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.
Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.
The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.
Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.
As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.
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.
Instead the DOI declared their "lean" and "constrained" force would revoke letting private entities lease for conservation. Something at odds with lean employees trying to maximize conservation ROI. Why would they be begging to rip away conservation from private hands into unavailable public hands if they didn't already have the manpower, unless they're playing a political fuck-fuck game?
That reveals the true fuck-fuck game. DOI employees claim they are lean, out of employees, etc while actively pursuing actions that are counter to how those acting in such circumstances are in the interest of acting. But actually their management are rescinding rules that help offload conservation to private actors happy to do it, instead diluting the ability of the DOI to preserve resources by instead tossing additional tasks on already overloaded employees at which point they'll have their spouses on forums complaining and stirring up the voters to try and bring more employees under their grasp. Presuming they're successful, they will then again swamp said employees, and the cycle starts anew.
Which brings me back to my assertion:
>. 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.
If they were actually trying to unload tasks from employees they'd be happy that environmental groups were trying to take the load off DOI employees and paying them leasing fees to do it, but that's not in the interest of management, as that could reduce their headcount and ability to beg for more money. Thus you can witness from actual acts of the DOI, it doesn't matter how many resources and people they get, their management are acting in ways it will appear to employees like they're broke and thin on people because they're run on ragged edges (something not unique, seen in many other areas of government, that will keep expanding task for current employees to the point they always seem broke and stretched out and then those associated with the organization will beg for more to start the cycle over again).
*edit: spelling
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.
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.
(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...
https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
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.
It's the frog and the scorpion fable.
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.
It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”
That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste!
I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.
It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle.
People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done.
[0]https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...
why isn't there really much waste in federal spending? because when you cut, nobody likes it.
well, no. there is pork.
a better example might be: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half" - John Wanamaker
I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.
The issue is figuring out how to actually fix that. It's Chesteron's Fences all the way down. Someone smarter than I would need to figure out how to even start on the problem.
The big issue though is that everyday people get exposed to the obvious inefficiencies in their day to day interactions, and don't see much if any of the big picture. So in pop-culture the meme builds up that all government spending is inefficient wastefulness. No one really talks or thinks about the stuff that just works.
The same sort of problems are endemic in private industry too. As I came from a working class background and worked my way up I like to say "America is fraud from the bottom up" - since I was exposed to the lower rungs of it first. It was definitely a shock coming into the working world as a naive teenager.
It would take an entire cultural shift to get much traction, imo.
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.
It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.
>>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"?
in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.
Was Clinton particularly thorough in eliminating waste? Is there reason to believe that no new waste materialized in 3 decades?
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
does not have to be actually making the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job.
Those are juat facts. No one on the right wont admit it, but that does not make it not right.
I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors.
As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.
What makes the federal any different than any other organization?
You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1?
It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.
Also, the average doctor's salary is around $386k/year, and is heavily propped up by extremely rare specialties who make much more. The average primary care doctor makes around $240-280k/year. It's true that the US pays doctors much much more than the rest of the world, and is also facing a historic doctor shortage which drives up costs - but your numbers are still way, way off, probably because you eyeballed instead of doing research.
In 2024, insurance was 31% of national health expenditure: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
That's a third of the whole system just spent on middlemen whose whole job is to make access to care harder. The single largest proportion of our expenditure was on the most useless part of the system.
Private health insurance costs more than physicians, hospitals, prescription drugs, or Medicare or Medicaid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
You’re using a number that includes private and public spending. There are problems with this topic, but it’s a different topic than federal government spending waste.
There are some real federal government spending inefficiencies, but you picked a topic that is predominantly private spend.
That it is does nothing to prove inefficiency.
To be clear this is per capita, not per recipient.
The US has a massive tangled hodgepodge of private companies, having poor coverage, very high prices, and quite poor outcomes. Meanwhile there are numerous European countries with public healthcare systems that are far cheaper and provide much better outcomes.
Here’s one of a million sources:
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...
I don't know much about US spending but if it's anything like the UK I doubt that. There's plenty of waste. People only end up thinking there isn't, because it's extremely difficult to cut just the waste, so cuts are usually equally to waste and useful functions.
But that doesn't mean there's no waste! The problem is to cut the waste you pretty much have to spend a ton of money hiring highly skilled and motivated employees, and then fight decades of accumulation of cultural acceptance of the waste. Basically impossible.
Yep, the section of people that lose out will make a noise.
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
With *cumulative taxation (state+ fed) being in the region of 60% or about 2/3 of one's income where do I even start to untangle the huge mess of govt spending - waste or otherwise?
Cumulative= income tax Fed + State, inflation, payroll tax, Regulatory burden, Capital gains tax, tarrifs, sales tax, property tax, city tax, school tax etc.
Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.
Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.
"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.
What have we got to show for spending $3 trillion?
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which administers research grants, is a division of the Department of Education. Given your point, how much of this funding was dedicated to research? Even if $500 million (its much more, but I digress) has been invested in research since 1980, this does not negate your point since the Department of Education does more than advancing academic achievement?
Each state has its own rules for education. The Department of Education mostly funds programs based on federal law, but they can only regulate state's activities they’re breaking federal law, you can't solely blame the department for failures of multiple state governments.
The dollars spent is not evidence of accomplishment.
When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.
So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.
With government agencies, the incentive is to spend 100% of the budget, otherwise their budget will get cut the next year.
Some years back, "Frontline" did an episode on dentist businesses. The government had a new program where they paid dentists who did dental surgery on poor people. There was a sudden drastic rise on dental surgeries on poor people, and little of it was medically justifiable. "Frontline" was shocked, shocked to see this happen. But of course, it was the obvious and inevitable result of how the government issued the payments.
They disgraced the People's House. Gilded it so the POTUS could feel like a king/emperor/tzar.
Destroyed the East Wing to build a ball room. Initially said it would be privately funded (which is itself a hugely corrupt act having individuals and corporations directly fund hundreds of millions to a vanity project for the POTUS). But then tried to raid the public coffers for it to the tune of over a billion dollars.
Accepted a plane from Qatar and spent millions rebuilding it. Now saying they are going to donate it to the Trump library(aka steal from the public).
All the contracts going to family and friends? The overt pay-to-play politics?
Yeah, of course DOGE was BS.
the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.
but only 36% are for-profit?
I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.
Trump is a continuation of this well played track, with the a large sprinkle of fascism, grifting and destruction of the federal government as a goal.
I don't know if that desire is caused by intentional propaganda or if it's just who we are as a people because of our history.
Maybe it's not right, but it's what Americans expect from our government right now.
The most expensive are purely for oil, for hawks feeling manly bullshit wars.
https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...
They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.
So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.
Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?
Even this assertion is heavily, heavily disputed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washi...
>Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function research, told the Washington Post that the EcoHealth/Wuhan lab research “was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research.” He said it “met the definition for gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.”.
"the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples."
Pretty cut and dry?
"[Pushing MAGA initiatives] is important to somebody for good reasons." Yes, zealots love pushing their ideology.
In about 15 seconds I found the following:
Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology
An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching
These are pure waste pushed by religious zealots.
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...