I didn't miss the point. This waste could have been avoided, is the thing, and anyone who cared about running and knew how to run an organization well, might have. Such a person might even have guessed there were excellent reasons that the executive has not, previously, been run by one single person issuing surprising and very specific decrees that reach down to the lowest-level workers, across large swaths of it at once, and not done that.
> I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it.
This doesn't save anything. Now utilities and maintenance costs are higher. It's more spending. Leasing out or selling the buildings would have cut waste.
> I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional.
I don't know how many times and ways people involved in the admin have to say that their goal is to wreck the federal bureaucracy before people believe them.
> This waste could have been avoided, is the thing, and anyone who cared about running and knew how to run an organization well, might have.
Sure, by not having the vacant offices in the first place. Different ways to achieve that goal include: not allowing huge numbers of employees to stop coming into the office; or if you do allow that, by then competently following up on the implied reduction in office usage.
There are clearly lots of ways to avoid this kind of waste, but all of them go back for years, and were not done. So here we are. And instead of being critical of that, you're choosing to fixate on the most recent events, where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
> There are clearly lots of ways to avoid this kind of waste, but all of them go back for years, and were not done.
What waste? The offices? Filling them doesn't reduce the waste.
No, the waste is lost hours of productivity, and chaos making these offices less efficient. You solve that by rolling this out very differently. The waste I'm talking about is entirely avoidable and 100% DOGE's fault.
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> where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
What underlying problem? This 1) didn't need to be done, and even if that weren't true, 2) was done in a hamfisted way that wasted money.
You're focusing on the trees and missing the forest. Please go back and re-read my original comment.
Small waste: the few hours/days of lost productivity while offices are re-opened.
Big waste: the empty offices that were sitting there while nobody was using them, for years.
Maybe they could have avoided the small waste by being more careful and methodical, or maybe that would have taken 10x longer. I don't know, and it's not worth arguing about.
> I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it.
This doesn't save anything. Now utilities and maintenance costs are higher. It's more spending. Leasing out or selling the buildings would have cut waste.
> I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional.
I don't know how many times and ways people involved in the admin have to say that their goal is to wreck the federal bureaucracy before people believe them.