The Water is a Mirror

A lot of what you might call government waste is our fault.

Indulge me, dear reader, and study the following decision from the Government Accountability Office responding to a memo from a Certifying Officer of the Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command of the Army entitled Request for Advance Decision-Use of Appropriations for Bottled Water, Aug. 7, 2009. 12 soldiers would be carrying out missions at ports in two cities where the command did not have permanent work sites. Since there was no water access, could the command pay for bottled water for these servicemembers?

Why, Pahlka? you are now asking. That’s 5 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. But I have a point. Today, we’re like George Saunders’ Story Club, except instead of dissecting short fiction, we’ll lightly deconstruct this obscure GAO decision memo. (Note to self: start new blog that does this weekly.)

Let’s start at the end. This memo is signed by Daniel I. Gordon, who was at the time Acting General Counsel of the GAO. I bet this guy went to Harvard Law, my instincts tell me. Yep. He also graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University and got a masters at Oxford. He was later appointed to the head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy under President Obama. (Remember Kevin telling us that OFPP was one of the most underrated jobs in federal government?) So it’s a reasonable guess that some subordinate probably wrote this memo, and Gordon just signed off on it. But still, while he pored over texts at Oxford and Harvard, what are the chances Gordon dreamed of weighing in on whether an army commander could expense $200 worth of plastic bottles of water from Costco? Not high. He was the executive editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He thought loftier thoughts, I guarantee you. (And no, I’m not mocking him.)

Whoever wrote the decision took their job very seriously. The author cites 11 precedents, three establishing that bottled water is ordinarily considered a personal expense of the government employee, and eight establishing the exception for when “the available water posed a health risk if consumed, or because water was not available.” Each is referred to by the file number and date. How long do we think it took the author to research and write this? Did our author have the case law, so to speak, all in his/her head? How good is the GAO’s search functionality for this kind of research, or at least how good was it in 2009, when the memo was written?

The email requesting the decision came in on August 7, and the memo is dated September 29. Seven weeks is actually pretty fast turnaround, in my view, but it does beg the question of what the soldiers drank in the meantime. Did they delay the deployment pending clarification of the policy? Did the soldiers pass the hat for a flat a day in the meantime? But more to my point, which I’m getting to, seven weeks speaks to a process. How many people had to review this memo before it was published? How much did taxpayers spend on this decision? In 2024, lawyers at GAO made between $99,913 and $191,900. Not counting the GC, who presumably makes more than this but probably spent little time on this personally, we spent up to about $100 an hour every time a staff lawyer touched it through what are presumably several layers of review beyond the research, writing, and publishing online. Then there’s the time spent on the Army side discussing this and requesting the guidance. I’m not going to do wildly speculative math here, but let’s just say it's fair to assume that this decision cost quite a bit more than the $200 in question. And with the eight prior precedents cited (were there more, and have there been more since then?) it’s not the only time we’ve clarified this particular policy.

My point is definitely not that lawyers at GAO make too much. They should probably make more. But we should focus them on high value work. And I certainly don’t mean to gloss over the need for rules. We need rules. But we also need reasonable judgement in the application of those rules closer to the ground. Lacking it, we feed a narrative about waste in government. There is less support for the public servants whose jobs have been eliminated because of it.

There is waste, fraud, and abuse in government, to be sure. Medicare and Medicaid fraud is real, and we should make it easier to prosecute these cases. (Elon thinks you just catch the fraudsters and lock them up — in fact, you spend years building a case and refer it to the Department of Justice, and let the wheels turn at the speed they may. There should be a middle ground.) But a lot of what people perceive as government waste is stuff like this — just unwise use of resources directed by very smart, dedicated people. Why would smart, dedicated people do this? Because in American culture, the people don’t trust their government.

My point is actually this: an enormous amount of the waste in government (and what some might call abuse) comes from people trying very hard to avoid the perception of waste and abuse. We’ve made it a first order thing. Most people who work in government (and make less money than they could) do so because it means something to them to serve the public. But serving the public turns out to involve catering to a deeply ingrained mistrust, which distorts the work, leaves soldiers thirsty, and drives further mistrust. Looking for someone to blame?

My point, dear reader, is that this starts with us.

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PS: For those of you in need of practical clarity on topics like these, aka current feds, here’s a decision tree covering whether you can purchase meals or snacks. More of these here in the GAO Red Book.