Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
I worked for a company that at one point was worried about wasteful expenses.
Eventually to solve this resulted in a system where a $40 pizza lunch went to a committee of completely disconnected morons who debated it and would then forward it to a VP to make the final call. Probably a couple thousands in time costs with the paperwork and people time involved … for $40 of pizza. Oh and they had lunch while they debated.
I got an email from the committee once, I told them to forget it and I would buy my team pizza with my own money…. they actually tried to get me in trouble for that.
These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.
Thankfully we were bought and the new CEO did away with it.
That is exactly why there are discretionary spending limits, if the overhead for sending the $40 pizza to a committee isn't priced in, then every cost will blown out.
Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.
They don't care, destruction of the federal government is the point. Congress needs to do their job.
"Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock."
One day, deep in a build, I was so frustrated I got our CEO and COO and made them walk around the building with me as I fumed "Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" screen" - and our COO looks at me and said "are we really that bad?" and I said "THIS MEETING ABOUT MEETINGS COST US $5,000!!!!!!!!!!!" - sadly, we didn't get any screens, but a company wide email went out and meetings decreased.
This would actually be impossible to use in most companies I worked for, as half of the workforce is usually consultants or contractors from various companies and their hourly rates are trade secret.
Yeah, I was telling my wife last night that if we live long enough we might get to read some really interesting books from (to be) former SVR/GRU types about the time they made assets from most of th oval office.
Broadly speaking, it's the job of the executive government to prevent this, of which CIA and NSA are merely tools. However, it turns out that, in America, you can literally buy the executive wholesale as a foreign actor with enough resources and determination.
And we can't even say that this was a surprise. Federalist Papers No 22:
"Evils of this description ought not to be regarded as imaginary. One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption. An hereditary monarch, though often disposed to sacrifice his subjects to his ambition, has so great a personal interest in the government and in the external glory of the nation, that it is not easy for a foreign power to give him an equivalent for what he would sacrifice by treachery to the state. The world has accordingly been witness to few examples of this species of royal prostitution, though there have been abundant specimens of every other kind.
In republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community, by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, to stations of great pre-eminence and power, may find compensations for betraying their trust, which, to any but minds animated and guided by superior virtue, may appear to exceed the proportion of interest they have in the common stock, and to overbalance the obligations of duty. Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments."
Once when I was in consultancy, I was at a 10+ person meeting where they spent 45 minutes debating an hour's worth of charge for a PMs time on the project.
It didn't go down so well when I stated "I don't know how much each of you get paid, but I know the rough hourly rate my firm charges to have me here, and I can pretty confidently state we've just spent more money debating that hour's charge than the hour's charge is worth" -- it did move the meeting on to more important topics though.
These are people who want to prove, regardless of anything, that government is less efficient than private enterprises... particularly their private enterprises, who would be happy to help you with your problem, dear citizen, for a nominal fee.
It blows my mind how many people like "that's so inefficient!" or "that will create so many problems!", giving even a shred of consideration to this fake org that its goal has literally anything to do with what it says publicly. It's a complete farce.
I've said this a dozen times here now, but the word "efficiency" doesn't really mean anything in isolation; "efficiency" only really makes sense if you define what you're optimizing for.
Since they don't really do that, they can then define the term to mean whatever they want and then declare it as "successful".
It's absolutely not clear that that's true, and "financial efficiency" doesn't make sense either in isolation.
You could only make the argument that what they're doing is "more efficient" if we're getting the same output while spending less money, but since they're cutting entire programs then I don't think it's fair to assume at all that we are getting the same output. It is absolutely not implied that spending less money and reducing the federal workforce is going to be "more efficient" by literally any definition of the term that I can think of.
And it's really odd the DOGE hasn't found any "inefficiency" in the contracts that Tesla and SpaceX has with the federal government. I would personally think that spending $400 million on a bunch of famously unreliable cars pretending that they're tanks is a waste of money, but I'm not the richest person alive, so what do I know.
It's not going to cost the government anything, when they destroy the government. That is exactly their intent.
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist, an unelected person, who many Republicans in congress signed a pledge to.
We're at the "small enough" phase, and soon enough we'll be at the "drowning" phase. This is their dream come true, unfortunately it's going to be a nightmare for everyone but the most wealthy.
No. Now workers will not spend the $50 on office supplies, either paying for them out of their own pocket, or doing without.
Either way, they're saving $50, either by stealing it from the employees who'd rather pay themselves to be able to do their job, or by causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the productivity because someone spends 2 hours hunting for an unused pen instead of just grabbing one from the supply box in the corner.
Many government offices had no free coffee already. This was the case in the mid-teens at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which houses the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where the federal CTO and CIO sit, and the National Security Council, just to name a couple.
I've seen news articles like "here the government spent $5000 on a party" like it's some crazy story of wasted money. And then it was like their annual Christmas party, with 100+ people paying less than ~$50 per plate and they had to bring their own beer. Like, hardly affluent spending.
Or "government sent their workers to this hotel on tax payers' dime!!" with a picture of some suite, and turns out they just attended a conference about their area and they only saw the conference rooms.
I don't get why spending money on government workers is so frowned upon. They deserve conferences, a nice office and some social stuff just as much as anyone. My Christmas parties as a government consultant cost probably 5x as much, never heard anything, and also paid with tax payer money, just through a layer of privatization...
Just one person taking a coffee break to go get coffee obviates any savings. The free coffee isn't there for the staff, it is there to save the org money.
The federal government is so worried about the appearance of spending excess taxpayer money that employees set up water clubs and coffee clubs where the employees all chip in for a water cooler and a coffee machine every month.
So, this particular contractor was big into efficiency and cost savings, to the point that we were all required to do a project where we made something more efficient and documented how much money we saved in doing so. The whole thing was mostly bullshit, but one of the interesting things I learned by doing it was that saving engineering time was essentially $0, because from the company's perspective we were all salaried, and as long as the time we were saving was charged to the same contract we would be charging our other work to, it didn't matter.
From that perspective, which I do not agree with, the cost of coffee breaks was also $0, while the cost of providing it was not, so no coffee. On one program I was on we at least managed to get facilities to install a commercial Bunn machine for us, but we were still responsible for buying all the supplies.
Under that simplistic model there is no space for higher quality, higher reliability, etc. Then "efficiency" is one dimensional and you have basically no agency. The cost model should be agreed upon collectively.
You're right, and there were definitely situations where we could have done things better, but didn't, because the impetus wasn't there. It was really frustrating, and I wish I'd been able to get out sooner.
> -2000 lines
Not sure what this is a reference to, but one of the fun things I tripped over while there was that code changes were valued on dollars per LOC. Changesets with net negative LOC were... problematic. I think I once had a change that was near -2000 LOC net.
Worth noting that it is not at all dumb if your objective is to degrade the power and effectiveness of the US government. There are effective people in charge this time who know exactly what they're doing here.
Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
Sounds like my company.
It finally got rid of the travel agency contract, so for my meeting last week I ended up spending $600 in salary hours making my own arrangements so the company could save a $50 commission to a travel agent.
I've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency, but my work travel has always been pretty simple.
I've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency
But that's the point. With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work. One day you just got an email with your flight, car and hotel information. The travel agency handled everything.
There was no "working with" an agent. Employees focused on their work, not figuring out travel arrangements.
That you worked with someone tells me we're talking about different things.
> With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work.
I've never worked anywhere where they just sent me flight and hotel information with no input from me. I've always coordinated with the travel agent so I could at least pick a travel time that worked for me.
Conversely, I've never worked anywhere where the employees had input on this sort of thing. The company's paying for it, travel is on company time, so barring conflicts like doctors' appointments, the company tells the employees when and where to go.
I've had the same experience, especially with making changes - places I've worked where we could arrange the travel, changes would be easy since we'd book flexible, make changes through the airline's web site and not pay fees, but with the travel agent we'd often have to call, so we couldn't easily make changes out of business hours (when we often needed to) and then we'd have to pay the agent a fee for the service of doing something we could have just done on the airline's web site ourselves.
This argument exists even if there is no bureocratic process for the purchase, assuming that the purchase is not done.
Suppose a 500$ monthly expense for taxi, where the employees need to use public transport in its absence. Or a software tool that saves 1 hour per week, and costs 20$/ month.
In both cases the employees need to spend more time and the costs are reduced.
But the salary cost is fixed (for the most part, whatever cuts where possible were already done), so the workload goes up in this phase. And I'm assuming they are just trying to crack the whip.
It's just a typical business management tactic of reducing costs, and maximizing workload per employee, (and increasing income usually, but in this case I think they'll translate it to reduced income as tax cuts, the increased income is for the private sector)
Placing back the red tape and requiring everyone to follow the rules is step one in a malicious takeover. It makes everything slow and inefficient, making every department fail their objectives and deadlines, providing an invented basis for reducing/upending/replacing/getting rid of whatever policy/program/department you want to get rid of.
The goal isn't to reduce spending. It's to create bad press to get rid of parts of the government that get in the way of the cronies in charge.
Exactly. This is all about power grab without going through a proper due process. The government is shitty and inefficient but DOGE is not the way to fix it.
Requiring people to "follow the rules" is malicious? Why did we even make the rules in the first place? What is this mythical idea that a government without red tape will automatically be operating in your interest?
We had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers.
The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.
If anything, such an extensive system should have better controls than a small business. Given that, there are trillions of dollars flowing around of other people's money.
Have you worked for the federal government? Employees literally have to fill out forms and follow a strict process to buy anything when they don't have these charge cards.
If my experience in non-federal government is any guide, they have similar requirements when they use the card, the difference is that it is after the fact and if the application gets rejected, the payment is the employee’s responsibility. The amount of red tape is the same either way, but with the caed the red tape happens after the purchase.
With the card, the urgent next-day-delivery order is already on its way while the red tape waits for approval. And the worker enters the order into the supplier's website directly.
With a standard order, the urgent order is entered into Oracle Financials, waiting for approval, and some time during office hours in the next 1-2 days someone in finance will copy the order into the supplier's website, omitting one order line by accident.
The federal government actually operates in the opposite way. They cosign a credit card under your name, you have to pay it off at the end of every month, and they reimburse you after the fact.
That's pretty much the mechanism of acheiving the effect that I was describing on State governments I’ve seen, too. I was just trying to generalize on the level of responsibility, rather than detailed payment flow.
So, remove the checks and balances that were already put in place over decades to make sure employees are spending responsibly. Um, sure.
With the employee cards, all the transactions are traceable and can be monitored with a minimum of red tape. How exactly would one improve upon that? It's literally the technologically-enabled solution.
If you want to save money and remove bureaucracy, you first create a system, then migrate to it and sort out issues, then remote the old system. Now it's going to take months to get something new in place, while also juggling manual approvals and getting things through payment systems individually.
I suspect that a charge on the card involves at least 15 seconds of writing down what the charge was for.
The point of giving employees the authority to spend from charge card without excessive additional oversight is to keep it at the 2-3 minutes (realistically it's going to be at least that, not "15 seconds") per expense, rather than 2-3 hours of bureaucracy.
Part of the effeminacy is they get what they need now not some time in the future. The old school requisition systems where everything had to be approved in advance and the purchase handled by a purchasing agent was slow and inefficient for small orders. Which is why organizations give their employees a card with a spending limit.
Apparently some of the transactions were in strip clubs. I'd be willing to bet that the procurement formalities of a small business of quite a bit in common with the formalities of a large business...
