Are "government job" a dirty word to you....
Yes. Not that it applies to all government jobs, but it does apply to a lot of them. Clearly, the DOGE is exposing no small number of meaningless jobs that were handed out to buddies as "consultants". And my own experience working for the better part of a year with the Dept of Energy showed me how inefficient and redundant such outfits can be. You park the government truck and rent a car because that cuts the apparent fuel use down as mandated by higher ups. You have the smallest drill rig drill the deepest hole because the lead driller had 11 years' experience, while the larger rig that was hired deliberately to drill that deeper hole "only" had 8 years of experience. In doing so, they broke the derrick and created an extremely hazardous situation for all of us on the rig. And a huge repair bill which the taxpayers got to pick up.
Dairy barns here had to be certified by the health department to call a barn "grade A" (that's drinking milk vs Grade C - "commercial" milk used in canned condensed milk or dry powdered milk). Inspectors came by upon occasion. But because the milk company sold some small amount of milk to Texas, a Texas inspector had to come by every 3 months or so. They couldn't take the word of the local county inspectors. Apparently, Texas didn't think Arky health department workers knew squat about milk??? So, someone drove 300 miles to the county and inspected 20 or so barns a day until they covered them all. Oklahoma OTOH were fine using the Arkansas Health Dept. findings.
When I applied for a sanitarian license under my geological license (which was explicitly allowed) the county sanitarians discouraged me and argued I didn't have enough experience to do perk tests and soil morph tests (I did them with an engineering firm) and the reason was that the salaried sanitarians had a huge cottage business of doing those after hours for $200 a pop and were alarmed I might take some of their work. I primarily wanted it to install monitoring wells. Finally had a chance to sell my drill rig for a large profit and things were picking back up in the patch. So, I sold the rig.
Fed Gov. used to have a rule that you could not sell a car or truck unless it had 50,000 miles or more on it. They had lemons that were in the shop and costing thousands of dollars and couldn't sell. I was at a society meeting with the state geologist - nice guy, good geologist and he was telling me that they came from Little Rock to Ft. Smith in a vehicle with 250,000 miles on it and they cannot get it replaced because the state cannot understand why a field vehicle that they take into off-road situations frequently cannot be an electric car or a hybrid Prius. So, the money is "there" for a new vehicle but they have to keep the old one so they can actually do field work. Likewise, they are budgeted $300,000 for a new sample library but haven't been approved for any building. The old library is just a barn, it leaks like a sieve and has since I was there 20 years ago and is frequently broken into even with cameras. And it is on the south side of Little Rock while the offices are in N. Little Rock across the river 10 miles away.
A classmate of my brother ran a C store for many years. But his monitoring well indicated a leak. The tank didn't indicate one, but the state pitched in $50,000 and he replaced all the tanks, borrowed money only to have more fuel show up in the wells. The state shut him down, bankrupted the guy at age 65. Bank sells the store still operating today. OOPSY DOOPSY.... Turned out the state finally traced the fuel to a leak in an above ground DIESEL tank on CITY PROPERTY about 300 yards away. And
the city knew the tank leaked but used it anyway. The C store did not sell diesel in the first place. And Max couldn't sue the city.
The old city courthouse has a flat roof which had been a PITA for years leaking. So, they decided to rebuild the roof with a pitched roof. But the cost was going to run a little over $50,000. State requirement. HAD to be architectural plans and bids. So, an architect was hired. His cost? $50,000. The final cost of the roof? About $225,000.
Chicago's mayor a few years ago promoted a "census cowboy" to ride a horse through the south side of town and promote the census in areas where compliance was low.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/who-is-chicagos-census-cowboy/2305040/
Do I need to go on with the incompetence of governance? And the apparent disinterest that government employees have in watching out for the taxpayer's dollars?