> More than $163 billion in pandemic-era unemployment benefits was likely issued in error, with a big chunk due to fraud, according to a U.S. Department of Labor report.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/27/fraud-had-significant-role-i...
The amount of inenffiencies and fraud is quite astonishing.
Public institutions are indeed bound by some rules that force some inefficiencies. But after decades working both in the private and the public sectors I can say with confidence that the public sector is substantially less efficient, for a myriad of reasons, some legitimate and some not.
Or they just push the inefficiencies to wherever they screw the least profitable customers, which none of their competitors especially want either.
Usually they try regulatory capture or anti-competitive behavior first.
As someone that has worked for the Military and Fortune 500s, both are bad, but the government is in a different league when it comes to wasting money.
Unfortunately there are numerous private businesses that have monopolies or abuse their market dominance to knee-cap their competitors. The result is, in my opinion, worse than the government because they do have a profit motive and will agrressively drive up prices or lower wages/quality.
It’s an indirect loss of the public and the publics money.
Not only are there no consequences to waste in government as others have pointed out, the entire incentive structure around government spending actively incentivizes waste. This waste serves an organizational function in practice, but there are many ways to achieve those functions without lighting giant piles of money on fire. In corporations, waste tends to be the product of neglect; there are significant incentives to reduce waste once it rises beyond a certain level. Corporations may be less sensitive to the threshold conditions that cause them to reduce waste than may be optimal but they are always there.
I haven't read the actual report, but this article is really poor at giving me the right set of information.
Did the program deliver on its stated goals? Was the outcome an overall net positive? How positive was the outcome? How did the errors or fraud contribute against those goals? How costly are the counter measures? Are they even worth putting in place? How effective do we predict they'd be? How confident are we that they'd even work? How much delays would have resulted from putting them in place? Etc.
I like to start at least with the question: Was it a net positive?
At the very least if it was, then it was a better decision then doing nothing. Now you can dig into the details and retrospect to learn how it could be done next time in an even more effective manner.
Among the 200 other countries, I'd bet there are dozens who handle this better.