This is a painful read. $814 for a container for pencils? Really? Even more egregious is highly-paid (and I really mean, highly paid, even more than most SV people) employees who do not show up for work (the kicker: they also got bonuses, apparently)!

But this is chump change compared to some of the excesses of last year. The Paycheck Protection Program was basically a huge stimulus program, with many loans being 'forgiven'. That's right, going concerns that anticipated difficulties in operating their businesses (note that they had not actually run into trouble) took out these loans that were later forgiven. This program was nearly a trillion. That's a Trillion. With a T. I'm sure some of this saved businesses from going under, tiding them over until they could recover, but in a highly inefficient, wasteful way. Of course, it will be cast as 'Stimulus' when fiscally-minded people ask for an accounting, and more taxes, such as this one, which lays hands on unrealized gains, will be proposed to fund such 'Stimulus' benders!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa...

However, the story is 1) old, 2) overblown crap, and 3) I can't find any other angles on this to fill in gaps—I'm wondering in particular whether some of their choices of vendors are due to requirements to spend X% of their non-wage budget with US companies, or other, similar pressure.

Regarding #2, once you work your way past the deliberately-bad use of math required to make this look like "news", it amounts to, "the EPA spent ~$600 per worker per year on office furniture and expenses related to office furniture like storage and moving fees"—which seems... entirely normal? Even low? The story only looks like a story at a glance because they intentionally misrepresent what's going on. All the pieces are there to figure it out, to their credit, but once you work through it it's not newsworthy whatsoever.

This is, as they say, fake news.

[EDIT] the piece also seems to rely on people not generally knowing what it costs to buy furniture that'll last 10+ years under heavy use. Even cheap large conference room tables are not cheap, actually. Now, if they're buying these then throwing them out after a couple years, and it's not just the political appointees at the top doing this, then there's reason to complain about the agency itself.

I Ducked 'epa expensive office chairs' and got this : https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa...

The fact you are spreading it over 10 years does not make the 4k chair suddenly cheap.

Yes, some furniture pieces are very expensive. No, that's not always unjustifiable. Nice furniture that works well and will last continues to cost actual money—compare it to Ikea or Ashley Furniture or whatever, and it'll always look expensive. It's also possible they're under restrictions, explicit or implicit, about where they can spend that money—your budget-tier options are going to be limited or nonexistent if you're restricted to American companies, for instance. Given these figures, what they were not doing was giving any significant percentage of their employees insanely-nice furniture.

I'm also curious how many of the top-end items the piece singles out were for political appointees' offices. That could be corruption, sure, but it's a very different kind of issue from the EPA itself having a spending problem.

Meanwhile, $600/employee/yr seems well within the bounds of normal.

Piece is bullshit.

[EDIT] it's also—and this was the most credible-looking source I could find for this, mind you—some guy "reporting" on figures that an organization he heads came up with. Check the about-the-author bit at the bottom. So. There's that.

[EDIT EDIT] I just checked Herman Miller's price book. That $15,000 conference room table the article calls out (inattentive reader: "Oh my god, my dining room table only cost $300 at Ikea, that's insane!")? Based on what I'm seeing, it must have been enormous. Think "20 feet long" enormous. Tables that big are expensive. Are there cheaper ones? Yes. Are 100% of tables that size—which are in limited demand—going to seem absurdly expensive when presented this way? Also yes.

You sure do need a lot of characters though.

Who's "you"? Not me.

> and when you get called out on it with the Forbes article

I posted the Forbes opinion piece on my own, elsewhere, before spotting that someone else had also posted it. I was not "called out".

> You sure do need a lot of characters though.

So does the (bad, i.e. intentionally misleading) Forbes piece.

It's plainly shit judging just from what's in the piece itself, and it's written by an explicitly, as noted in the piece biased author. Is there a better piece on this? Everything else I could find was on very sketchy sites and repeated the same stuff. Of course since the numbers themselves, as gathered by an organization run by the person writing the piece, don't tell the story the article wants you to think it's telling, I think it's a fair guess that no such "good version" of this piece exists.

Outside of the general "no" from some people w.r.t universal health care I think that's another reason the federal government has been so unproductive in just making it happen. You going to fire all of those people and completely re-tool the economy? It's not that easy.

But also the military while a large portion of the budget isn't that crazy relative to what we're doing. Should we pull out of Germany, Japan, and South Korea? Only sell weapons? Should we pull forces out of the Pacific and let China conquer Taiwan (or unify depending on your perspective)? I think it starts to get very complicated, very quickly.

-edit-

A quick tangent unrelated to your comment is that we've been trained to assume that all government spending is "waste" which is kind of irritating. Items like the infrastructure bill (or at least components of it at a minimum) can be viewed as investments with ROI instead.

The US is facing perma trillion dollar annual budget deficits, even with tax hikes.

You could reduce our military spending to a reasonable 2% of GDP - ~$450 billion - and the difference wouldn't even cover half of our debt interest per year at this point. The US probably needs to be spending $150-$200 billion on additional annual infrastructure spending at this point, for at least a decade. Entitlements or healthcare? Throwing an extra $100 billion at those per year is a drop in the bucket ($100b = ~2.6% of US healthcare spending per year).

For 20 years spending growth has been far outpacing economic growth, it has been plainly unsustainable for a long time. Now we're putting everything on the global reserve USD credit card.

You can't keep growing spending at 7-8% while your economy grows at half that rate or less - unless you're willing to go the currency debasement route, which is what they've chosen thus far.

Cutting military spending to politicians usually means something else, like cutting benefits to warriors who've already served (thus not really military spending).