by DannyBee | 2025-06-17 15:19:53+00:00
I lived in DC for years, so i've had this discussion probably 8000 times already. Time for 8001 i guess.

Let's separate waste and corruption - they are fairly different things.

Let's then split waste into:

1. Programs <someone> (don't care who) thinks are not worth doing or shouldn't be done by government, or whatever - IE the overhead is not what people are arguing about, and even if the program had zero overhead, and government was being as efficient as possible, <someone> still thinks it shouldn't exist.

2. Programs with high overhead or otherwise seem inefficient.

There are other things you can consider waste, but this feels like the majority of what people argue about.

#1 is often subject to widely varied views on what government should be doing or you name it. For this discussion, you can be <someone> and decide which fall into #1 and which fall into #2 :) We'll just assume literally everything in #1 is waste and should be killed.

If you kill everything that people initially think falls into #1, the US would probably spend no money. The majority of the budget is covered by things people think they disagree about, and want gone or not gone or whatever.

However, for most people , if you remove the ignorance of what things are and what they are doing, and then you killed everything that actually falls into #1, it would not make a huge dent in the US budget. This is because the majority of people tend to support, at least in the sense of saying it doesn't being in #1, the things that are actually the majority of the US budget.

and then we'll ignore #1, because reducing the overhead wouldn't matter, and if you take the same view as most people, it will not be a big pile when you get down to brass tacks.

Let's talk about #2.

#2 is often subject to arguments about the overhead. This is much easier to discuss.

Most arguments about the overhead are about how high it is. This is, IMHO, not a useful measure at all.

Asking whether something has high overhead doesn't tell you what to do if the answer is "yes".

Better questions to ask (IMHO) are "Do i want the outcome this program achieves" (if not, it falls into #1), and then "Can i get the outcome on the same timeframe, with less overhead, and enough less overhead that it's worth it".

The answer to the latter is often no.

Sometimes it's yes in a theoretical sense (should it be possible to achieve the outcome for less money), but still no in a practical sense (can you actually pay someone to achieve the outcome for less money), even if you removed bureaucratic constraints (IE just stuck with the real requirements to achieve the outcome).

Often times it's no practically because of scale- i can have 4 hard drives delivered by amazon tomorrow at 8am. I can't get them to deliver 4 million by tomorrow. On top of that, even if they could, while the odds are they are not the only people who could deliver 4, they may be the only people who can deliver 4 million. In that case, they have no reason to not charge me a near infinite amount of money since nobody else can do what i want. So it is very high overhead, but you can't actually reduce the overhead without changing the requirements. So if you want the outcome, as is, you have to accept the overhead.

Plenty of times it's no in both the theoretical sense, and the practical sense, because notions of overhead amounts are wrong, and things are not as high overhead as people seem to believe. As an example, people continue to think USAID has high overhead, but it actually does not by any objective measure. In USAID's case, it just has funny accounting called NICRA. Anyone who digs enough to actually calculate the real overhead, consistently discover (and agree) it's competitive with private organizations that do the same. See, e.g., https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-w... for a reasonably new example of someone discovering this.

Of course, there is certainly plenty of waste in government, but it's a lot less than people think.