[eganist]

Having spent time in the public sector...

...it's amazing how much of this is caused by local and state governments being unable to afford:

1. Qualified talent

2. Equipment

3. Effective professional services

"The beatings will continue until morale improves" or, perhaps more aptly, "funding will trickle until programs improve."

a.k.a putting the cart before the horse.

I get that this isn't uniform across the board, but anecdotally, it's been true everywhere I've been. What's more appropriate, at least to me, is to include temporary funding that renews on meeting certain OKRs.

[prirun]

Having a relative who is a CPA and worked for local governments...

1. They hire their friends instead of qualified talent, and pay their unqualified friends ridiculous amounts

2. Local officials have businesses on the side and arrange to have their business get local government contracts

3. They don't want anyone qualified looking at their finances, because all the corruption and fraud will be obvious.

We've had local elected officials steal money and yet they can't be removed from office because they were elected. The whole local government situation is shit, starting with the fact that the people elected may be "popular" in some sense (they won the election, yipee!), but that doesn't mean they are qualified to run a city or county or manage a large budget.

[ac29]

If you or your relative actually has evidence of corruption, fraud and theft, why not go to the State AG with it, or the FBI?

I can't imagine just throwing up my hands and saying "welp, its politics" if I had this sort of information.

[prirun]

So you would throw your life into chaos in an attempt to get a corrupt official removed (which probably wouldn't work), only to get a new corrupt, elected, unqualified official in their place? No thanks.

[notacoward]

It might be helpful if you said where you were observing all this, because it's not universal.