Eventually to solve this resulted in a system where a $40 pizza lunch went to a committee of completely disconnected morons who debated it and would then forward it to a VP to make the final call. Probably a couple thousands in time costs with the paperwork and people time involved … for $40 of pizza. Oh and they had lunch while they debated.
I got an email from the committee once, I told them to forget it and I would buy my team pizza with my own money…. they actually tried to get me in trouble for that.
These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.
Thankfully we were bought and the new CEO did away with it.
Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.
They don't care, destruction of the federal government is the point. Congress needs to do their job.
One day, deep in a build, I was so frustrated I got our CEO and COO and made them walk around the building with me as I fumed "Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" screen" - and our COO looks at me and said "are we really that bad?" and I said "THIS MEETING ABOUT MEETINGS COST US $5,000!!!!!!!!!!!" - sadly, we didn't get any screens, but a company wide email went out and meetings decreased.
Levels.fyi built this btw: https://www.levels.fyi/cost/
We are truly fucked, you know?
And we can't even say that this was a surprise. Federalist Papers No 22:
"Evils of this description ought not to be regarded as imaginary. One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption. An hereditary monarch, though often disposed to sacrifice his subjects to his ambition, has so great a personal interest in the government and in the external glory of the nation, that it is not easy for a foreign power to give him an equivalent for what he would sacrifice by treachery to the state. The world has accordingly been witness to few examples of this species of royal prostitution, though there have been abundant specimens of every other kind.
In republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community, by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, to stations of great pre-eminence and power, may find compensations for betraying their trust, which, to any but minds animated and guided by superior virtue, may appear to exceed the proportion of interest they have in the common stock, and to overbalance the obligations of duty. Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments."
That sound exactly out of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
It didn't go down so well when I stated "I don't know how much each of you get paid, but I know the rough hourly rate my firm charges to have me here, and I can pretty confidently state we've just spent more money debating that hour's charge than the hour's charge is worth" -- it did move the meeting on to more important topics though.
"Penny wise but pound foolish" springs to mind.
I knew a place which did the same for stationary. "Employees are using too many notebooks".
Eventually they would have a staff to stock, approve and disburse. Which Im sure costs darn more than anything the notebooks did.
Either way, its still unclear why you would ration notebooks of the things.
Eventually I guess people just want an illusion of control.
These are people who want to prove, regardless of anything, that government is less efficient than private enterprises... particularly their private enterprises, who would be happy to help you with your problem, dear citizen, for a nominal fee.
Since they don't really do that, they can then define the term to mean whatever they want and then declare it as "successful".
You could only make the argument that what they're doing is "more efficient" if we're getting the same output while spending less money, but since they're cutting entire programs then I don't think it's fair to assume at all that we are getting the same output. It is absolutely not implied that spending less money and reducing the federal workforce is going to be "more efficient" by literally any definition of the term that I can think of.
And it's really odd the DOGE hasn't found any "inefficiency" in the contracts that Tesla and SpaceX has with the federal government. I would personally think that spending $400 million on a bunch of famously unreliable cars pretending that they're tanks is a waste of money, but I'm not the richest person alive, so what do I know.
ETA:
Looks like I was wrong about the Cybertruck stuff: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2025...
I stand by the rest of what I said.
This is literally going to cost the government more money.
This is activity so they can pretend they're doing effective things. That they're not effective, or even getting them farther from their stated goals, doesn't matter to them. Doing effective things isn't an option when you've ruled all those options out up front. Headlines demonstrating to some segment of society that they're doing stuff is what they're after, not efficacy (they can just lie about the efficacy, and have been)
Checking up on wacky stuff like this to make sure claimed "savings measures" aren't actually costing more money is something the independent IGs Trump illegally fired at the beginning of this term might do, and have done. Firing them, especially given why we even have them in the first place (Nixon—whose fall is also the trigger for all this we're dealing with now, a faction of Republicans decided they were going to work toward a place where their guy couldn't get taken down so easily, even for grossly illegal activity, and here we are, they did it) should have set off every alarm bell there is.
[0] Read CBO and GAO reports some time if you have an interest in what good ideas for this might look like. Spoiler alert: it's gonna become clear after a lot of boring reading that no serious plan won't have something akin to "restore taxes to 1990s levels" right at the top, #1.
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist, an unelected person, who many Republicans in congress signed a pledge to.
We're at the "small enough" phase, and soon enough we'll be at the "drowning" phase. This is their dream come true, unfortunately it's going to be a nightmare for everyone but the most wealthy.
Either way, they're saving $50, either by stealing it from the employees who'd rather pay themselves to be able to do their job, or by causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the productivity because someone spends 2 hours hunting for an unused pen instead of just grabbing one from the supply box in the corner.
From that perspective, which I do not agree with, the cost of coffee breaks was also $0, while the cost of providing it was not, so no coffee. On one program I was on we at least managed to get facilities to install a commercial Bunn machine for us, but we were still responsible for buying all the supplies.
-2000 lines
> -2000 lines
Not sure what this is a reference to, but one of the fun things I tripped over while there was that code changes were valued on dollars per LOC. Changesets with net negative LOC were... problematic. I think I once had a change that was near -2000 LOC net.
Or "government sent their workers to this hotel on tax payers' dime!!" with a picture of some suite, and turns out they just attended a conference about their area and they only saw the conference rooms.
I don't get why spending money on government workers is so frowned upon. They deserve conferences, a nice office and some social stuff just as much as anyone. My Christmas parties as a government consultant cost probably 5x as much, never heard anything, and also paid with tax payer money, just through a layer of privatization...
The goal isn't to reduce spending. It's to create bad press to get rid of parts of the government that get in the way of the cronies in charge.
This is a Capraesque idea of Washington D.C..
Suppose a 500$ monthly expense for taxi, where the employees need to use public transport in its absence. Or a software tool that saves 1 hour per week, and costs 20$/ month.
In both cases the employees need to spend more time and the costs are reduced.
But the salary cost is fixed (for the most part, whatever cuts where possible were already done), so the workload goes up in this phase. And I'm assuming they are just trying to crack the whip.
It's just a typical business management tactic of reducing costs, and maximizing workload per employee, (and increasing income usually, but in this case I think they'll translate it to reduced income as tax cuts, the increased income is for the private sector)
At least that's my take, pretty straightforward.
Sounds like my company.
It finally got rid of the travel agency contract, so for my meeting last week I ended up spending $600 in salary hours making my own arrangements so the company could save a $50 commission to a travel agent.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
But that's the point. With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work. One day you just got an email with your flight, car and hotel information. The travel agency handled everything.
There was no "working with" an agent. Employees focused on their work, not figuring out travel arrangements.
That you worked with someone tells me we're talking about different things.
I've never worked anywhere where they just sent me flight and hotel information with no input from me. I've always coordinated with the travel agent so I could at least pick a travel time that worked for me.
I suspect that a charge on the card involves at least 15 seconds of writing down what the charge was for.
The point of giving employees the authority to spend from charge card without excessive additional oversight is to keep it at the 2-3 minutes (realistically it's going to be at least that, not "15 seconds") per expense, rather than 2-3 hours of bureaucracy.
With a standard order, the urgent order is entered into Oracle Financials, waiting for approval, and some time during office hours in the next 1-2 days someone in finance will copy the order into the supplier's website, omitting one order line by accident.
With the employee cards, all the transactions are traceable and can be monitored with a minimum of red tape. How exactly would one improve upon that? It's literally the technologically-enabled solution.
You know what’s way more efficient though?
Cards.
The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.