There probably are inefficiencies in any government that do add up to some savings, but it would be in the process and methods and not the stupid shit DOGE honed in on. They skipped the whole reason people are typically made redundant and just downsized teams that actually did need that many people. They went for the smash and grab to try and show big savings quickly without actually doing any real work.
vrek@programming.dev 2 days ago
I agree but wouldn’t limit it to government… Any organization. To get any real savings you need domain knowledge though. You need to know that the organization spends a lot of money on bits that break every day or two but if you reduced the feed rate and spin rate a bit should last a month easy.
You need to know that you have engineers spending up to 4 hours a week each to read a spread sheet and then write it on erasable boards for “management review” when it could be replaced by a TV where they project the spreadsheets or better yet a teams meeting where they share their screen.
You need to know that if you pay for laptops or a tablet and a systen for your mobile team members to enter information rather than a paper notebook and expect them to bring their own pen, you reduce errors, reduce their time required per task, have more data to analyze for even further savings in the future.
You need to know what actually takes times and money and how to correct that. You can’t have that domain knowledge fore every government agency. Yes some things are universal but most of the big ones are specific.
Hell in a lot of cases, look at shipping cost. Can we do some predictive analysis and tracking so we don’t need so much overnight delivery? For a lot of stuff, set a minimal amount in stock(say average amount you use in 2 weeks) and change the shipping from sameday/overnight to standard ground(typically 3-7 days).