Progressive leftists tell us that letting the Government run things optimizes efficiency because Government doesn’t have to worry about profits, and can therefore focus on providing the most efficient and effective services to people.
A former bureaucrat at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) tells us that this is total [link to accurate visual metaphor]. From the (popup-riddled) Daily Caller:
In a resignation letter obtained by ScienceInsider, David Wright, director of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — which oversees and monitors possible research misconduct — offers a scathing rebuke of the unwieldy and inefficient bureaucracy that he dealt with for the two years he served in the position.
According to Wright, activities that in his capacity as an academic
administrator that took a day or two, took weeks and months in the federal government.
He recalled an instance in which he could not get approval for a $35 cost to have cassette tapes converted into CDs. He eventually was able to get them converted in 20 minutes for free by a university
. And another instance in which he “urgently needed to fill a vacancy,” but was told there was secret priority list. Sixteen months later, he wrote, the position was still unfilled.
He also recounts an occasion on which the HHS bureaucracy once evaluated the efficiency of its practices; and the results were so bad they decided to do what any business would do; retool its processes to make them more efficient and get rid of the dead weight.
No, just kidding, they buried the report and vowed never to do it again.
“On another occasion I asked your deputy why you didn’t conduct an evaluation by the Op-Divs of the immediate office administrative services to try to improve
them,” he wrote. ”She responded that that had been tried a few years ago and the results were so negative that no further evaluations have been conducted.”
No wonder they think Obamacare is a rousing success.
More important for the feds’ efficiency is the fact that the federal workers don’t have to constantly worry about being fired, which frees their minds to be on the lookout for more efficient practices.
But since they’ll never actually change any of their practices, at least we can be thankful that they save a little of our money by not undertaking endless “evaluations.”
I used to work somewhere that received a LOT of moolah in the form of NIH grants. What a WASTE of money! The research was good, it was sound, but so much money got just flushed down the toilet. One researcher was an Apple fan, and an “early adopter” and would always buyt the latest, newest, zoomiest Apple product–on his grant dime. If that is the ONLY waste, it’s still a lot of money–figure that the NIH gives away some $80,000 grants and figure the Apple waste is $3000… No, wait! Let’s say a new computer is still “necessary” and that only $1000 of that is actual “waste,” that is still $80 MILLION. Of course, that is only just a little under 0.3% of the amount of grant money distributed, but believe me, there is a LOT more wasted per grant than $1000.
And the NIH TOTAL budget is only slightly less than 10% of the TOTAL HHS budget…
I wonder that the HHS budget was in budget was a hundred years ago…?
Oh, wait! HHS only goes back to 1979! And it’s predecessor only goes back to 1953! And ITS predecessor only goes back to 1939!