[FirmwareBurner]

Bad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about?

You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV.

And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS.

Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.

This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.

[nkrisc]

Step up, throw down some numbers and sources.

[thayne]

Here is one example of waste: FedRAMP certified software often costs 2-10x equivalent non-certified software. That means the government is paying a lot more than anyone else for the same thing.

Why? Well part of it is because getting and keeping that certification is itself expensive. There are expensive audits, that take up a lot of time, and generally require paying specialized consultants to get through. All of your cryptography needs to be done using expensive FIPS certified "modules". There are requirements about the hardware you run on. All of your vendors also need to be FedRAMP approved. The requirements often add a lot of friction to normal operations and slow things down. In many cases it is easier, and cheaper to run/build an entirely separate product for FedRAMP possibly in a separate data center, which adds a lot of cost. And to be honest, a lot of the requirements are mostly security theater.

But another reason is just that the government is willing to pay that high premium for a stamp of approval.

To be fair, it is warranted for the government to have some assurance of the security and quality of software they use, especially if the software is used for more sensitive purposes. But the certification process is overkill for many places software is used, and I think that if some effort was put onto steamlining the process, the cost could be brought down.

[FirmwareBurner]

Let's do a thought exercise on your loaded question, considering government waste and corruption has been thoroughly covered by journalists since the invention of the free press and are a Google search away for you.

If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you?

If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?

Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?

[vannevar]

I think the point is that while people have indeed groused about government waste since the dawn of government, when people actually study it, they find that the rate of fraud and waste is comparable to the private sector. See, e.g., https://www.epsu.org/sites/default/files/article/files/EN_EF... for web.pdf and https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844....

It's not that there's any more fraud or waste in government than in private business, it's that it's less tolerated. I think the main reason for this misperception is that in the private sector, people pay a la carte for particular goods and services, while in the public sector, people pay for shared infrastructure even if they rarely use it themselves. So they are left with the feeling that they aren't getting their money's worth. But of course everyone benefits economically and socially from a stable and prosperous society, even if they can't put their finger on discrete services they use. The reality is that it simply costs a lot of money to maintain a large, modern society. Indeed, it actually costs more than we are paying here in the US, as evidenced by a growing debt that has been a bipartisan creation.

Believing in the mantra of waste, fraud and abuse is comforting, because it implies we could be getting all the same benefits for less money. But there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

[potato3732842]

>it's that it's less tolerated

You say that like it's a bad thing.

If my favorite restaurant decides to hire management by nepotism and product degrades I can just not go there.

You can't just not deal with the government so of course the standards ought to be higher.

[vannevar]

If your democratically elected government spends money in ways you find unwise, you can vote for someone else, so that also tends to self-correct (albeit on a longer time scale).

The problem isn't the obvious things, in the government or your restaurant example. It's the less-obvious things---your favorite restaurant might cheat on its inspections, for instance. The rate of food poisoning there may go up, but you'll still be unlikely to be the one that gets sick. And the prices will go down slightly, as they are able to cut corners. This kind of "waste, fraud, and abuse" tends to go to an equilibrium, where the cost of finding and eliminating the fraud is similar to the cost of the fraud itself. And this equilibrium happens in both government and the private sector.

The idea that a modern technological nation of hundreds of millions of people could dramatically cut its spending and maintain its standard of living is a utopian fantasy.

[FirmwareBurner]

>If your democratically elected government spends money in ways you find unwise, you can vote for someone else, so that also tends to self-correct

Not if all the candidates choose to spend money in the same unwise ways.

[Loughla]

I didn't read that at all. It reads as a statement of fact, not a values judgement.

[nkrisc]

> If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?

Then I can read them, find similar sources, judge how much I trust them, and get a better idea of how much corruption and waste you are claiming exists.

While I am sure corruption and waste occurs, if it’s such a serious problem, there ought to be some evidence of it, direct or indirect.

What’s the alternative, I just accept your claim as fact? Or I “google” it until.. what? I find sources that support your claims?

Why should I believe you?

[FirmwareBurner]

> Or I “google” it until.. what? I find sources that support your claims?

Yes?! Is that too much to ask for that you do research before commenting?

>Why should I believe you?

I didn't tell you to believe me, I told you to go do your own research if you don't believe me.

[nkrisc]

If you’ve done the research already, why not share it with your original comment?

[potato3732842]

>If I do post sources, then what? Do you take your words back and admit that stuff documented by the press it is real?

If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity.

You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.

[ethbr1]

It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion.

If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid.

As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended.

If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.

[FirmwareBurner]

>It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion.

No offence, but comparing asking for proof of corruption with proof of sky being blue of petrochemicals is a biased bad faith argument.

Asking for sources on corruption is more like asking for proof that the earth is round, which is definitely not a legitimate request, but more trolling masquerading like an innocent request and dodge scrutiny ("It's just a question bro, why r u mad lol").

Nothing wrong with asking such a question per-se, but that's something you can also google yourself due to countless occurrences from legitimate sources, hence why it's in bad faith to ask such a thing from others, and should be more strictly moderated as many here abuse this "sauce or gtfo" attitude in bad faith to discredit a pov without providing any arguments.

[ethbr1]

> Asking for sources on corruption

Existence of corruption isn't what you asserted.

>> how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption

That's the assertion you made -- waste and corruption at scale.

It's very much a reasonable question to ask for sources of how much there actually is.

Otherwise, people just post things on the internet insinuating that there's a huge (unspecified) amount.

Is it 1% of the budget? 5%? 25%? (Hint: it should be trivial for you, the claimant, to dig up a source. And it's close to one of those)

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

> Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.

I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.

"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.

"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.

Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.

I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.

[potato3732842]

If value is such a nebulous term then that should make your job easier not harder because it lets you make comparisons to the "dysfunctional bigco" end of things.

The people you are arguing with think government is inefficient. They will be more than satisfied with an honest accounting that results in a conclusion that the government spends 5/10/20% more per result than private sector. Just having an actual number one can be confident in would be a huge step forward. But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

> it lets you make comparisons to the "dysfunctional bigco" end of things.

I don't like to compare governments and companies, personally. They're very different kinds of structures with (hopefully) quite different goals. They probably shouldn't look much like each other.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.

Setting aside whatever you mean by "you people", since we are all people, hopefully all on Team 'Make Things Better', and don't need to be divisive:

That seems to be what was requested here OF those making the claim that the accounting currently shows an unworkable level* of waste, requested BY those unconvinced of the claim.

* - Or perhaps I misread the magnitude being claimed. Could you clarify with a number, please?

[FirmwareBurner]

>"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved.

No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption. I could go on.

If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way.

>There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.

Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption.

And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.

[triceratops]

> Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's.

No idea if that's true. But my impression was that France's military has been rather more...active post WW2 than Germany's. So maybe it's just about practice and readiness to go to war.

[CapricornNoble]

The French are not just active, they have capabilities Germany straight-up lacks.

A nuclear aircraft carrier, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, solid overseas expeditionary capability (France could sustain a few thousand troops in Africa, Germany almost certainly could not match that), and a few amphibious assault ships, to name several big ones that immediately come to mind.

[triceratops]

France developed a nuclear program immediately after WW2 in order to not depend on America for nuclear security. For obvious reasons Germany didn't do that.

Germany didn't need expeditionary capability after the war. It probably doesn't need to project force beyond its continent even today. France regularly had military entanglements in its former colonies, and probably still does. Capability is a function of necessity.

[sorcerer-mar]

> That's what waste and corruption does.

Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.

In the US, the goal of the healthcare system is to produce profit. So the simpler explanation is that the healthcare system consumes more money and produces less healthcare because it spends more to produce profit.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.

And that's not corruption like I was saying?

[sorcerer-mar]

Uhh... no? Not in the traditional sense of the word, no. It's how we've decided to architect our system.

"Corruption" in this context typically refers to an element of dishonesty or theft and so on.

If you mean "corrupt" in the ethical sense, then sure, kind of?

[FirmwareBurner]

So the US taxpayers voluntarily asked their government to give them expensive and shitty health insurance instead of healthcare?

[hidingfearful]

> US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy

US healthcare and childcare are private, not government. Likewise I suspect much of the education cost is private colleges/schools, not government.

You seem to be arguing that the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

“ the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector”

That is easily the case if you aren’t careful. Private health insurance has a big incentive to drive up cost of the medical sector so they can take a few percent as profit. Defense contractors have almost no incentive to reduce costs, quite the opposite.

I guess it depends on what you call efficiency. If you define efficiency as extracting maximum profit then modern corporations are very efficient. If you define it as providing products and services at low cost, then they are inefficient.

[FirmwareBurner]

>US healthcare [...] are private, not government.

What's Medicare and Medicaid and why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?

On a per capital basis, even if you don't include private healthcare spending, the US stil spends more per capita on healthcare than the other developed countries.

https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-government-healthcare-...

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

> why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?

Because these are interacting with and purchasing services from a market-driven healthcare system which is optimized for profit, not health outcomes.

[FirmwareBurner]

Thanks for defining corruption.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

What would you say determines the market price of a kilometer of "basic road"?

[FirmwareBurner]

What do you define the market price of someone roofing your house? Same shizz different scale.

[DannyBee]

I lived in DC for years, so i've had this discussion probably 8000 times already. Time for 8001 i guess.

Let's separate waste and corruption - they are fairly different things.

Let's then split waste into:

1. Programs <someone> (don't care who) thinks are not worth doing or shouldn't be done by government, or whatever - IE the overhead is not what people are arguing about, and even if the program had zero overhead, and government was being as efficient as possible, <someone> still thinks it shouldn't exist.

2. Programs with high overhead or otherwise seem inefficient.

There are other things you can consider waste, but this feels like the majority of what people argue about.

#1 is often subject to widely varied views on what government should be doing or you name it. For this discussion, you can be <someone> and decide which fall into #1 and which fall into #2 :) We'll just assume literally everything in #1 is waste and should be killed.

If you kill everything that people initially think falls into #1, the US would probably spend no money. The majority of the budget is covered by things people think they disagree about, and want gone or not gone or whatever.

However, for most people , if you remove the ignorance of what things are and what they are doing, and then you killed everything that actually falls into #1, it would not make a huge dent in the US budget. This is because the majority of people tend to support, at least in the sense of saying it doesn't being in #1, the things that are actually the majority of the US budget.

and then we'll ignore #1, because reducing the overhead wouldn't matter, and if you take the same view as most people, it will not be a big pile when you get down to brass tacks.

Let's talk about #2.

#2 is often subject to arguments about the overhead. This is much easier to discuss.

Most arguments about the overhead are about how high it is. This is, IMHO, not a useful measure at all.

Asking whether something has high overhead doesn't tell you what to do if the answer is "yes".

Better questions to ask (IMHO) are "Do i want the outcome this program achieves" (if not, it falls into #1), and then "Can i get the outcome on the same timeframe, with less overhead, and enough less overhead that it's worth it".

The answer to the latter is often no.

Sometimes it's yes in a theoretical sense (should it be possible to achieve the outcome for less money), but still no in a practical sense (can you actually pay someone to achieve the outcome for less money), even if you removed bureaucratic constraints (IE just stuck with the real requirements to achieve the outcome).

Often times it's no practically because of scale- i can have 4 hard drives delivered by amazon tomorrow at 8am. I can't get them to deliver 4 million by tomorrow. On top of that, even if they could, while the odds are they are not the only people who could deliver 4, they may be the only people who can deliver 4 million. In that case, they have no reason to not charge me a near infinite amount of money since nobody else can do what i want. So it is very high overhead, but you can't actually reduce the overhead without changing the requirements. So if you want the outcome, as is, you have to accept the overhead.

Plenty of times it's no in both the theoretical sense, and the practical sense, because notions of overhead amounts are wrong, and things are not as high overhead as people seem to believe. As an example, people continue to think USAID has high overhead, but it actually does not by any objective measure. In USAID's case, it just has funny accounting called NICRA. Anyone who digs enough to actually calculate the real overhead, consistently discover (and agree) it's competitive with private organizations that do the same. See, e.g., https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-w... for a reasonably new example of someone discovering this.

Of course, there is certainly plenty of waste in government, but it's a lot less than people think.