I've worked for the government before and have personally witnessed a very large amount of waste. It's absolutely there, and it's disgusting.
Waste needs to be cut back - that is morally required to happen, because it's not waste of some private company's money, it's the waste of other peoples' money - the only problem is that you can't take the Office Space "What would you say you do here?" approach of randomly cutting people, but have to address the systemic issues that result in tens of billions of dollars lost yearly.
Some of these include:
- literal incentives to waste money in the form of "if you don't use your whole budget every year, we'll cut it next year" (which applies to large parts of the military and defense, which happen to be some of the biggest spenders)
- massive bureaucracy that takes processes that should take a day and turns them into multi-week-long nightmares
- terrible office cultures that encourage single-points-of-failure...and then gives those people lots of vacation time
- large policy sub-orgs that focus on evaluating requests against hundreds of thousands of pages of policy instead of trying to help the workers actually get things done
- terrible contracting processes that result in the government paying 2-10x more than private industry does for goods and services (which only a small increase in quality or reliability)
...and many, many more problems.
> I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems
You can simultaneously believe that the average government worker is competent and hard-working, and that the bureaucracy as a whole is extremely inefficient due to systemic issues.
Blanket defense of government (in)efficiency actively makes the problems worse. Focus your energy instead on adding nuance when discussing the problems and solutions.
I think this is part of the problem. There is merit in the stated goal. Most people think there is waste in government, so cleaning things up resonates.
The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency. We can only take him at his word that things are being improved. But given the various false and misleading statements that’s already come out, of the limited info being released, how can we trust him?
> The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency.
Yes, spot on, I think this is very accurate and truthful.
I'm just trying to differentiate between "the government is wasteful, and here's the careful and prudent way to make it better" and "the government isn't very wasteful and we should avoid even talking about the possibility".
I’m not sure there are many people arguing for the latter. The former yes, but more than that it’s the types of things that are being targeted.
Method aside, musk is trying to save a few million here and there on things that are “wasteful” but provide benefit to a lot of people, including Americans. Meanwhile, a multi trillion dollar tax cut that’s going mostly to the wealthy is fine and not wasteful for some reason. Jacked up prices from a handful of defense contractors is also fine.
Waste needs to be cut back - that is morally required to happen, because it's not waste of some private company's money, it's the waste of other peoples' money - the only problem is that you can't take the Office Space "What would you say you do here?" approach of randomly cutting people, but have to address the systemic issues that result in tens of billions of dollars lost yearly.
Some of these include:
- literal incentives to waste money in the form of "if you don't use your whole budget every year, we'll cut it next year" (which applies to large parts of the military and defense, which happen to be some of the biggest spenders)
- massive bureaucracy that takes processes that should take a day and turns them into multi-week-long nightmares
- terrible office cultures that encourage single-points-of-failure...and then gives those people lots of vacation time
- large policy sub-orgs that focus on evaluating requests against hundreds of thousands of pages of policy instead of trying to help the workers actually get things done
- terrible contracting processes that result in the government paying 2-10x more than private industry does for goods and services (which only a small increase in quality or reliability)
...and many, many more problems.
> I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems
You can simultaneously believe that the average government worker is competent and hard-working, and that the bureaucracy as a whole is extremely inefficient due to systemic issues.
Blanket defense of government (in)efficiency actively makes the problems worse. Focus your energy instead on adding nuance when discussing the problems and solutions.