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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the problems people have with evaluating the efficiency of government is that most of the projects government engages in are necessarily very complex. The point of government research is to work on projects that are too blue-sky to be immediately interesting to industry, but the flip side of this is that such projects are inherentl difficult to manage. DOD projects are notorious for this. Every big DOD RFP asks for something literally nobody has ever built before. When I worked at a company that contracted for DARPA, the government literally didn't know what it wanted us to build because our work would inform their opinion of what was possible to build. You can't hold these sorts of projects to the same standard as implementing an invoicing system for a company that's basically the same as every other invoicing system ever made.

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Ok, how about a welfare system then, it seems to me that a government welfare ministry should distribute about 90% of what it takes in spending 10% on administration, when I looked into my government it was spending 55% on administration.

Put this into perspective, once the US finished paying interest on debt, medicare and welfare there's no money left over for anything else.

Science programs are one thing, but the government can't deliver 70 year old services with reasonable efficiency.

It depends entirely on the structure of the welfare program. For example, the veterans affairs administration provides services, mostly health services, directly to veterans. In that case, you'd expect 100% to be overhead, because VA doctors and hospitals are paid out of overhead.

Most federal welfare programs, however, involve cutting a check. Look at the Social Security Administration. It has a budget of about $12.7 billion, and administers $700-800 billion in benefits to 50-60 million people: http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/basicfact.htm

That amounts to an overhead of 1.6%, or ~$250 per person served.

Or, look at it another way. Total federal payroll is about $180 billion, for 2.15 million federal employees (a number that has fluctuated between 1.8 and 2.2 million for the last half century despite nearly a doubling of the population). That's about 4.7% of the budget, or 1.2% of GDP.

Most of the federal government is not overhead. 95% of it is just taking in tax revenue from certain people and cutting checks to other people.

You could get that kind of efficiency, or get closer to it anyway, if you just cut people a check. It turns out that's more effective at combating poverty than most social programs anyway. But it's politically impossible.

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