[subharmonicon]

> But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.

It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.

I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.

What they found:

- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.

- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.

- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.

[dmix]

It’s still worth looking and finding that stuff out (carefully and transparently). There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past. GWB created a small version of DOGE with almost the same mandate that never really did anything notable because it was small and never ambitious (it also still exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...).

Most large wasteful private organizations are often the ones who get comfortable in their existing market, employees get hardened in their ways, and eventually are threatened by changes in the market and competition and die off. There is no competitive pressure on gov agencies. It’s almost always a one way street after an agency gets formed that it continues as is indefinitely with only occasional changes in leadership. The number of agencies (>400 federally in US) only increases. Congress rarely looks backwards with spending, they only challenge demands for new spending plans to expand agencies. Otherwise budgets only go up with new line items as US tax revenue forever increases each year.

[nullstyle]

> There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past.

Citation needed. The OMB has been around for a while.

[rat87]

Trump has also attacked parts of the goverment doing anaylsis/oversight of the budget as well as hobbling prosecution of corrupt politicans