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Nick Maley's avatar

Great article! The basic points are very good and true.

I've done many years work with the Australian Government (as a supplier of IT systems). Your system and ours are similar enough that I feel I can comment.

Corruption in the Australian (and I suspect US) civil service is rare and I never observed it myself. The civil servants I dealt with were usually well motivated and competent people. But I did observe an amount of waste (not slack) in Government.

A lot of the waste (not slack) is procedural and governance based. Governance processes are supposed to reduce waste and fraud, but they have unintended consequences. The demand to negotiate the lowest price on goods means that we often accept the lowest bidder, but the lowest bidder often turns out to be the bidder most adept at fudging project scope The net result is big cost overruns and contract variations. The insistence on fixed price contracts, which seems like a good way to constrain cost, means that a big risk premium is built into costings, and for reasons mentioned above, contract variations still occur anyway.

Another source of waste is just inertia. Department structures and procurement decisions end up being the fossilized history of the enthusiasms of previous governments. Sheer inertia plus external stakeholder self interest means that these programs and structures and decisions persist even though they are irrelevant to the current priorities and the money could be better spent elsewhere.

A quickie slash and burn exercise like DOGE was never going to solve these problems, because they are systemic. They are fixable, but only through diligence and cooperation between the political and bureaucratic players. Good government is a team sport and the 'government should be like a business' demand is moronic.

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Dale Almond's avatar

This is a great article, thank you! It addresses my two current pet peeves - "the government should be run like a business" and the short-sightedness of "just in time" (no slack) marketing, which seems to have spilled over into "just in time" for pretty much everything. Off topic, but on topic: sociopaths are unable to envision or plan for the future in ways that non-sociopaths do; they largely live in the moment. This mindset can result in terrible outcomes, when what they want in that moment is all they see, without any regard for the future. "I want it and I want it now" says His Majesty the Baby.

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