but they were eliminated first, thus preserving as a cap (maximum) the status quo.

Your store will not get any cleaner operating like that. You have simply redistributed the cleaning load back onto the shoulders of those who already are overwhelmed by the workload. The cleaners have asked repeatedly for the opportunity to hire more trained audit personnel but somehow it rarely makes it into the budget and now, once they have authorization from management to fill empty seats, those hired to help expand capabilities of the audit authority are kicked back to the curb just when they had begun to make solid contributions.

Now we’ll consider your solution – firing the existing cleaners and blaming it on poor performance.

Where will you get new cleaners who understand the store even at a minimal level? If you assume they will learn on the job, who will provide that training, introducing the tools and giving that real-time exposure to all the surfaces that need to be scrubbed? You should understand part of the reasons why the store is dirty if you consider the edge case reality above. Chronic understaffing. As new programs come online, and they do every time Congress passes a new spending resolution or budget, those programs add to the pile of things that need to be cleaned (audited for compliance with program guidelines).

Add another edge case. Budgets for departments are not carved in stone though they ultimately control how much your cleaners can accomplish since the tools to clean are not free (tools include training, travel expenses, office space; in addition your budget must provide all the monies allocated to the multitude of programs the agency administers, some of which date back decades). In fact, once budget numbers are approved, there are perverse incentives to spend every dollar allocated in the previous budget so that you can demonstrate a minimal level of need for the next agency budget discussion. This is waste. There is a tendency among agency management, frequently political appointees, to use budget numbers as a talking point on their resumes to boost their own profiles. Consider that management has a strong disincentive to decrease an agency budget because the lower number is a less attractive talking point in future employment discussions. None of those managers will spend a career as a department head. They’re taking that experience down the road to a private sector, higher paying position.

The ones under them, the cleaners in your analogy, took their government jobs knowing that they also had options in the private sector. They chose to try to make a difference for their fellow citizens knowing that they probably would not earn as much as they could had they worked in the private sector. Long-term service to country came first.

Budgets must allow room for continuing education of the staff; they must allow for travel to audit locations and long-term lodging in cases where complex audits of large program recipients are conducted; they must cover everything related to offices from the computing resources to the office space itself. Other things too including all the funds allocated to the universe of programs that Congress established under that agency control. Remember the latest push to sell off government owned assets when you consider this because the cost of office space will only increase once the government has to lease space from private equity owners. Selling an asset that is publicly owned is corrupt when the intention is to enrich private entities who have supported your operations.

Add another edge case. Management priorities conflict with program guidelines sometimes to the point of illegality. Managers who have no domain knowledge but who take orders from those who installed them attempt to subvert various safeguards put in place by Congress and the only authority that can keep them in check is the OIG and audit staff who have to school the new guys on all the reasons why they can’t legally do the things requested. Your analogy would see the safety valve removed from the system and replaced by a straight pipeline which allowed anything that fits in the pipeline (within budget constraints with no regard for program guidelines) to pass unchecked while the new guys come up to speed on the programs. Promising to hire new cleaners (new check valve) doesn’t fix that at all since we have seen that budgetary constraints and hiring freezes can easily be used as a delaying tactic while program monies freely flow to those not qualified to receive them with no monitoring and no way to recover anything.

This post got long. Not unusual for me. I’m cutting it here for now. You provided a bone and I stuck a bit of flesh on it. It still isn’t a viable organism but it could be skinned out with further discussion. Thanks for not calling me a cunt like one of the last guys who didn’t like what I posted. LOL.

TLDR: The cleaners aren't the problem and they are definitely a valuable component of the solution. The managers are the problem.

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your perspective and agree with many things you said.

I'm not sure whether this passage mentioning "you're walking..." applies strictly to me or whether it is a generalization referencing "They're not actually..." in the leading part of that sentence.

>They're not actually taking the middle ground and making a stand, although even that is questionable; you're walking (knowingly or not) towards a side.

I have disclosed my own personal bias in the discussion so that those who wish to discuss can understand where I stand without needing to guess. I have a dog in the hunt and it's a good dog with many successful hunts to brag about.

>Look at the world around you and make an honest assessment, as unblinded by your biases as you can.

I'm always open to changing my mind (altering or eliminating my biases) if the data is there to support a need to change. I'm a geophysicist and massaging large data volumes to find the useful information within drives my processes. We all approach situations with a pre-existing notion about how it will play out. The ones who come out enlightened are those who recognize that new information can enhance our understanding and lead us to change our perceptions (biases) and we are open to that new information and whatever new world it brings. Too bad there are those who are locked into a bias or an agenda so tightly that they are unwilling to accept that things could be different.

>Especially since we here tend to be very privileged.

I agree with the privileged part and would like to add that many do not have a broad experience base to use as a foundation for their beliefs since they walked out of a university with a cheat code that allowed them to skip all the hard parts of life. Loosely translated, many here on HN are out of touch with the world that others inhabit every day, insulated from many of the problems that are ordinary parts of life for most of their fellow citizens.

>"your people" say all the right words. They still failed, out of either incompetence or corruption.

Wall of text author here. Not sure why you went after that guy who was just trying to offer useful advice to someone else.

I'm gonna assume that "your people" means the Democratic party and those who support that party. I'm open to being corrected though.

You're conclusion in the last sentence is wrong. Like so many libertarians/conservatives it is way too binary - EITHER/OR.

Expand your mind a bit and consider the reality that it is more likely an AND/OR situation where the AND is the maximum likelihood. I don't see a realistic world where incompetence AND corruption can't work side by side to yield the same results and I've been around long enough to have seen plenty of evidence for both working in concert.

The world is not black and white, it is shades of grey once you consider the edge cases.

Thanks for commenting on this thread.