Government departments are by their nature very inefficient. They attract people who cannot survive in the wider corporate workplace, they reward people who do the ‘right thing’ by the department rather than by the taxpayers who fund them, and they have no incentive to provide value, and many incentives to ‘need’ more money next year.

So all in all it’s hardly surprising, and certainly not news, that government departments are big wasters of money, and the bigger the department, the bigger the waste.

And the US Military with all it’s many departments, is most likely the biggest and most wasteful entity that the world has ever known in all of human history.

But whilst it’s well known that big government departments are big wastes, and it’s well known why that’s the case, what’s less well known is how hard this problem is to fix. Anyone who enters the fray planning to ‘reform’ a department, to save money, to cut waste, to do the right thing by the taxpayers they’re supposed to be serving, must navigate a maze of ulterior motives, deliberate delays, inaccurate information, and small-minded bureaucrats with petty kingdoms to protect.

The Washington Post has published a report that blows the lid of just how hard it is to fix a Pentagon-sized spending problem:

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

And they’ve usefully published a 77 slide presentation from the report, so you can see what the Pentagon is so desperate to hide. Click here to read it and weep.

Sure, this is an American problem, we don’t have to fund the Goliath that is the Military Industrial Complex. But this is just a writ-large version of what we’re funding every day of our lives. These sames games are played out every year inside Australian Bureaucracies and waste on a colossal scale goes on in perpetuity, partly for a lack of care from our Public Servants, partly because efficiency has zero priority, partly because they have perverse incentives to need more money even if they don’t.

But whatever the reasons for the ongoing waste, read that article, then read the 77 slide report… then contemplate what we’re up against if we’re ever going to bring government spending in any department under control.

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