Re: 2018 midterm elections catch-all thread
The biggest issue I have with the whole government is inept and terrible argument is that there seems to be some unfounded belief that there is a party that doesn’t want to grow government when they are in power.......
I appreciate this post and I will be happy to clarify. It makes little difference to me which party is in charge. The bureaucracy persists; the urge to waste is in the DNA of government. Spending increases regardless of who is in power. Each new administrations just adds to the pile. That is why the Democrats/Republicans are good, while Republicans/Democrats are bad argument that is perpetual here causes me to laugh. When it comes to government spending, both parties are two big piles of crap. I'm not really interested in measuring which pile of crap is taller.
With most professions, if you haven't worked in it, it is unlikely one will understand the details of the job. Likewise, in a profession in which one has worked, you often assume the audience has a frame of reference and will understand the stories you tell about it. (When I was an investment banker, hardly anyone outside the profession understood what I did. Their frame of reference was the teller at the local commercial bank branch. I got tired of telling people that I worked on a bit higher level than counting out change all day.
) I am now in the business of government acquisitions and have been for a decade. I've worked in programs managing all of their service and hardware/software contracts. I've also worked for contracting offices creating the actual contracts for various government agencies.
I work in DoD, but I have experience with dozens of government agencies across government. The way government buys goods and services is sickening. For example, the previous program where I worked rolled out a new payroll/accounting system. The cost was supposed to be about $500M and ended up costing close to $800M. Keep in mind this new system is supposed to be more efficient than existing systems .... and was massively inefficient. At the time I left I believe 47 other agencies across government switched to the new system. Every agency that adopted the new system also contracted with the vendor who created the system for onsite support. I managed these contracts, so my knowledge of them is first hand. Now people have to get trained up, so some onsite support is understandable - a few months maybe. Yet all these agencies had support for years. I heard back from many of the contractors that they were kept on to do the actual work (not training) in perpetuity. That was the case when I left, and will be for the foreseeable future because that support is now hard wired into their various budgets. Total waste of money.
I'm also aware first hand of dozens of "administrative support" contracts throughout the government. Long story short, much like the example above, contractors are hired to do the job of government employees. I'm not talking about the highly technical folk that do jobs beyond the skill level of most civil servants. I'm talking about a contractor whose job it is to do the basic functions of a bureaucrat, so the bureaucrat can basically do nothing. I've seen it first hand. I've seen dozens of contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I've talked to my counterparts across government who've told me the exact same thing. Hundreds of such contracts. Thousands. I just talked to a contractor who is getting paid six figures to do basic administrative work so the civil servants, who also is getting paid six figures, can do anything else but their jobs. This contractor and his team are on a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to do little more than filing and shredding. There are tons of contracts like this out there. These contracts are 100% waste.
In addition to the many wasteful service contracts, every agency buys hardware and software. In my first hand experience much of what is bought is unnecessary. Too much is bought. The wrong thing is bought. What is bought is obsolete. Maintenance lapses and heavy reinstatement fees are the result. Millions of dollars of waste at my program. Everyone in acquisition at every other agency I talked to at NCMA conferences had the same experience. Ridiculous amounts of waste.
And I haven't even touched how long it takes to buy even legitimate goods and services. Many months of man hours just to buy a printer. Etc. It's just the way government (barely) functions.
And all this is even before you add the corrupting influence of lobbyists to big government. Or how government programs encourage people to underachieve. And all the market distortions and unintended consequences.
So, that's why when someone maintains that the government is efficient, or maybe just a little bit inefficient, I feel compelled to set the record straight. Because, as I said at the beginning, if you don't work in a profession it is normal to be ignorant of the details, and it is easy to draw conclusions that are way off. All I can to is offer the truth about the way government functions. People either recognize it or not. For many, their allegiance to a political tribe is too much to overcome.