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by nameless912
476 days ago
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This is the thing that keeps making me so angry when I hear so called "budget hawks" get mad about the number of federal employees. Payroll is _not the problem_!! All of the federal payroll is something like 10-15% of the government's expenditure. Firing _everyone_ would only cut costs by 10-15%. There are plenty of programs (read: bloated defense contracts and corporate subsidies) that we could cut to save costs instead, and we wouldn't crater the federal workforce like we are now. You can be mad about the government spending money on things you believe are unnecessary, and you can even want to fire the people related to that program! But across the board personnel cuts don't fix the appropriations issues and will waste money in inefficiency, waste and loss as the folks that are left have to pick up the pieces. Does the federal government employ too many people? I dunno, maybe. Do we fund too many programs? Yeah, probably. But these cuts are _fucking insane_. |
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The Defense part especially seems crazy. Per USASpending.gov [1], last year the federal government spent $9,700,000,000,000. Despite all the talk that Covid budgets were short term event, they never actually went back down. Dropped to $9T in 2022, and then started rising again. Post-Covid surge was $6.6T in 2019, then jumped to $9.1T in 2020. $10.1 in 2021.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
At the same time, post-Covid, the Defense Department budget has been rising at about $100,000,000,000 / yr for the last three years. 2021: $1.1T 2022: $1.2T 2023: $1.3T 2024: $1.4T
(To be fair in comparison though, the largest other single items, Medicare / Social Security, have also been rising fast. 2021: 1.4 / 1.2, 2022: 1.5 / 1.3, 2023: 1.6 / 1.4, 2024: 1.6 / 1.5 )
However, with the DoD, what have we got from that much spending? Incredibly depressing slides from The War on the Rocks like this one about the incomprehensible gap in shipbuilding capacity? A factor of 232x? The US only has 100,000 tons of shipbuilding? That's a single neo-Panamax cargo ship. [1]
[2] https://www.twz.com/alarming-navy-intel-slide-warns-of-china...
Or this one from Military.com, that the government does not know where $151 million of $225 million collected from soldiers for food supplies on garrisons was actually spent. [3] Fort Stewart, 87% of funds redirected. Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, 63% redirected. All but two bases left more than half of the money for food unspent. $225 million doesn't mean almost anything to the government, yet $460 of mandatory / month deduction in paycheck for a Basic Allowance for Subsistence that then goes "somewhere" matters quite a bit to individual soldiers. And the defense budget rose $100B every year for years.
[3] https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-featu...
Anyways, specific examples of the issues I have with current government spending and the way it's allocated.