I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.
Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.
A rounding error!
It's not principled to solve problems in stupid ways, it's actually just stupid.
Here's where someone who has thought about the problem for more than 5 seconds would likely start: gigantic healthcare organizations defrauding Medicare, in particular vertically integrated pay-viders.
Literally tens of billions of dollars per year in known, easily detectable fraud.
Where did you see me talking about DOGE? You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV.
And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS.
Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.
This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.
I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.
"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.
"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.
I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption.
If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way.
>There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption.
And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.
Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.
In the US, the goal of the healthcare system is to produce profit. So the simpler explanation is that the healthcare system consumes more money and produces less healthcare because it spends more to produce profit.
And that's not corruption like I was saying?
"Corruption" in this context typically refers to an element of dishonesty or theft and so on.
If you mean "corrupt" in the ethical sense, then sure, kind of?
How is "voters choose to have a system that optimizes for profit" an example of "corruption?"
Please explain your logic step by step.
I've never heard Americans say "I want a system that costs me a lot, makes other people rich and give me northing in return".
Explain how that isn't corruption.
You're not from America, are you?
US healthcare and childcare are private, not government. Likewise I suspect much of the education cost is private colleges/schools, not government.
You seem to be arguing that the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector.
That is easily the case if you aren’t careful. Private health insurance has a big incentive to drive up cost of the medical sector so they can take a few percent as profit. Defense contractors have almost no incentive to reduce costs, quite the opposite.
I guess it depends on what you call efficiency. If you define efficiency as extracting maximum profit then modern corporations are very efficient. If you define it as providing products and services at low cost, then they are inefficient.
What's Medicare and Medicaid and why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?
On a per capital basis, even if you don't include private healthcare spending, the US stil spends more per capita on healthcare than the other developed countries.
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-government-healthcare-...
Because these are interacting with and purchasing services from a market-driven healthcare system which is optimized for profit, not health outcomes.
Medicare and Medicaid are expensive because we incorrectly apply market economics to healthcare.
None of that requires corruption. It's a mixture of over-commitment to market-based solutions and a bare minimum of empathy enshrined into law.
No idea if that's true. But my impression was that France's military has been rather more...active post WW2 than Germany's. So maybe it's just about practice and readiness to go to war.
A nuclear aircraft carrier, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, solid overseas expeditionary capability (France could sustain a few thousand troops in Africa, Germany almost certainly could not match that), and a few amphibious assault ships, to name several big ones that immediately come to mind.
Germany didn't need expeditionary capability after the war. It probably doesn't need to project force beyond its continent even today. France regularly had military entanglements in its former colonies, and probably still does. Capability is a function of necessity.
The people you are arguing with think government is inefficient. They will be more than satisfied with an honest accounting that results in a conclusion that the government spends 5/10/20% more per result than private sector. Just having an actual number one can be confident in would be a huge step forward. But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.
Setting aside whatever you mean by "you people", since we are all people, hopefully all on Team 'Make Things Better', and don't need to be divisive:
That seems to be what was requested here OF those making the claim that the accounting currently shows an unworkable level* of waste, requested BY those unconvinced of the claim.
* - Or perhaps I misread the magnitude being claimed. Could you clarify with a number, please?
I don't like to compare governments and companies, personally. They're very different kinds of structures with (hopefully) quite different goals. They probably shouldn't look much like each other.
If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you?
If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?
Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
It's not that there's any more fraud or waste in government than in private business, it's that it's less tolerated. I think the main reason for this misperception is that in the private sector, people pay a la carte for particular goods and services, while in the public sector, people pay for shared infrastructure even if they rarely use it themselves. So they are left with the feeling that they aren't getting their money's worth. But of course everyone benefits economically and socially from a stable and prosperous society, even if they can't put their finger on discrete services they use. The reality is that it simply costs a lot of money to maintain a large, modern society. Indeed, it actually costs more than we are paying here in the US, as evidenced by a growing debt that has been a bipartisan creation.
Believing in the mantra of waste, fraud and abuse is comforting, because it implies we could be getting all the same benefits for less money. But there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
If my favorite restaurant decides to hire management by nepotism and product degrades I can just not go there.
You can't just not deal with the government so of course the standards ought to be higher.
The problem isn't the obvious things, in the government or your restaurant example. It's the less-obvious things---your favorite restaurant might cheat on its inspections, for instance. The rate of food poisoning there may go up, but you'll still be unlikely to be the one that gets sick. And the prices will go down slightly, as they are able to cut corners. This kind of "waste, fraud, and abuse" tends to go to an equilibrium, where the cost of finding and eliminating the fraud is similar to the cost of the fraud itself. And this equilibrium happens in both government and the private sector.
The idea that a modern technological nation of hundreds of millions of people could dramatically cut its spending and maintain its standard of living is a utopian fantasy.
Not if all the candidates choose to spend money in the same unwise ways.
Then I can read them, find similar sources, judge how much I trust them, and get a better idea of how much corruption and waste you are claiming exists.
While I am sure corruption and waste occurs, if it’s such a serious problem, there ought to be some evidence of it, direct or indirect.
What’s the alternative, I just accept your claim as fact? Or I “google” it until.. what? I find sources that support your claims?
Why should I believe you?
Yes?! Is that too much to ask for that you do research before commenting?
>Why should I believe you?
I didn't tell you to believe me, I told you to go do your own research if you don't believe me.
If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity.
You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid.
As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended.
If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.
No offence, but comparing asking for proof of corruption with proof of sky being blue of petrochemicals is a biased bad faith argument.
Asking for sources on corruption is more like asking for proof that the earth is round, which is definitely not a legitimate request, but more trolling masquerading like an innocent request and dodge scrutiny ("It's just a question bro").
Nothing wrong with asking that question per-se, but that's something you can also google yourself due to countless occurrences from legitimate sources, hence why it's in bad faith to ask such a thing, and should be more strictly moderated as many here abuse this "sauce or gtfo" attitude in bad faith.
Existence of corruption isn't what you asserted.
>> how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption
That's the assertion you made -- waste and corruption at scale.
It's very much a reasonable question to ask for sources of how much there actually is.
Otherwise, people just post things on the internet insinuating that there's a huge (unspecified) amount.
Is it 1% of the budget? 5%? 25%? (Hint: it should be trivial for you, the claimant, to dig up a source. And it's close to one of those)
Why? Well part of it is because getting and keeping that certification is itself expensive. There are expensive audits, that take up a lot of time, and generally require paying specialized consultants to get through. All of your cryptography needs to be done using expensive FIPS certified "modules". There are requirements about the hardware you run on. All of your vendors also need to be FedRAMP approved. The requirements often add a lot of friction to normal operations and slow things down. In many cases it is easier, and cheaper to run/build an entirely separate product for FedRAMP possibly in a separate data center, which adds a lot of cost. And to be honest, a lot of the requirements are mostly security theater.
But another reason is just that the government is willing to pay that high premium for a stamp of approval.
To be fair, it is warranted for the government to have some assurance of the security and quality of software they use, especially if the software is used for more sensitive purposes. But the certification process is overkill for many places software is used, and I think that if some effort was put onto steamlining the process, the cost could be brought down.
Let's separate waste and corruption - they are fairly different things.
Let's then split waste into:
1. Programs <someone> (don't care who) thinks are not worth doing or shouldn't be done by government, or whatever - IE the overhead is not what people are arguing about, and even if the program had zero overhead, and government was being as efficient as possible, <someone> still thinks it shouldn't exist.
2. Programs with high overhead or otherwise seem inefficient.
There are other things you can consider waste, but this feels like the majority of what people argue about.
#1 is often subject to widely varied views on what government should be doing or you name it. For this discussion, you can be <someone> and decide which fall into #1 and which fall into #2 :) We'll just assume literally everything in #1 is waste and should be killed.
If you kill everything that people initially think falls into #1, the US would probably spend no money. The majority of the budget is covered by things people think they disagree about, and want gone or not gone or whatever.
However, for most people , if you remove the ignorance of what things are and what they are doing, and then you killed everything that actually falls into #1, it would not make a huge dent in the US budget. This is because the majority of people tend to support, at least in the sense of saying it doesn't being in #1, the things that are actually the majority of the US budget.
and then we'll ignore #1, because reducing the overhead wouldn't matter, and if you take the same view as most people, it will not be a big pile when you get down to brass tacks.
Let's talk about #2.
#2 is often subject to arguments about the overhead. This is much easier to discuss.
Most arguments about the overhead are about how high it is. This is, IMHO, not a useful measure at all.
Asking whether something has high overhead doesn't tell you what to do if the answer is "yes".
Better questions to ask (IMHO) are "Do i want the outcome this program achieves" (if not, it falls into #1), and then "Can i get the outcome on the same timeframe, with less overhead, and enough less overhead that it's worth it".
The answer to the latter is often no.
Sometimes it's yes in a theoretical sense (should it be possible to achieve the outcome for less money), but still no in a practical sense (can you actually pay someone to achieve the outcome for less money), even if you removed bureaucratic constraints (IE just stuck with the real requirements to achieve the outcome).
Often times it's no practically because of scale- i can have 4 hard drives delivered by amazon tomorrow at 8am. I can't get them to deliver 4 million by tomorrow. On top of that, even if they could, while the odds are they are not the only people who could deliver 4, they may be the only people who can deliver 4 million. In that case, they have no reason to not charge me a near infinite amount of money since nobody else can do what i want. So it is very high overhead, but you can't actually reduce the overhead without changing the requirements. So if you want the outcome, as is, you have to accept the overhead.
Plenty of times it's no in both the theoretical sense, and the practical sense, because notions of overhead amounts are wrong, and things are not as high overhead as people seem to believe. As an example, people continue to think USAID has high overhead, but it actually does not by any objective measure. In USAID's case, it just has funny accounting called NICRA. Anyone who digs enough to actually calculate the real overhead, consistently discover (and agree) it's competitive with private organizations that do the same. See, e.g., https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-w... for a reasonably new example of someone discovering this.
Of course, there is certainly plenty of waste in government, but it's a lot less than people think.
Are you sure that's a defensible position?
Nearby a vacation spot there is a sand dune next to the road, and a carpenter spent an afternoon building a ramp over it so that his son could drive his mobility scooter onto the beach. The city tore it down, then took over 2 years to build it back, worse quality, at a final cost of over $40,000.
What do you make of this story, and how did DOGE even attempt a fix?
Doge wanted to take shortcuts and destroyed everything without having alternatives in place. They had hoped for short-term wins, and neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste.
The Government Accountability Office is a congressional body that's been doing exactly what you describe for years. It's old - so it goes against the narrative that government waste is unmonitored, it's also unglamorous, boring, and not meme-able, and most importantly non-partisan, so it won't reliably dominate the news cycle with outrageous partisan talking points.
Chump together all the 100s of millions in waste year over year; the change to your chumping is not good change, its inflation and general impoverishment. Every penny of that 200 is a note in the bank of inflation and degradation.
We fund the military industrial complex to such a ludicrous degree that $200m can just disappear on bullshit contracts to cronies that go nowhere, and politicians don't bat an eye.
Nobody with power cares about the debt. They just keep borrowing money and handing it to the defense industry. This is one of only a handful of issues on which there is bipartisan agreement.
But I doubt the politicians "don't bat an eye" at 200M, for they know that money is going straight out of the economy and into private coffers.
The government budgeters are not naive to the economics of military spending. The cope about pennies on the tax dollar is naive about both economics and what the government is really doing.
This idea that government is incapable, dumb, and prone to mismanagement is a harmful rationalization, and simply not true. If anything, this thinking excuses the government to act that way, and then there is no way of knowing if they are purposefully mismanaging or doing so because incapable.
No one here is excusing anything, but rather just stating how things are. And if you think that those with the power actually give any consideration to us, let alone think "hey, they dont care, carry on!", then you've truly lost the plot
We could be spending it on things with a much higher return.
I don't believe that you guys all believe the military industrial complex should start sitting on cash and collecting interest, even though that's what you're saying. The obvious solution is "they don't need that much money", but that's unrelated to how they spend the money they do have.
Are you really unable to distinguish the difference in value between, say, funding infrastructure maintenance - or 1000 other things - and just filling some crony's pockets?
Your argument feels something like the heap paradox [0], "the budget is big, so this thing doesn't matter." The budget is made of things this size though, and all it takes to fix it is to start taking grains of sand out of the pile instead of stacking the pile higher.
does 30 cent matters to you??? because its not 3 dollar as a comparison but 30 cent is
Not everyone pays the same amount in taxes.
> does 30 cents (or the actual value, $3) matter?
Not hugely, but the other point is still important. If somebody takes $3 out of my back pocket a few times each hour it adds up, and when the net effect is nearly guaranteed to be a transfer of funds to OpenAI with no benefit to the taxpayer (likely a negative benefit given our usual stance on letting monopolies run amuck) I'm especially salty about it.
Very few people would willingly pay for military spending if for example when they buy food they are prompted with the option "do you want to give 30 cents to the military industrial complex?" And that "very few people" would not in sum render 1 Trillion.
Save perhaps the most extreme "I spend 70% of my six figure income on rent because I want to live alone somewhere trendy" of household budgets this is true for literally everything from the smallest business in the smalles of small towns to the federal government.
if you don't mind having 1 trillion military then you are not mind for 200 mill contract
The budget isn't all aircraft carriers and stealth bombers.
Maybe this is a good buy, maybe it's a bad buy. I don't know and I have no way of ever knowing. Just because the budget is big and the money is other peoples does not mean decision makers can be wishy washy about a hundred or two mil here and there. Everyone needs to care all the time. People like you and who share your "it's all pennies in the grand scheme" thought process at scale is the problem and why we're even having this discussion.
this is not on top of the list of "waste" things to worry about there are 20+ another reason and you pick this budget size its a weird hill to die on
You delegate that to people whose job it is to know.
But you keep delegating it to people who want to spend more.
(Made-up but plausible example)
If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help.
People don't feel nearly as stupid as they ought to for being complicit in the 30-40yr that lead us to where are now
The physical disconnect hypothesis isn't really borne out by the lack of concern for collateral damage in pre-firearm warfare, when killing was mostly done face to face, compared to today.
Guess which one of those is more trigger happy.
That would be back end only, not all software has a gui.
Wait, I thought AI is killing all these jobs?!
If you want to argue that the examples are different, that's an extra point you need to bring to the table. You're not allowed to assume everyone just agrees with you.
The comment didn’t advance the conversation. It was a relatively shallow level of engagement; something I’d expect to see in a silly Reddit back and forth. We deserve better here.
And to your point: my comment explained my point: “long term R&D on a telecom protocol followed by government implementation and standards and industry adoption versus…”.
Of course I don’t assume everyone agrees with me. (You don’t really think I do, do you?) But I want people to put a certain level effort to reach a quality bar. My problem perhaps is that people don’t want to put in sufficient effort. Or perhaps as a community we are not setting the bar high enough. This level of thinking is attainable here; we just need to set the bar and fight for it.
I don't think you're prior is correct at all here, and trying to dismiss a bleedingly obvious counterexample (I mean, come on!) as "shallow" just because it refutes your deeply held beliefs is exactly they opposite of "substantive engagement".
To wit: you're just wrong. Take the L.
There is no need to be a jerk about it. I explained my standard and thinking; we don't have to agree, to restate your earlier point. Your comment is choosing a "win versus lose" mentality.
If I was incorrect about a positive (factual) claim, that's fine, I'm happy to learn. However, if we disagree on normative claims (values), that is not about "correctness".
For context, I can't readily think of a time when someone here on HN used the word "pedantic" in a kind way. It seems like the most-socially acceptable form of insult here. It isn't something you say out of respect. Your tone seems angry and combative rather than trying to understand. From my point of view, this is sad and counterproductive. To hoist up a level, this is part of my main point above -- I want there to be a kind of discussion here that is productive: both substantively and in terms of mutual respect.
> the history of Pentagon-funded R&D is absolutely filled with wild success stories and with embarrassing disasters...
I don't disagree. I'm not sure why you think I would. Perhaps you were misunderstanding?
Just to give some context -- which you probably know -- but it will help give us some shared grounding ... DARPA funded TCP/IP by way of the ARPANET, and DARPA gets its funding from the Pentagon. Still, the Pentagon's R&D funding (around $140B) is hugely different in character and scope from DARPA's funding ($4B). Compare (i) a broad Pentagon contract to get access to OpenAI's services with (ii) DARPA's funding for ARPANET. I don't see this as an interesting or relevant comparison: the Pentagon isn't driving fundamental research in (i). There are much better comparison points, such as the Pentagon's contracts with AWS or Azure.
I wonder how that will work with the networking reqs the DoD has. Probably some direct link to a gov VPC I suppose.
This will be used to generate even more powerpoint.
"Hi there. It looks like you're trying to write a document. Would you like me to open Word?"
This upgrade was long overdue.