[riizade]

There are a lot of ways to compare these numbers, and I think "absolute dollar amount" is not particularly enlightening among them.

On a per-project percentage basis, the parent's story wasted ~100% of the project's budget. The same number for California's unemployment fraud is less than 2% (the program totaled about $110B).

$300M was wasted in an organization that serves (completely spitballing here) maybe ~500k people among all its customer organizations? The California government serves ~40M California residents.

In any case, government waste is likely orders of magnitude more easily uncovered than even public companies' waste. And when we find out, we can lobby for change and vote for policies that adjust the process to hopefully result in less waste.

But when Coca-Cola overpays 10x for some highly-connected contracting firm to build them some shoddy CRUD software for an internal process we'll probably never heard about it due to a combination of lack of transparency and lack of reporting interest. If we do hear about it, there is no real avenue for lobbying for the change of Coca-Cola policy.

That's not even mentioning that Coca-Cola's entire existence could be (rightfully, in my mind) considered corporate waste because their products actively harm the world, which is a claim much more difficult to apply to the DMV or the California government as a whole.

[JJMcJ]

> overpays 10x

That's more or less the business model for some consulting companies.