Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it.

I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.

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.