by toss1 | 2025-07-14 15:16:34+00:00
Good to hear

I've got zero problem going after W, F, & A.

However, it is often (and especially now) is a mere cover for a LOT of other even more massively wasteful concepts.

In ANY large organization, and in ANY organization doing innovative work, there will ALWAYS be significant literal waste, especially when viewed in hindsight. Trying to root it all out is merely a straight-up recipe for different kinds of waste — a dense bureaucracy of requirements but the waste is predictable and "accepted". I do work as a 2nd- or 3rd-tier military supplier, and working with "CUI" (Confidential Unclassified Information) has a very significant overhead, and every single contract comes with a list of huge "flow-downs", literally pages of lists of federal regulations that apply to the contracts — and that is just the list of regulations, reading the actual regs is hundreds or thousands of pages — and that is all to prevent WF&A.

Start talking innovative weapons systems, hardware and software, and we have ALL of the issues of any kind of hardware and software development, sometimes the need to very rapidly develop, and all kinds of constraints, and when a program that looks good doesn't pan out, people screaming "WASTE!!!". Often it happens even when the program works in the end.

Even in bog-standard stuff with a long lead time, such as artillery shells, the cries of "WASTE!!" are a problem. The situation in Ukraine is showing that we have very low and inadequate artillery shell production capacity and inventory for fighting an actual war. Startup time for new production lines in measured in years. Yet, to prevent ""WASSTE!!" almost all of it was shut down. And now we cannot supply enough for even a tightly constrained active hot war. But, if the USG had done the right thing and paid contractors to keep active those lines and stockpiled millions of rounds, everyone would be screaming bloody murder about the "WASSSTE!!".

And what happens when you do go after it without being careful? Just look at DOGE: In an early example they fired the people in the energy department responsible for safety of our nuclear weapons stockpile because the "efficiency" people literally did not know what the DOE did; they had to scramble to hire them back when the press called it out. Or, this week, it turned out that the NOAA employee in central Texas responsible for coordinating severe weather warnings with local officials had taken the DOGE early buyout, so was not available to help. NOAA still did the best they could with what they had, but we're now picking hundreds of dead bodies out of river banks and trees.

How efficient is that?

Yes, there are always problems of efficiency at scale, and you can always find somebody scamming something. But even some of the DOGE employees that quit publicly expressed surprise at how actually efficiently the govt ran. So, I must say I'm a bit skeptical of the $2T unaccounted funds (and over what period?). That said, we could definitely do better in terms of budget rules, and the "use it or lose it" rule creates problems. The question is whether or not it creates more problems than other sets of rules.