Ways to massively cut Federal Spending

[Robert Jordshaugen]

Excluding entitlements, the ways to dramatically cut federal spending in the US can be categorized three ways: Removing non core departments - ones that have no purpose or violate the Tenth Amendment; cutting federal pay to US privets sector averages; and refocus federal department employees onto the core task, changing the way managers are rewarded, and removing obstacles to outsourcing or partnerships. I would like to focus on the third as a way to cut non entitlement and defense spending by 20%.

For the most part, federal bureaucrat managers are measured in power by the size of the budget that they administer. As with most people who manage large groups in private or public sectors, these people tend to be ambitious. If you are rewarded by size of the budget, how will you behave? There're is no incentive to manage or reduce costs, and no reason to do so. Spending as much money as possible becomes the proper way to manage, and is the natural way to progress your career. This is rational behavior in an irrational environment.The second area is the difficulty of partnering and outsourcing. Has anyone actually tried to become a federal vendor? If one actually reads an RFP, imagine the costs of the consultants who prepared the document. The complex rules throughout the entire engagement mean that only the companies who can understand and abide by the rules, generally those with extensive legal and compliance groups, can even hope to participate in a bid, much less handle the complex and sometimes contradictory requirements of working with Uncle Sam. Do we imagine that these costs are not built in? For large bids, how much lobbying takes place? Most companies that could help lower the costs of government simply cannot participate, and those that can, drive up the prices to cover those extra costs.The most important are and the one dearest to my heart is the lack of task focused employment and the tight delivery of the "product" of that department with the minimum of resources. In the government, if an analyst is hired, he needs data to analyze. To get data, there needs to be software. To buy software in the government, you need consultants to write and respond to the RFP. To hire consultants, you need to perform an internal needs assessment. To perform the internal needs assessment, you need more analysts, who of course need more software. Take this circle forward for 40 years, and you have a supreme mess of people who do nothing but send reports to each other, generally informing other people why the reports do not include some data. In most federal agencies, more that half of all employees deliver nothing coinciding with the mission of the actual federal department. Try surviving like that you your business...healthcare has been trying, but some hospitals are finally noticing that most administrative employees have no purpose (this is what I fix as a living). Cut the extra people, and be surprised at the savings.