Because they don't know where the small sources of waste are, and it takes time to fix them. If you need an immediate reduction right this second, the only thing you can do is surgical cuts, which means laying people off. Fixing the small sources of waste has to be an ongoing process that continues forever, and most of the interesting fixes actually cost *more* money in the short term to save money in the long term.

They might, if it happens to be at the end of the year when they do the cuts, and if that spending happens to be enough, but most of the time when this happens, they're looking for 30% cuts, not 1%. And finding thousands of fractional-percent cuts takes too long.

Not really, no. Inflation changes the value of the dollar. That means the government's debt also becomes less expensive every year, assuming all else is equal. And inflation causes increases in income, both for businesses and individuals, which means revenue should be increasing roughly proportionally. If it isn't, then that means the tax code is failing to properly capture percentages of actual gains, and this is something that needs to be fixed structurally.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, treasury revenue is going up, at least on average. From 2015 to 2025, tax revenue increased by 18.3%. Meanwhile, assuming Gemini isn't gaslighting me, the U.S. population increased by only about 6.6% in that time. So not only is revenue increasing after adjusting for inflation, it is also increasing relative to the population size after adjusting for inflation.

I can't tell you why service seems to always be getting worse. Maybe it is because we're spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on the most inefficient healthcare system in the first world, driven by a combination of lack of a public option or single payer system, poor auditing of payments, massively delayed payments that cause small healthcare providers to struggle to survive and force consolidation into giant regional monopolies, and probably a lot of other things that I don't know about because I don't work in that field.

When you end up having hyperinflation of your medical insurance costs, it eats a bigger and bigger piece of every other part of the budget. And the federal government is not immune to that.

There are probably other reasons as well. That's just the first one that comes to mind.

This is moot, because as you can see from the chart, inflation-adjusted revenue increased rather rapidly during that same period.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Maybe a percent or two, but with a budget is big enough, that's still a lot of money that could be used for something else.

The point is not that any of these things individually will result in big gains. The point is that there are a lot of different small inefficiencies that add up to a bigger inefficiency.

For example, for some reason, when the IRS sent out their findings for tax exempt status, a group that I work with never got the determination letter. And the IRS had no straightforward mechanism to resend the letter. Fixing it involved hundreds of phone calls before we reached a person who could help, and then waiting for someone to print it and mail it to us. All of this stuff should be in electronic records, and it should have been trivial for us to directly get a new copy electronically from their computer systems without requiring a person at the IRS to intervene.

Every time a person has to do something because a computer lacks code to do it, that is an example of government waste. It probably isn't worth fixing all of them, because sufficiently rare things could take decades to recover the cost of coding them, but that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't triage them, catalog them, prioritize them so that the scope is fully understood, because when you do that, you may find other people coming in later and saying, "If you do that, it will save me time on related task [x]," and that might then turn out to push it into "implement this ASAP" territory. Without documenting the state of things, those discoveries won't ever get made, and nothing will improve.

And the IRS has multiple incompatible login systems that use different credentials, multiple sites that expose different parts of the same access to information about your business/charity, etc. all of which have to be maintained, resulting in massive levels of redundancy, not to mention causing massive confusion for anyone who ever has to access them, wondering why it says they don't have an account even though they had to have one to fill out previous IRS paperwork. Replacing them with different views into the same data (with access right limits, presumably) in the same online system would likely save significant money, both in terms of software maintenance costs and server operation costs.

And how much auditor time could be saved if they trained AI models on previous audits and used that as a starting point for flagging suspicious returns and/or filtering suspicious returns flagged by existing automation? I don't have any idea, but I would not be surprised if that approach eventually produced meaningful long-term savings.

And every time they send out tax forms, what manual processes have to happen to distribute advance copies to companies like TurboTax, and how much time would be saved if we had a centralized, modern electronic version of all of the forms, rather than PDFs, with an open source implementation, complete with code to populate one form from another, etc.? Maybe it would cost more initially, but would save money in some other areas, like making it easier for auditors to recompute the taxes after fixing errors in data entry. I'm not sure, but these are the sorts of efficiency wins that should be looked at.

So in that one division alone, there are glaringly obvious inefficiencies that, if fixed, could result in considerable cost reduction. Similarly, every time you deal with someone at the Social Security Administration or (at the state level) the DMV and they tell you that the computer system is down and they'll try again in a minute, that's an example of government waste. It's a system that isn't working correctly, which as a result, wastes the time of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of government workers on an ongoing basis.

There's no reason to believe any other part of the government is any better. Government IT is known for being disastrously slow at modernization, and it costs taxpayers a lot of money because our government doesn't spend the money to bring those systems up to date in a timely manner.

These are just some examples that are obvious from the outside looking in; there are probably many less obvious examples that would be obvious to someone who works there every day. And that's the point. The people at the top can't see what wastes the time of the people at the bottom, because they don't have visibility into their minute-by-minute activities (and even if they could, they would have a hard time filtering the flood of data into something useful). So you have to drive efficiency from the bottom up, and our government does not do this, so we can never really know whether that inefficiency adds up to half a percent or ten percent.

We can't get a complete picture without going to the people at the bottom of the org chart and asking them what could be done to make them more efficient, what could reduce waste, etc. It's a relatively easy low-hanging-fruit task, so we should do this. :-)

I hope that makes my position clearer.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.

It was easy: Turn the hue knob to the left for purplish skin, to the right for green skin, and then carefully center it for purplish-green skin.

I don't care how much of an idiot you are, you're simply too stupid to respond to further. I don't want things to be as they were in my childhood. Back then, things were a mess. BECAUSE government tried either to micromanage everything or manage nothing at all. The idea of a third way, where governing is about just that, placing control mechanisms in place but not do the management, is obviously far beyond your pea-brain.

Most businesses over a certain size also waste a f**kton of money. The larger the organization, the harder it is to avoid doing so.

I told you exactly how this practice creates waste. At the end of the year, unspent budget goes away, so the people to whom the budget was assigned look for ways to spend it. Most of that spending was not specifically budgeted for, or else the stuff would have been bought earlier in the cycle. And if it were strictly necessary, it would have been explicitly budgeted, rather than being bought because there just happened to be money left over.

What percentage of that spending provides a real benefit? There's no way to know, because they didn't have to provide a formal justification and ask for more funding to cover it, since there was money left over from something else that didn't cost as much as expected.

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

Why do you believe those "AI detectors" are accurate? The past evaluations I've seen came to a different conclusion.

On the part of senior parts of the US government administration.

US Gov Logic: Korea = Asian, China = Asian. Therefore Korea company linked to China.

This is the same type of Republican US Government "logic" used to bomb and invade Iraq in 2003:
Saudi Arabian Terrorists attacked USA. Saudi Arabia = Arab, Iraq = Arab (and unpopular). Therefore, Bomb Iraq!

If you think there is classified intel providing more rationale than this, you are almost certainly deluded.

The fact that you can't see government waste tells me that either you're not looking closely enough to see the problems or you're benefitting from the waste.

One of the core problems with government waste comes from the budgeting process itself, wherein money that is not spent a the end of a budget year must be given back, and your next year's budget will likely be cut based on the fact that you didn't use your entire budget that year. This sounds like a good idea in theory, until you realize that managers see that as a risk to them being able to do what they need to do the next year, which means they will find ways to spend any unused budget at the end of the year (or worse, the quarter), even if it is for things that could easily be deferred until a later year, or for things that they don't strictly require. And this is how budgets bloat.

To be fair, the same thing happens in businesses, academia, etc.; it is not specific to government. But it is very, very common in government. And while those expenses might not look like a lot at an individual team level, they add up to a lot by the time you look at the organization as a whole.

But no, the hilarious thing is that you're telling me I'm wrong without actually rebutting a single point that I've made, which means you're likely arguing based on blind faith in an ideology or political group, rather than based on an actual understanding of how government budgeting works, which makes your opinion largely irrelevant in practice.

Just saying.

I disagree. It actually needs less regulation.

The siloing of knowledge and duties is why it was always somebody else's problem. So you simply take out all the regulations that obligate siloing and replace all of that kerfufle with a single rule: "If it's on your plate and nobody else has published that they've done the work so far, it's your responsibility, silos be damned, and failure leaves you liable".

That's it.

That's all we need. A removal of siloed thinking and a duty to complete all of the scheduled work regardless of whose toes it tramples.

That would have solved the problem. But, because departments never like to give up powers they obtain, a side-effect would be that departments would be proactive. They wouldn't walk down piers, looking for strange things. Rather, if they heard of strange things that are their department, if they don't want to be shamed, then they need to ask the company for more information. Because then it's on their plate and not that of a rival department.

The other benefit of using this approach is that it isn't about the special cases, it's about the general problem that underlies all of the special cases of this sort: nobody takes responsibility until it's already a disaster.

If a department is liable for pretending the problems aren't there, then the department wil CYA. If the only way to do so is to do all the outstanding work, regardless of title, then that work will get done. If the only way to get it done right IS to give it to the right department, and they're on the hook until that has happened, you're damned right it'll happen.

I've worked in the public sector, I've seen the paranoia and closed-mindedness first-hand. That's not going to go away. So you solve the issue by exploiting those traits, since you can't eliminate them.

Either that or it's a persistent urban legend.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

And before you complain about LPCAMM2 being much slower than the high-bandwidth RAM on the CPU package: It's perfectly fine to design a system with a non-uniform memory access paradigm, treating the memory behind the LPCAMM2 interface as a RAM disk. That way you have 8 GB of high-bandwidth DRAM swapping to 16+ GB of somewhat lower-bandwidth DRAM, and the soldered-in SSD lasts longer because it doesn't have to (ab)use its intake buffer to hold the swap file.