Kepler
Cornell Big Red
Re: The 112th Congress - A Congress divided shall not cry!
There may not really be that much "waste." I've worked with the DOD and they have a lot of mechanisms for auditing and cutting expense, and in every Cost Plus contract I have ever seen Cost Control makes up a significant part of what a contractor is graded on. Since Reagan, the operating principle of most government services is a quasi-private business model. Add to this that every administration is always trying to find and correct the "waste" of the prior administration but very little comes of it.
There are inefficiencies in government, but there's also no profit being skimmed off the top. Those things may well cancel out. The major problems with government are (1) a lack of an accountable trail for managers who move on to lead a different organization and (2) duplication between competing organizations who set up their own parallel structures. But again, both of these problems are replicated in the private sector.
The wars are an enormous waste, though, of course. The amount the former regime, and now the current, have wasted playing dime store De Tocqueville in Iraq likely dwarfs all the government waste in the history of the republic. And oh yeah a lot of people died needlessly, too.
There may not really be that much "waste." I've worked with the DOD and they have a lot of mechanisms for auditing and cutting expense, and in every Cost Plus contract I have ever seen Cost Control makes up a significant part of what a contractor is graded on. Since Reagan, the operating principle of most government services is a quasi-private business model. Add to this that every administration is always trying to find and correct the "waste" of the prior administration but very little comes of it.
There are inefficiencies in government, but there's also no profit being skimmed off the top. Those things may well cancel out. The major problems with government are (1) a lack of an accountable trail for managers who move on to lead a different organization and (2) duplication between competing organizations who set up their own parallel structures. But again, both of these problems are replicated in the private sector.
The wars are an enormous waste, though, of course. The amount the former regime, and now the current, have wasted playing dime store De Tocqueville in Iraq likely dwarfs all the government waste in the history of the republic. And oh yeah a lot of people died needlessly, too.
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