Saturday Thoughts

 Saturday Thoughts

What a week!

On Wednesday, I posted some thoughts about how I was feeling about the totality of the movements around us. It was a reflection on the larger movement over the past 100 years that led us to this place where some of us are mourning this shift that seems to be happening in the electorate of our country.

Since then, the most prominent feature of our news feeds has been the disastrous meeting between Zalenskyy, Trump, and Vance (with help from a carefully selected press corps). That was without a doubt a shit show.

There are a number of thoughtful reflections out there about the circumstances that led to that event. My post from Wednesday actually sets the ground work for some of my thinking about that meeting, though at the time I was thinking primarily in terms of the economic and tax policy of the 20^th century and less about geopolitical alignment. But the parallel is clear.

Without going too far into the weeds about this shift that is happening in that arena, I think it’s sufficient to say that the vote in the UN on a resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine that was supported by most of the world but rejected by Russia and its allies, and amazingly by the United States, pretty much summarizes my concerns about where we sit internationally. It’s hard to imagine that a resolution rejected by the authoritarian political spaces in our world should be a resolution that the United States should reject as well.

One amusing specific from that conversation is that our new Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who is literally available on video from his days at Fox describing the Russian invasion of Ukraine now doesn’t seem to know if Russia actually invaded Ukraine.

But my thoughts today are focused in a domestic arena. I want to take a moment to talk more fully about government waste and the current crusade to eliminate fraud and waste from the federal government.

I actually don’t disagree that the government would be well served to put more energy into ensuring that expenditures are effective, efficient, and appropriate. We had, until recently, a number of systems in place to pursue that outcome. I passionately disagree with the notion that those structures were complicit in waste or that they were not endeavoring to uncover waste and eliminate it. It’s easy to take broad swipes at these kinds of efforts but those critiques generally neglect to recognize that such efforts are being pursued by people just like you and I who endeavor to be effective. What they don’t have, generally, is adequate resources to eliminate ALL of the waste. They have to make choices.

As an example of this, let’s consider an effort that DOGE is making to eliminate waste in government software subscriptions. As detailed in an article in WIRED, DOGE is finding a wide range of software subscriptions that seem excessive. They are probably, to some extent, correct. At the same time, as the article linked below explores, the issue is complex. In some cases, it is more efficient and effective to contract for a package of subscriptions that encompasses the full potential for the needs of the organization that may or may not come to fruition but would not be effectively managed on a one subscriber at a time process.

To bring this down to a smaller level, here at The Forst I sometimes need to purchase a software subscription to apps that support our website. An example that comes to mind immediately is a calendar package that helps to display an interactive calendar of events on specific pages of our website. Over the past year I have transitioned from one service to another. Now, I’m starting to wonder if the calendar feature built into our root software package is now sufficient so that a third party package is not needed at all. Should an outside auditor look at the related expenditures in this area, they could easily claim waste, or even “fraud”. Why did I pay for that service that I’m not actually using? Well, I’m busy. I’m doing the best I can. I’ve cancelled some of this recently, but it took some time to consider how changes to our website design has impacted the need for those services.

Amplify that a thousand fold to the services provided by a federal program that interacts with literally hundreds of thousands of users. Yes, it could be more efficient. That said, at what cost?

I don’t know how much the DOGE efforts are costing. It’s a moving target. But estimates are significant, and some figures go as high as $40 million for just the first month. So, they have those resources. They use those resources, and they do, in fact, find some waste.

And yet, look at this idea of software subscriptions. Supposing DOGE finds $10M in unnecessary subscriptions in the Department of Labor. It’s possible, though the actual number is probably lower when you start to consider lost efficiencies in constantly renegotiating subscription needs. I’m sure whatever oversight program existed in the Department of Labor would have loved to dig into these costs and tighten them up. But what would that take? What would that cost? Did they have the staff to do that? What other priorities did the oversight staff have? DOGE has no budgetary restrictions and is just slashing things that it randomly chooses to focus on.

Let’s be real. Most of what is being cut has nothing to do with waste. Programs and staff are being cut because they reflect priorities that the current administration finds objectionable. Important services are being lost. You may not think they are important, but I can assure you that the people around you – your neighbors – who depend on those services probably will miss them.

My point, if it’s not clear, is that government efficiency is not advanced by standing on the house floor and pontificating on cherry picked examples that on their face seem egregious. It is advanced by properly funding systemic programs to review government spending and eliminate waste. Our current context does not do that. It is eviscerating programs without regard to their efficacy and claiming those cuts as savings.

There is a way to increase the efficiency of a system. It takes resources. If congress and the executive branch wants to focus on efficiency, almost no one would object. That is not what is happening here.

 

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-software-license-cancel-federal-budget/