the waste in the private sector is nothing compared to the public sector. you have no idea.
> Elon Musk just got Tesla to pay him $50 billion. For what, exactly?
for this: https://fortune.com/2021/03/16/elon-musk-net-worth-tesla-sto...
Does anyone have an idea? I hear this so much but I’ve never seen hard numbers on it.
Individually they don't seem so bad, but it's death by a thousand cuts with these things.
And that one costs more than the numbers shown. The process to get security clearances can take 12 months or more, time when people may not be able to work on whatever they were hired for, or they may quit rather than sit twiddling their thumbs for a mediocre salary.
https://www.gao.gov/reports-testimonies - lots of reports here
You hear about musk getting 4/50 billion, you say, oh well, its what the shareholders voted for...
You hear about stuff that happens in government---yeah, that's what the voters voted for too.
Even any fraud which happens: the voters are the one's who determined how much funding the watchdog departments get. But watchdog departments are expensive too, so you've got to trade off.
Everybody hates the government but loves their congressman. Probably because he's saying that he's cutting government waste. But if we keep electing the same congressmen over and over, decade after decade, thing's won't change.
Another example of DOD waste is in hiring if clearances are required and the new hire doesn't already have one. Because of the problems in the current clearance system it can take 12 months to get a clearance, being very generous that's $200k to have someone sitting at a desk twiddling their thumbs. If there are only 1000 new hires across DOD without clearances every year (and there are more) that's just $200 million wasted paying salaries but getting no value from them. Every year. Again, the real number of new hires without clearances is a lot higher than that.
That's one reason I chose the example I did. The project is late, it's forced them to maintain (for hundreds of millions of dollars) the system it will replace, and the clearance process is taking close to a year for many, if not most, new hires. The total cost of this new system being late is billions of dollars, not just the $1.3 billion or whatever they directly measured for it. For an IT system.
And this is common in DOD IT system acquisitions and sustainment. Each one of these would bankrupt a medium-sized business (without VC money if they thought it could be a unicorn) if it didn't have the DOD infinite cash backing.
Other than the absolute largest, highest profit margin companies (with cash to burn) no private business can be this inefficient.
I hate that there is not way for me too tell whether you are even real or not. This business of having computers which can pass the Turing test really has its disadvantages.
Paying somebody $200k? I think it should be obvious that a spy who slipped in because of weak vetting cost the U.S. more than $200k...an hour. E.G. a harpoon-class cruise missile costs almost $2 million---and compromised intelligence could have us firing one of those off at innocent people. E.G. the second gulf war and "weapons of mass destruction" We could have saved a couple of trillion dollars.
What a remarkable misrepresentation of what I wrote.
I don't want us to spend less (necessarily) I want us to waste less and spend effectively. If you aren't just trolling and really don't understand that, then I'm honestly surprised you successfully found and clicked the reply button.
And since your reading comprehension is so bad, the $200k is not their pay, their pay is likely around $60-90k/year. The $200k was total cost to keep someone sitting in a desk producing nothing for a year, and a lowball. Quite frequently what happens, in high COL areas especially, they sit there for a year, get a Secret or TS clearance, and then bounce to a contractor for 2-4x the pay. US tax payers get nothing for it, but got to spend at least $60k on salary, another $30k on benefits, another $30-50k in other overhead, and $50k or more on the security clearance process itself. And in the end the position the person was hired for is vacant, has to be filled again, and the process repeats.
This is not effective, it is not efficient, it's just wasteful.
sigh and I don't like it either. I miss the days, not long ago, when if something was making reasonably grammatical and coherent sentences, that mean it was a person.
One of the broader points is that government waste and private sector waste look different. We would like organizations to provide services at cost (or as close to at cost as possible) to consumers. That’s zero waste. Profits are waste (arguably a necessary evil, but a waste from the consumer’s perspective). Paying people to do nothing is waste.
One of the promises of the private sector is they can keep costs low by innovating on the product, figuring out ways to make it faster and cheaper. But very often that’s hard, or not possible, or not convenient. So they “innovate” on price or market position instead. Tacit collusion, enshittification, monopolization, cartel behavior, acquahires, shrinkflation, etc. are all symptoms of private sector waste. Not innovation.