Since my employment working for the government I have worked for the DOD and DOE. Both don’t change very much at all in the issues I see. They are as follows:
• Lazy, unproductive, expensive federal employees that are IMPOSSIBLE to get rid of.
• Spending money that SHOULD be given back to the Treasury.
• Over spending on things that sit on shelves for years with no use and then get thrown out.
In the government world contractors are hired to do most of the work because the federal employees are too hard to get rid of and too lazy to do the work required of them. In my old office they refused to take on anything addition, spent hours browsing the internet, went out to eat during work hours and charged it, and just kept the old processes in place ensuring that the work would continue to be slow and not get done in a faster way. At my current job I have gotten reprimanded for doing work too quickly and efficiently and making processes ten times faster. It is horrible. The whole ‘job’ security thing is all they think about. In reality if we had hard workers or paid the workers based on the work they accomplished we wouldn’t need half the people we have, there simply isn’t enough work to go around, to be extremely blunt. And it’s no wonder that anything concerning the government takes forever to get done with workers like this. We really need some new reforms on firing lazy abusive workers or paying workers based on work completed.
At the end of the year I have heard over and over again the issue with extra funds that need to quickly be spent so they don’t lose the same funding next year. What’s with that???? A unit should not be penalized for giving BACK money to the treasury they should be rewarded and should get the same budget next year. I don’t know who came up with that bright idea….but I can tell you I’ve seen first hand over and over how much waste of money it makes.
I worked in a warehouse at one point and we would spend money at the slightest whim. Infact we were told that if we needed any money just ask because they had just bought a 200k piece of equipment that wasn’t heavily needed and because they had the funds they went ahead and bought a second….I can tell you I first hand know what happens to that equipment. It gets smashed up and thrown out. I don’t know how many items I have been told to destroy that was brand new in the box because it was no longer ‘usable’. There is a huge amount of waste in the government when it comes to that. While organizing the warehouse that hadn’t been organized in five years I found so much brand new things that we didn’t even have the slightest idea we had.
All of these three things could save the government huge money. I propose making new job positions that work at fixing these issues and eliminating all the waste of employee, equipment and funds. Federal employees should have just as much to fear about losing their job as a contractor does if he doesn’t work.
I completely agree with the following people posts as well:
http://governmentreform.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Elimninate-End-of-Year-Spending/118530-13060
