Comment by 616c

3 years ago

Let me more blunt: perhaps I am one of those bureaucrats. Your comment espouses views of government bureaucrats as indifferent to wasting "others" money and only accepting poorly executed projects. Most agencies are currently beholden to extensions under continual resolutions for day to day spending money and don't have stable budgets due to Congressional pressure (new year is month's away, but it has been this way frequently for years now). So, you have to fight to be allowed to spend any little bit of many that wasn't allocated as part of ongoing spend (but even I don't know how that works in detail, I am low level), for even small amounts to keep everything under $10,000. I have to ask and wait for ridiculously small stuff.

The prior comment (and my rebuttal) were that it must be intentional re measurement, re the risk of doing and not doing things and what the cost is (a.k.a. risk-managed programs in the parlance NIST helped standardize). No, it is not. As for what you are leaning into: perhaps quantitative measurement of risk is important, but perhaps raw costs are not the only factor? I agree, in some (I am not sure it is over 1/2 and I can say most, but I am not suggesting it is a really small fraction and completely disagreeing with you) or many cases, raw cost is a factor that seems to be ignored. How is that? But there are others where we (as civil servants) probably could try to explain implied costs (I have failed ironically to get people to consider a mathy approach to this a few times) around things you and I probably see as qualitative. But sometimes we in govt have to do things because elected officials in the govt make us do so through changed or new laws. Other times the perception of the very ineptitude and indifference to hard-to-quantify factors you cite is a risk unto itself (just harder to quantify) for the larger agenda and that drives the need to purse it anyway.

I recommend people read this article and cite it often when presenting about how to help government help itself. I started doing that as an outsider, and now it rings truer than ever to me on the inside.