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

When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.

And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts.

So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.

	▲	WalterBright 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.