And the CDC work is all pre-competitive work that boosts the efficacy of everything else in the economy. A tiny amount of money that results in so much more economic activity and savings than could be imagined in most private industry. And all the numbers for the public savings on, say, food safety are all clearly laid out in long reports. Reports that nobody at DOGE would ever read because they don't believe than anything good could be produced by people who accept lower salaries for higher impact.
There's absurd waste in private companies which always makes me laugh when people say the government is inefficient.
So you can get people working in the government who couldn't get a job in the private sector if they tried, working with total job security (they can't get fired) for an entity with zero competition so there is no drive or motivation to get better or otherwise improve.
Whereas with private companies you can get hired quickly and fired quickly, meaning you have to perform well (motivation), you are paid better so you attract higher quality candidates, and also if the company does badly you go bankrupt, which means the whole company performs better or dies. The companies which remain win the market and are more efficient (as they are the companies which survived).
If the US government is more inefficient than others then there's something to be said about how it works, how it could be improved, instead there's only this rhetoric that doesn't invite at all the discussion about what are its failures and paths to improve, just recycled catchphrases supported by a cliché.
Private companies are also inefficient in many ways even with competition, why is that if competition is supposed to make inefficient companies uncompetitive? Maybe there's something else to discuss rather than these thought-terminating clichés...
O'Rourke's take is an interesting read; it is commentary that is meant to be more humorous and entertaining than political, I think he excelled at that in the entirety of Parliament of Whores. It was published in 1991 in a different political climate. He does admit he's doing this for fun, that the takes he express are mostly uninformed about the nature of many of these government departments and programs, and takes a (traditional) conservative (high level, and ahem, naive) view of many government programs. For example, additional quotes from that PoW chapter:
> Training and employment is properly the concern of trainees and employers: $5.7 billion.
> Insurance companies should gladly pay for consumer and occupational health and safety: $1.5 billion.
> If unemployment insurance is really insurance, it ought to at least break even: $18.6 billion.
I shared this for the Circumcision Precept bit; the portions of the quote surrounding that were context.
CDC? Every day you go home believing that you are part of a machine saving thousands of lives. BATF? Keeping guns away from terrorists.
And it's not a self-delusion. They ARE doing good things, even if the agency isn't perfect.
"Add it all together, and I've cut $282.8 billion, leaving a federal budget of $950.5 billion, to which I apply O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. This gives me another $95 billion in cuts for a grand total of $337.8 billion in budget liposuction."
Parliament of Whores, page 103.