We aren't even in the same dimension as perfection here. It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually. The US government is the largest employer in the world. The reasoning would be no different if it was a corporation.
This is true. So now let’s look at the substance of what DOGE has actually done:
- indiscriminately fire people who have been in long term positions but recently got promoted and so were considered “probationary”
- dismantle the CPFB which was a net gain for revenue
- dismantle 18F which has a track record of improving government efficiency
- fire people who were involved in managing nuclear weapons and bird flu and then try to bring them back
- share spreadsheets on Twitter about really old people in the social security system making people think there’s tons of fraud without learning about the 2023 OIG report that already existed that explained this data
- make a bunch of noise about cutting a bunch of contracts including a third of which were already fully spent and will save nothing
Does this give you confidence that they are genuinely focused on reducing inefficiency and waste? It seems to me like they are rushing in, not bothering to learn what has already been done, arrogantly making assumptions, randomly breaking things and causing chaos, and all for what… a few billion in real savings which is not even a fraction of the proposed increase in spending by the current budget resolutions being worked on by the Republicans in the house?
Why should we have ever thought that an operation literally named after a dog meme was serious about anything?
I’d also add that doing all of this by breaking laws/contracts makes it likely that the net cost will be greater than the advertised savings. Every one of the contractors they stiffed has pretty straight forward grounds for a breach of contract suit and every government employee they said was fired for poor performance has grounds and a strong incentive to sue to clear their name.
All of this makes everything more expensive in the future: new contracts are going to have higher overhead to account for new legal and accounting costs, and unless the government will never hire anyone again they’re going to struggle to get skilled employees at all, much less at the same salary, when it’s clear that they’d be signing up to be treated like this. The direct cost is bad but the productivity cost will be even greater and last for decades.
The government has a fair bit of flexibility to cancel contracts without penalty. They usually don't, and of course nobody has ever seen it as this scale.
You're probably correct about the employment law. That will take more legal finesse to keep them from having to pay a ton of money. Fortunately for them they also own the judiciary. It's not 100% reliable, but they've for 4 out of 5 needed votes locked in at the top level
They also deleted the largest "fraud findings" from their site after a day or so after posting them because they were lies, and enough people called them out
I don't think the US government is the largest employer in the world unless we aren't counting other countries governments. China seems to have around 50M government employees, 10 million civil servants and 30-40 million in other government jobs.
> It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually
It's not that obvious to me, and is such a broad assertion that I'd require more than an "Everyone knows it. Just look at history" explanation to accept it as fact.
It also implies 2 things that I would disagree with
1) That the inefficiency and waste increases over time. It's likelier to me the ratio of those things stays the same, but it's more apparent as it scales - a company "wasting" 2% of its budget is vastly different than the US government "wasting" 2% of its budget.
2) That it's inherent to "human organizations" themselves - this doesn't seem to explore any other possible explanations. Given the nature of the discussion, I would think it's worth discussing whether other factors (like capitalism) might have an effect
(We'll ignore the vagueness of terms like "inefficiency" and "waste" with regards to government spending; not everyone agrees on what things are efficient or not. There are also many ways of measuring efficiency for both long- and short-term outlooks.)
When ever anyone talks about government inefficiency, ask what perfect efficiency would look like.
Nail them down to specifics. Not just improvements, but perfect efficiency.
Guaranteed they will soon start to flounder, because "inefficient government" is a propaganda talking point, not a fact that can be established with any workable economic definition.
And "the deficit" is the difference between what government chooses to spend and chooses not to tax.
A huge proportion of government spending is either/both an investment and/or a direct driver of beneficial economic activity. That includes "unworthy" spending like welfare.
Dilbert is about a corporation, not government. Everyone seems to know that every large organization has some inefficiency. They seem to think the government has it worse, because that's what Republicans have been telling them.
It's no worse for government than any other large organization. Better than expected, given it's size.
