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OMG! The [Government] is [Waste]ing My Money!
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Did you know that sometimes THE GOVERNMENT spends money on things you didn't want them to spend money on? It's TRUE!
Well, I'm pretty sure that nobody agrees that it was a good idea for the Windsor municipal government to spend a million bucks fixing sand traps at a luxury golf & curling club or for the province of B.C. to spend half a million dollars on a Grey Cup party, anyway. YMMV, I suppose.
We talk a lot about government spending & waste, but there wasn't a dedicated thread for government pork... until now!
'Waste' is a topic with a lot of potential scope, because different people want the government to pour funding into different areas. For some people, the F-22 program in the U.S. was just a big waste of money; for some people, the Mars exploration program is just a big waste of money; for some people, food stamps are just a big waste of money; etc.
If possible, I'd like to focus this thread on things that are pretty much universally agreed to be waste. Like, just envision in your head whatever it is that you consider to be wasteful spending, package it as GOVERNMENT WASTE! (TM), and talk about the packaging rather than the specific thing inside.
How do we curb wasteful spending? How is contemporary spending efficiency compared past spending efficiency? Were there actually 'good 'ol days' in terms of fiscal responsibility, particularly in the U.S.? How much wasteful spending are we 'okay' with, given that one accepts that waste will happen in an imperfect human system? Can waste actually be a good thing, or at the very least, a necessary byproduct of something positive?
Has anyone ever actually called one of these hotlines? What happens if you do? What should happen if you do, in your opinion?
It's YOUR money, D&D, that YOU EARNED, working at a JOB! Tell me how much you hate having it spent on Obama's hookers & blow.
With Love and Courage
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/04/01/state-department-to-spend-400000-for-camel-statue-in-pakistan/
I don't mind some ornamentation around our embassies but a silly camel statue? Can't they put in a nice fountain for a fraction of the cost instead?
That's why i'd prefer, for the purposes of this thread, for the 'waste' in question to be just some formless essence you presume to be wasteful.
(Probably won't happen, but whatever)
EDIT:
Well, suppose that they had done some less expensive ornamentation: 80-100K, for example, on a garden or less extravagant piece of art. If Fox had still run that story (and let's assume that they would)... would you not still consider it wasteful, and have more or less the same reaction?
It appears the artist is not without a sense of irony.
Also, how much you want to bet that putting a sculpture of a Christian metaphor is going to be extremely unpopular in a majority Muslim country?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I can wrap my head around $80K. That's an upper middle-class family's annual income so my reaction would be Fox News is making a big deal over nothing if that were the story.
But $400K? Now that's a number I'm not familiar with so I'm outraged.
The government of the CNMI is extraordinarily corrupt, relying on nepotism to fill positions (almost none of the legislators have law degrees), each senator is allocated $500,000 a year for "office expenses", elected officials routinely pack the juries in friends' trials with supporters, etc. The garment industries who used to be on the island (who got to put Made in USA tag on their clothes, since the CNMI is a U.S. commonwealth) bribed the local politicians with large amounts of money to keep labor regulations off the islands (and bribed Republican senators with even larger amounts of money- remember Jack Abramoff?).
The employees in the garment factories made less than half of the minimum wage on the mainland (before 2007 they made less, as minimum wage laws did not apply), and slept in company-owned barracks and ate company-provided food (paid for by a wage deduction, of course!). The Department of the Interior stated that 91% of private-sector workers were immigrants (who were not allowed to apply for residency or citizenship before 2007) and that "Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry."
And did I mention that all this was and is paid for by US taxpayers? Huzzah! The Federal government had to pass a regulation back in 1995 saying that Welfare Recipients may not hire housemaids, because the majority of the native Marianas Islanders (who aren't relaxing in a cushy public job they got from their uncle) are on the dole.
read more!
Short version of the story is that we subsidize the growth of sugar in the US, and put a quota tariff on imports. It's a kind of tariff where we can import a small amount, but then the tariff comes into play and makes any additional purchases cost prohibitive. Brazil has a great advantage at producing sugar, and it and some other countries sell it to the rest of the world at a much lower price than we pay in the US. Then we subsidize the corn that is used to make HFCS, ensuring a market where manufacturers will find it cheap to use HFCS to sweeten food when without all of this intervention we might be using real sugar and not harming our health so much. The majority of the benefit goes to a few corporations.
Over $100M per year to determine whether magic is real, and they have a very hard time getting to "no".
We actually did a study at our agency, and we have found that if we replaced contractors with federal employees, even at a loss of productivity we would save roughly 33% over contracting.
Attitudes about contracting are, in general, pants on head stupid.
Contracting makes sense when you have a one-off project and don't have access to or need to supplement in-house expertise. It also makes sense when you have a task that only needs to be done infrequently but requires people with a highly specialized set of skills that can't be readily utilized elsewhere. Something like an annual calibration and infrequent repair / maintenance on some specialized piece of machinery, or disaster recovery after a building flood.
It doesn't make sense when you have a continuous need for a task, especially a low skill task. Things like food service or general transportation for military units, for example. General road repair / construction, or standard helpdesk IT support (although, as noted above, big / unusual projects might call for outside experts).
With an organization the size of the Federal Government, there are almost no tasks that are infrequent enough to call for outside specialists. It would almost always be cheaper and more efficient* to do things in-house with actual employees, provided the tasks are properly managed.
It's not funding in support of, it's actual rigorous research as a part of the NIH. That funding ultimately leads to "theres no evidence this does anything", which is a good thing. The department comes under fire from senators who call it a waste, saying things(from the wiki) like "science doesnt need to understand something before we let people benefit from it!". Which... I mean that senator is probably a gigantic waste himself.
Basically there the people in the NIH that investigate 'emergen-c'(the FDA probably handles this example, but anyways) and make up sure people know that shooting your body full of vitamins doesnt actually do anything for you.
edit: Er the end point here is that theres no money in scientific reporting showing this shit doesnt work, and a pile of bullshit being laid on people that it is. I'm kind of happy that some of my tax dollars goes towards real investigation of health practices. The alternate is 'I'm a doctor and this random dude punching your back for cash based on chinese mysticism has your best interest' commercials.
I actually have no problem with this. The point of such research is simply to build a body of evidence that either refutes or proves that these therapies have value.
The question is simply, "People have been doing this for thousands of years. Is there a point to it?" And the answer is not always, "No."
The other side of that is that even when the traditional remedies are scientifically nonsense, that does not mean they have no medical value. One big lesson of dealing with refugee populations - in the case of the link among the Hmong - is that inviting traditional healers into the hospital encourages patients scared of modern medicine to seek treatment.
In such cases, the traditional healers basically serve the same function as the hospital chaplains.
this would be pretty fantastic
frankly the DOD could do most of its contract work in house as well for far less money
But the process to keep contracting "fair" is where the bloat starts going in.
We solicited a 10 million dollar 5 year contract. That was the price that was the best value, second cheapest, and it is actually a reasonable price, but to get that price. It took 5 weeks to handle solicitations.
The selection committee was 5 people.
We need 1 person who's sole job is to watch that group and handle the paperwork (my job).
The procurement contracting officer had 2 contract specialist who all spent about 6 weeks each on it.
That contracting officer hands it to another contracting officer, and supporting contracts administrator who spends roughly a quarter of her time on this contract because it is mission critical. For the next 5 years.
The contractor had to increase the price to have a person who solely just handles the government interactions and paperwork.
Right now we are looking at an extra 2 million, and this was a competitive solid contract. Then when you start looking at having to pay Davis Baccon, inefficiencies in scheduling around the government, the other costs which are harder to measure kick in.
I'm against those things that everyone hates. I'm for all those things everyone loves. More good! Less bad!
And in the grand scheme of things, $100M is chump change to raise awareness of baloney, particularly when taken in context of the total budget.
Here are just 5 wasteful projects that cost a lot more than baloney research.
"Oh, sorry. X product bid and it was reasonable but Y Product is veteran owned soooo we are going to get that and we will just have to retrain everyone."
On the one hand, yes that is the nice part of it. It's true that funding research into this sort of thing isn't a bad idea necessarily.
On the other hand: it is incredibly ridiculous to expect that the one thing people were waiting for to throw down Reiki forever was a placebo-controlled study. I mean let's be clear: it is the practice of not touching a person. There is no way to prove it does not work in a manner that will ever change a single person's mind. Your aunt will still insist it helped a friend beat cancer.
I mean it's not like the NHS funding of woo bullshit or anything but holy crap just... let it lie. 5,000 year-old scams will continue to work for eternity, we've got better things to do.
edit: of course, I do understand that the actual answer is to fund the NIH like mad because actually having scientists capable of producing work is a good thing. But still, Jesus. What do you even do with your day when you're researching chiropracty? Just... write "nope" on a blackboard a couple dozen times?
This would be true if, and only if, when needs change or when particular employees were found to be not-up-to-snuff, you could reliably and easily get rid of them. Hiring a new fed isn't just hiring a person you can't easily get rid of; it's also hiring a potential federal pension, which inflates the cost.
Unfortunately, so much of this kind of work is covered by government-worker unions and, even when its not, there is so much red tape you need to go through to fire a federal worker*, that this will never, ever happen. Accordingly, contractors are going to be around not just due to immediate cost-savings (if any) but also because of flexibility.
* Some of this is for good reason, to prevent political douchebaggery from getting decent workers fired, but the amount of required hoops is frankly ridiculous.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
That was the first time I heard someone tell the contracting officer to go to hell.
My favorite experience was in trying to order high-end camera/video equipment for a state agency. All of the major vendors were on a "Do Not Buy" list, and the only approved vendor was a random small shop in another state. We loved trying to figure out just which legislature/director was related to the shop's owner.
Best part - the equipment we received had been ordered from one of the banned vendors by the shop, reboxed and sold to us for a significant markup. It was all pretty funny in a sad way.
One of the things Al Gore should get more credit for is trying to get federal employees the ability to just walk into a local shop and buy supplies. There's a ton of invisible waste - i.e. graft - floating around on those approved vendor/contractor lists.
And don't even get me started on the "veteran" and "minority-owned business" scams - big money men start a company, appoint a figurehead "owner" who fills the right boxes and get favorable contracts. Because they are well-funded, they can underbid real minority and veteran-owned firms then jack up the price on the back-end with change orders and overcharges.
Our contracting process is thoroughly stupid, though.
Eh I disagree with them about the Gerald Ford carrier, both on the assumption that carriers are useless because of ballistic anti ship missiles (finding and hitting a ship at sea is much, much more difficult than assumed, except as a first strike) and because carriers get more actual use than most of our expensive weapon systems and have tons of utility in the event of natural disasters and such
plus $15 billion development for something like that really is nothing when you look at the other pork on that plate, also as a good Keynesian, carrier construction employs a lot more well paid middle class people per dollar than almost every other high end project
Such ignorance.
Is there wasteful spending in military? Absolutely. But it also creates jobs, which is something much of the rest of wasteful government spending does not do.
Not to mention, Ukraine-Russia.
Not quite. The biggest factor is the state of the market absent the entity wanting to contract. Subcontractors are a example of this. While they build "whatever" they don't need their own dedicated team because roofers would exist regardless of whether or not they hired them.
Things like technology appropriations even though the government will have an ongoing operation can safely be contracted out because absent the govt those kinds of project houses will exist in order to do other projects.
This is because the initial capital costs for an in house project team cannot be spread across other jobs where it can be for contractors.
Non project work definitely should be done in house though. There are no capital savings so there isn't any reason to contract if you're as large as the govt.
I'd argue that - again, from the position that not all military spending is waste - that the biofuel projects are pretty legit. Pretty much any prolonged conflict is going to cause huge disruptions in petroleum production, and military equipment doesn't work so well without some sort of fuel.
There are good arguments against the F35 and Littoral Combat Ship. Human Terrain I don't know much about, except that from what I've seen working with School of Public Policy those anthropologists / sociologists who are bitching certainly don't seem to be turning down huge DOD grants.
Which, of course, is a threat to the incumbent energy providers. So, we got a legislative ban on biofuel feasibility testing.
The F-35 and LCS were good ideas strangled by politics.
all government spending creates jobs. even the 'wasteful' type.
giving the GSA more authority to dismiss senseless disputes and shorten the process for those (as well as restricting some of the dispute filing conditions) are some of the easiest ways to reduce contracting cycle time and reduce waste.
90% of the time they just cause delay, do not result in a different company winning the contract and cost the government money paying for lawyers to fight it.
1 - extremely small and often out of context amounts (camel statue, the camel through the eye of a needle parable is in the Quran as well btw) that wouldn't cause an eye to blink in private entities. For instance, my privately held corporate employers have 8 digits worth of art on display in our 9 offices.
2 - research that's portrayed as obviously useless but then actually when you look at it isn't.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
This is a feature, not a bug. It's not about efficiency, it's about the grift (and graft).