[Jtsummers]

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

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.

[SubiculumCode]

That's the thing. The waste isn't in Federal beuracracy, it's in Federal contracts to private industry without strong self-interested oversight. The privatization trend takes a highly motivated group (companies) to milk money from an inefficient overseer.

[icedchai]

Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.

[CobrastanJorji]

Heck, even before they do anything, there is a sizable industry (with just a few players) focused entirely on the incredibly byzantine (but originally well meaning) process of bidding for government contracts (and also the politicking of acquiring no-bid contracts).

[parineum]

And who is responsible for making sure federal contracts don't go to wasteful contractors?

[sarchertech]

Yeah but that’s a process issue that would require deep familiarity and probably acts of Congress to fix. That’s not something a few 25 year olds with no relevant experience can come in and fix in 100 days.

[parineum]

Sure but this whole thread reads like it's absolving the government giving these contracts and blaming private companies.

It's the frog and the scorpion fable.

[Sabinus]

To me this whole thread reads people trying to apologise for DOGE, especially by making appeals like 'government has corruption and waste and that is bad so DOGE was good'.

[lern_too_spel]

It's why smart government created USDS, to clean up the mess left by contractors who set up the original healthcare.gov by having competent people work directly for the federal government. USDS was replaced with the incompetent DOGE (now US DOGE Service) and then completely shut down due to the new organization's incompetence.

[kotaKat]

This. Why the hell are we propping up private "veteran owned" companies that repackage a few things into a Pelican case and call it a revolutionary new product and sell it for tens of thousands over MSRP?

(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...

[ThinkingGuy]

While your point is perfectly valid, there's a little more nuance to the $400 (or $600) hammer story:

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

[alistairSH]

This.

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.

[sedawkgrep]

My spouse works in the DOI and while there maybe some inefficiencies, particularly in process, it isn't the people themselves which are the problem. Her group operates on razor-thin budgets and personnel constraints. They suffer the frustrations because they believe in the work.

[mothballed]

Government doesn't turn a profit, so the main way for middle management to gain influence and seniority is to have more employees. 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.

[monknomo]

hang on, isn't that true in private for profit companies too? Is not the path to VP from director typically grabbing more teams that report to you?

[mothballed]

Depends on the company, but there is another possibility, to produce more profit rather than more reports.

[sedawkgrep]

This is a profoundly dismissive and even circular take...or at least an intentional misrepresentation of what I said.

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.

[mothballed]

I'm referring to things like the DOI rescinding the 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule that allowed private ecologically minded conservation groups to restore and preserve land through leases -- something exploitive resource extracting private entities were already able to do.

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).

[sedawkgrep]

I’m not sure at all why you’re pointing at a rule established in 2024 and promptly rescinded in 2025 as a way to point out govt. waste.

[verall]

It was the post-DOGE DOI that rescinded the rule, after the "fat and waste" had been cut.

[asveikau]

I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea.

Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.

[lesuorac]

I guess it depends on what you see as waste.

As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.

[ajmurmann]

You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.

[EthanHeilman]

Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...

[Spooky23]

You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you.

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.

[devin]

There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.

[kridsdale1]

Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.

[pocksuppet]

It kind of is, where do you think Big Tech gets its money from? essential products and services are more expensive because of the waste. Like a can of Coke (or packet of rice) is more expensive because they buy ads through Google and Google wastes that money.

[gowld]

Consent matters.

[TSiege]

The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not

[boscillator]

Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.

*edit: spelling

[Jtsummers]

> OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's preview

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.

[boscillator]

Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia.

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.

[TitaRusell]

None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway.

Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.

[jimt1234]

I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?

[TitaRusell]

Trump was famously elected as the big isolationist candidate and we know how that went...

[watwut]

He was pro-Russian, thus against help to Ukraine. That is literally the extend of his isolationism.

The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.

[jimt1234]

But what about the Board of Peace? https://boardofpeace.org/ ... I love the quote: "...the war in Gaza is over." If people weren't dying, that would be hilarious!