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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

Consent matters.

> 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.

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?

I think your analogy is good, but misses the mark by millimeters. Optimizing is easy when you have a giant directory in the root of the drive named "delete this later". It's difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of directories, each with 100 files, of which you actually only need 75-85. You can't just delete any whole directory, because then things break; you have to go through each one and evaluate the purpose of each file, which is an expense in itself.

Yeah. Anyone who has worked with government agencies (federal or state, doesn't matter) knows how much waste and grift there is. Not All Agencies(tm) of course, but many.

The issue is figuring out how to actually fix that. It's Chesteron's Fences all the way down. Someone smarter than I would need to figure out how to even start on the problem.

The big issue though is that everyday people get exposed to the obvious inefficiencies in their day to day interactions, and don't see much if any of the big picture. So in pop-culture the meme builds up that all government spending is inefficient wastefulness. No one really talks or thinks about the stuff that just works.

The same sort of problems are endemic in private industry too. As I came from a working class background and worked my way up I like to say "America is fraud from the bottom up" - since I was exposed to the lower rungs of it first. It was definitely a shock coming into the working world as a naive teenager.

It would take an entire cultural shift to get much traction, imo.

it wouldn't be a triangle if it meant embracing one of the poles.

But the original claim was

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.

It's still $8000 per capita just for socialised healthcare. So still more than NL. The US has the worst of both worlds.

Through Medicare and Medicaid, the US spends more public money per capita on healthcare than any other country spends period. This is largely because Medicare/Medicaid were not allowed to negotiate pricing; they were legally required to accept whatever price companies wanted to set for a treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.

Is there any evidence that the education research has been of any benefit to educational results?

The dollars spent is not evidence of accomplishment.

Pick your definition of academic accomplishment if you like.

What have we got to show for spending $3 trillion?

State governments administer education separately, the Department of Education's job is to make sure they are following federal law. The Department mainly administers federal programs that dish out funding to states.

Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.

And when you get cost plus contracts, the incentive is to maximize costs.

With government agencies, the incentive is to spend 100% of the budget, otherwise their budget will get cut the next year.

Some years back, "Frontline" did an episode on dentist businesses. The government had a new program where they paid dentists who did dental surgery on poor people. There was a sudden drastic rise on dental surgeries on poor people, and little of it was medically justifiable. "Frontline" was shocked, shocked to see this happen. But of course, it was the obvious and inevitable result of how the government issued the payments.

It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before.

I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.

MIC gets paid handsomely to make sure this gets perpetuated. But goes back to even Smedley Butlers time, using the military and intelligence services to ensure capitalists have cheap access to resources. Supercharged with the second Iraq war as mercenary companies took over military work and contractors "rebuilding" the country.

Trump is a continuation of this well played track, with the a large sprinkle of fascism, grifting and destruction of the federal government as a goal.

Medical services are for-profit, not the hospitals. The hospitals funnel money to for-profit vendors.

The level of unprovoked violence used to enforce social security I find unjustifiable just to satisfy my material requirements.

This government thinks bike lanes are DEI: https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportat...

They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.

NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent.

So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.

Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?