What is waste?

Waste is in the eye of the beholder. It is easy to find in government. Waste can seem anything for which you don’t understand the need. Why do we need a fire department when there is no fire? We could really save billions by disbanding the Air Force, there is no mention of an air force in the Constitution. Just a Navy and an as needed Army with appropriations of no more than 2 years. “To raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;” The Federalist papers explain the danger of standing armies. The Armed Forces Unification Act of 1947 turned that part of the Constitution on its head. Where were the strict-constructionist then?

Anything as big as the US government will have inevitable mistakes and misappropriations. One of the greatest waste eliminators in history was Henry Ford, but he did not do it with broad proclamations. He and his employees would look in detail for waste, eliminate it, or find a secondary use for the material. Edward Kingsford changed sawdust into charcoal briquettes. Methodical waste reduction brought the price of a Model T down from $860 to $260 while also making improvements. It took 17 years but unlike government Ford did not have thousands of other responsibilities.

If Ford or GM cut a corner to save money it did not have much effect on the rest of the industry. In government a cost reduction in one division can bankrupt another. Not inspecting aluminum at the source can cause a production stoppage a year later, precipitate a recession a year after that, or a plane crash 5 years later.

Cost cutters like to point out examples of military hardware that costs way too much, but its usually some Civil Service employee that discovers it and starts the cumbersome process to get it reduced. He might tell a neighbor about it who writes to the local paper. Sometimes it’s a one-of-a-kind pre-production item that had to be designed before they could manufacture the first one.The pundits forget that military specifications are very rigorous, and for good reason. Many systems are idle for most of their service life, but are expected to perform perfectly with no advance notice. It took me six months to get the cost of a shim the size of a quarter reduced from $25 to $15 each. An outside vendor offered to make them for $80 per thousand, but we only needed 6 at a time. Cost cutters had made it impossible to inventory 994 until needed.

If you walk in a steel mill and all the people seem idle, that’s good. That means everything is OK, the mill is running profitably. If they are working hard, that means the mill is shut down, losing money until they fix it.

Random firings may cut payroll cost today, but there is institutional knowledge that is distributed throughout the organization, nobody knows everything. That one guy in HR that gets fired might be the one a dozen managers depend on for timely advice. One of my employers paid a young engineer to interview an elderly engineer for months to capture and record his knowledge. I too learned more useful engineering from senior employees than classrooms. Once that institutional knowledge goes out the door you may never get it back. Wholesale firings are like burning down the house to get rid of the fleas, or killing mosquitoes with a shotgun.

Large cities were notorious for corruption. Especially in the past century. Chicago was especially notorious, but it also had a reputation as the city-that-works. We pass laws against corruption and crime, but without adequate investigation to find it and enforce the law in a justice system that is always there, the laws are meaningless. That’s waste.

USAID is criticized, “Why don’t we spend that money here?” Good question, two answers. First, if we help our neighbors in need, they are more likely to remain our friends. Second, the vast majority of that money is spent on US product for export, creating jobs here. It encourages other countries to also buy other US products. What is DOGE mayhem costing us?

Feedback encouraged at obenskik@gmail.com,really. Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a biweekly column for West Hawaii Today.