What percentage of federal spending is reasonably estimated as
“waste”? I don’t mean spending on programs that a particular political
party might disagree with for ideological reasons; I’m talking about
bloated inventories, overstaffed workforces, and other inefficiencies
that a private enterprise might reasonably be expected to cost-cut?
I don’t think anyone really estimates that. Every office has a little bit of slush, usually in the account billed as “other direct costs,” which covers things like office supplies, but each purchase of those items is made from a gov’t-approved vendor at a discount when possible, and you can bet that the GAO watches those accounts like hawks for unreasonable growth.
I reject your premise as insoluble, though – I don’t think you really know what you mean by waste, and I don’t think there’s a factual answer.
Is it “waste” to send ten people to a meeting in Los Angeles if only eight are really needed? What if the ten people only get five hotel rooms and two rental cars instead of ten and ten? What if the meeting could be conducted by teleconference, but management thinks it’s more valuable to send people in person? And if management spends three or four engineer-hours ($250 of your tax dollars) chasing down $40 in parking receipts on a $4,000 trip… is that waste? Or is that “due diligence” to ensure your tax dollars aren’t being wasted?
Honestly, I work in government contracting, and I see a little waste here and there… but I also see it on the corporate side.
True, I admit the definition of “waste” means different things to different people, it’s very difficult to estimate such things accurately, and lord knows there’s plenty of waste in the corporate world, too.
But people frequently estimate how much corporate waste could be trimmed – the entire premise of the leveraged buy-out (LBO) is that the new owners think they will be able to control costs better than the old owners. Read “Barbarians at the Gate”, the story of the buyout of RJR Nabisco – multiple players made estimates of how much additional money they could squeeze out of Nabisco by cutting costs. Those numbers turned out not to be entirely accurate, but at least multiple players came up with methadologies for attempting to estimate how much cost savings were available.
Surely such formulas could be applied to the federal government. The result might be correct or might be wildly off, but we can at least apply the formulas, can’t we?
Chasing after which department bought too many paper clips or which agency sent ten instead of eight staffers to attend a conference is an effort in futility. Economics of scale and all that.
These folks go after government waste in a big way. Check the link on Porker of the Month. Now we’re talking waste.
In all fairness I work for a federal agency and I do see some waste at my level. Can it be trimmed? Possibly, but what good does it really serve as Jurph pointed out when chasing saving $40 causes you to spend $1,000? Then again, I’m aware of quite a few tens of millions spent in the past year just to “save” hardly anything at all. Why was it done? You’ll have to ask the politicians since they wanted it done just so they could play sleight-of-hand with the taxpayers. As long as there are power games to be played along with large sums of money there is waste, be it inside or outside of government.
Well to adress the above (and to be honest, I can’t say how thorough the GAO is in the land to my south), most of what you refer to could easily be fixed with sound policies.
If the ten people are sent at the lowest possible airfare, no it’s not a waste - a couple of extra impressions would be beneficial to the government (we hope). If they all decide that they’re eligible for business / first class , and soak the taxpayer for (say NYC to LA) 4K per head, then yeah, that’s a waste.
Hotel rooms / teleconference? Has your employer asked you to share a room to save expenses? What government can do “face to face”, it will.
As for the last, a public company is at least responsible to shareholders, who, if they don’t like policy can vote with their wallets.
As to Duckster and chasing small expenses, you are correct. It’s not worth it. For those who travel business class for a hop of one hour or less, yes, it is worth it because I paid for part of that flight.
Government (mine or the US) could cut at least 50 Million per year, if they changed travel policies, and that’s a conservative estimate.
US federal government travel is bound by various regulations. If a federal employee is flying anything other than cattle car class, they are either authorized to do so or they are ripping off the taxpayer. Unfortunately ripoffs do occur. What many people forget that as a federal employee, I pay taxes, too, and I hate it when I see/hear about such waste.
Well, there’s the problem. “If they’re authoized to do so”.
Sorry to be argumentative, but I really don’t think anyone who works for the public should waste our money like that. I travel once in a while for work, and I always fly “cattle class”. Of course, I’m not up high in my company, but the people I respect, reguardless of “position” keep in mind the money they’re spending.
Case in point (actually, two): In Canada, Preston Manning, (former “Reform” Party leader) had an indicated preference for the low cost carrier WestJet. At the other end of the spectrum, David Collenette (former Minister of Transport) actually used his position to force Air Canada to reinstate a flight from Ottawa to Toronto on Friday nights (cite is the book “Air Monopoly”, author Keith McArthur).
Do you have evidence that it happens? Do you have evidence that it happens often enough that it could be stopped without spending even more money to do so? It’s become basically axiomatic in the U.S. that government is “wasteful” when in reality, it accomplishes many tasks far more efficiently than the corporate world. I don’t know about the federal government, but as a state employee, I can tell you that we don’t exactly work in luxury. Not that it’s a bad place, mind you, but the state doesn’t finance anything like what you seem to imagine. If anything, in a lot of instances, the state is so stingy as to be penny wise and pound foolish, but that’s the sort of thing that can only increase if groups like the CAGW that was linked to get their way.
My mother, also a state worker, can tell you some stories about general budget-related idiocy in which money was “saved” at the cost of effectiveness. Sad, though, since she’s a social worker and the money savings are in the forms of insufficient supervision of kids in foster homes. It’s too bad that so many politicians now seem to be making a career out of ridiculous superstitions - when you believe that every budget can simply be squeezed in perpetuity, it’s your fellow citizens paying the price. How much money does each taxpayer save each time a kid is abused because the state didn’t have the money to adequately investigate and resolve their case?
Back in the 1980s George Will uttered the famous line “Ronald Reagan thinks waste, fraud and mismanagement is a line item in the federal budget he can eliminate with a single stroke of a pen.”
Is it waste to travel business class instead of coach? How about if coach is sold out and it’s either fly business class or spend an extra night in a hotel?
I work for an activist group, so I have a lot of interaction with both state and federal government. The issue isn’t too many paperclips or too many assistants – it’s too few to get the job done the quickest and most efficient way.
I think events over the last five years or so should put paid to the notion that shareholders are given any real influence in corporate decision making – indeed, that shareholders even have reasonable access to the kind of information necessary to make investment decisions. Compared to the corporate world, federal and state government agencies are models of openness and fiscal discipline.
“Turned out not to be entirely accurate.” Wow, what an understatement. I should think that “Entirely specious figures manufactured from thin air without the backing of honest research in order to serve their interest in pursuing a transaction no matter what the consequences” would be slightly closer to the mark.
Based on what, exactly? Idle speculation colored by ideological preconceptions?