So, I like this piece a lot and the general point I think is correct. This one however reads to me more like either an overly paranoid certifying officer, or an internal conflict within the agency about the appropriateness of a purchase and someone going outside to get support. I do wonder about the effect of removing some authority/protection/responsibility from contracting/certifying officers and dumping it back on leadership (you can order them to buy the water, but if you're wrong, you're in trouble, not them).
More broadly, in my experience the stuff that 'feels like' waste comes in five flavors.
1) Straight up fraud. Heard about it, but never been involved in anything that actually proved to be fraud or theft (closest I came turned out to be the reverse, guy was accused of stealing molding from a job site, turned out he'd donated molding left over from a home renovation for trim work and had the receipts to prove it--not clear that was appropriate either, but that wasn't what we were investigating and investigating for being overly generous to the agency was not high on our list of priorities--details changed to preserve anonymity).
2) Over-centralization. 'Everything needs to go up the chain, so I'm never surprised.'==long delays and absurd overmanning on most things.
3) Mistakes in discretion. 'This seemed like a good idea at the time, but didn't work out, for reasons which may or may not have been clear at the time.'
4) We have to follow policy, which arguably applies here and says do something silly. No, we have to follow policy...or seek an exception. The authority which issued the policy (or some other delegated/designated entity) can issue them and in my experience is pretty open to doing so if you give a reasonable justification.
5) Congress told us to do it. This one legally isn't even waste, so long as it's true. If congress tells us to take over road maintenance in the richest town in the state, because the local representative got that in a bill to reduce his property taxes (example altered to preserve anonymity and motives perhaps unfairly ascribed, not stated) then doing so isn't 'waste' but it sure as fuck feels like it!
You may note that 2 and 3 are in conflict...yep. Gotta find a balance.
ETA: The GAO website isn't too bad, though it's no WestLaw--not sure how it was in 2009, but the Red Book has been around for a while and is a great resource!
The GAO internal system for searching legal decisions is probably better than the external one, and was in 2009. When you have a legal function, you have to prioritize the functionality around that. IIRC, humans had tagged all the old decisions (both appropriations and bids) with applicable laws (like Sunshine Act etc) and grouped a lot of related + precedential cases together? Maybe? It's been a while. But if you ever need a comprehensive list of GAO decisions, email the librarians and have them pull one from the inside. Probably the people who need that the most are already working at GAO? But still- talk to a federal librarian while you still can.
I'd add to your list 6) petty assholes trying to get people fired. There's whistleblowing, and then there's "Bobby hates Brenda ever since she got the last Herman Miller chair and now instead of relying on what's clearly stated in the Red Book we have to make it into water bottle federal case # 9."
I was calling that internal politics, but yeah. I've had pretty good luck with either searching their website or using the Westlaw Comptroller General database. But so far, I've been lucky and everyone's accepted my 'here's my yes/no and a link to the GAO opinion,' three line email.
ETA: There's one that kills me are micropurchases with indemnity clauses, we have one credit card holder who's terrified on that front, no matter how much hand holding I do...
I remember being fresh out of college in my new government role and my supervisor gathered up all of us to talk about TDYs and travel. He said "remember, our responsibility is *not* to do this in the most efficient way, it is to do it in the most *accountable* way." He repeated that no fewer than three times, necessary because all of us new employees constantly make the mistake of trying to do the government (and taxpayers) a favor by rationally spending less. He quite literally had to beat it into us to take the money and stop thinking about how weird and wasteful it was.
Clara, I think your anecdote gets to the root of the problem: a workplace culture, enforced by the leadership, that gets everyone to optimize for self-preservation through rule-following, good judgement be damned. So perverse to valorize this as "accountability".
Oh, Im very pro-GAO generally. This isn't meant to be a slam on GAO. It's meant to questions the conditions under which GAO and agencies work, and think about why govt has to be so defensive. The point is that the public encourages this behavior.
Coincidentally I went to a talk yesterday on this topic - Don Moynihan and Dan Honig. It was great, as is this post. But does stifling accountability still exist today, in April 2025? Will it exist in two or four years? It *was* a big problem, maybe it will be again. I hope not.
I had hoped that what’s happening now would be ~ a fire that would enable a successor ecosystem. But every day it seems more like a flaming hazmat site that kills the soil.
Jen - love that you dug this up. A true GEM of unnecessary government process. But I have a question that starts before GAO would need to be involved. How was this not covered by department policy? Had DOD never sent personnel to areas that lacked water? I’m very doubtful. Feels like this could have been handled with a quick email to the CFOs office of the relevant agency. Do you have any info if that might have happened in this case and they said, “Go ask GAO?”
It’s the involvement of GAO (which don’t forget is a separate branch of government - and yes I know they have authority over appropriations policy) that really leaves me scratching my head…
It had! That's why there were 8 precedents the author could cite! So it's either a lack of access to that policy (there's a LOT of it, so very hard to find), conflicting precedent which means ambiguity, or just CYA on the part of the DoD.
Brings to mind recent posts in r/fednews where people were complaining that DOGE had put a spending limit of $1 on their travel & departmental credit cards.
💯! This is is accountability theatre. I had to write a note every time I wanted to purchase a $20-$30 book for shared use within my branch. Eventually, I couldn't even do that.
Great post, JP. I bet the GAO atty who authored the memo drew upon one of my favorite federal publications, Principles of Federal Appropriations Laws. It is the compiled case law of GAO: https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/red-book
I once talked to a local government employee who was trying to send gift cards to people who participated in a pilot project. The cost of the required processing via certified mail and other “accountability” stuff ended up exceeding the actual value of the gift cards!
I like to call this and other issues (in hiring, budgeting, and more) the “paradox of government accountability”: we end up addressing concerns about government waste or wrongdoing in ways that create huge problems of their own—some of them the very same problems they were designed to fix! Like when convoluted “merit-based” hiring processes end up advantaging those who have friends or family who can coach them through things that aren’t otherwise obvious to outsiders, even if the point of all this process was so that we’re not just hiring friends and family. Or when upfront over-specification of tech requirements, created out of fear of tech failures, end up being a source of tech failures.
If you read the SF papers, you will see plenty of recent stories about city officials allegedly steering city money to their friends for various boondoggle purposes. Presumably the point of all this wasteful process is to try and stop that kind of stuff from happening. And whatever the tangible impact of such corruption in terms of money wasted, there is also an intangible but large impact in undermining trust in government.
So: is your implicit claim that we can and should find better, more efficient ways to deter and/or prevent those kinds of abuses (and then what would those ways look like)? Or is it that it's worth tolerating the occasional abuse of that kind, because it costs less than the process burden, and past a certain point which we've already long since passed, increasing the process burden won't do more to stop it anyway?
In short, what is the theory of optimal waste and abuse here, and what is the message to the public that sells that theory? Is it "trust us, we can stop abuses in a much less burdensome way"? Or "trust us, there is a certain inevitable level of abuse but we can keep it to a tolerable level at a much lower cost than trying to preemptively stop it entirely by tying the hands of the non-corrupt majority"? Or something else?
Thanks to Jennifer and to other commenters here. I would only add that I bet wildfire folks don’t have to do this to procure bottled water. In other words, by the time each agency or subdepartmant adds its own rules, the rule-embroidery can take all kinds of different forms and ultimately bear little resemblance to one another.
The agency I follow most closely, the Forest Service, when presented with huge infusions of cash in the IRA and BIL, gave the funding away in grants- each with its own overhead- and got rid of required matches- simply because hiring people and contracting was too difficult. And the monitoring requirements are made up by the grantees.. and I had to FOIA the quarterly reports as they are not public.
Plenty of blame to go around. Congress shouldn’t have given them so much money so suddenly. Someone should fix hiring (as Jennifer has written about) and the FARs. Dollars and accomplishments should be an open book.
This is a great example and, FWIW, I see some of the same cycles in my day job. I work for a small company that provides services to large multi-national companies that have a number of moderately large local sub-units.
When I first started there was a fair amount of freedom (and budget) allocated to the local level, and then there was a move to run that through more central decision making so that there could be an effort to standardize and look for efficiencies of scale across multiple units. Now, I suspect that's becoming too cumbersome and they will move in the direction of more local control.
I think that will be an improvement but, I would also say, we definitely saw cases where the process benefited from having a coordination at the corporate level.
Maybe it is just me, but I am having a hard time seeing the water due to the elephant stampeding through it.
Given events of the last few days, it seems like "power" is currently eating "policy" for breakfast.
Maybe "power" is the new policy, or is the whole point, the goal? The way of life?
"This is a great time to get rich."
Am sensing major vibes of "My kid beat up your honor student," or maybe "Give me your lunch money," or "Nice little country you got there."
Relatedly, you might want to have a look at this: Jon Stewart talking to Michael Lewis about government employees. The most relevant part starts about 30 minutes in:
So, I like this piece a lot and the general point I think is correct. This one however reads to me more like either an overly paranoid certifying officer, or an internal conflict within the agency about the appropriateness of a purchase and someone going outside to get support. I do wonder about the effect of removing some authority/protection/responsibility from contracting/certifying officers and dumping it back on leadership (you can order them to buy the water, but if you're wrong, you're in trouble, not them).
More broadly, in my experience the stuff that 'feels like' waste comes in five flavors.
1) Straight up fraud. Heard about it, but never been involved in anything that actually proved to be fraud or theft (closest I came turned out to be the reverse, guy was accused of stealing molding from a job site, turned out he'd donated molding left over from a home renovation for trim work and had the receipts to prove it--not clear that was appropriate either, but that wasn't what we were investigating and investigating for being overly generous to the agency was not high on our list of priorities--details changed to preserve anonymity).
2) Over-centralization. 'Everything needs to go up the chain, so I'm never surprised.'==long delays and absurd overmanning on most things.
3) Mistakes in discretion. 'This seemed like a good idea at the time, but didn't work out, for reasons which may or may not have been clear at the time.'
4) We have to follow policy, which arguably applies here and says do something silly. No, we have to follow policy...or seek an exception. The authority which issued the policy (or some other delegated/designated entity) can issue them and in my experience is pretty open to doing so if you give a reasonable justification.
5) Congress told us to do it. This one legally isn't even waste, so long as it's true. If congress tells us to take over road maintenance in the richest town in the state, because the local representative got that in a bill to reduce his property taxes (example altered to preserve anonymity and motives perhaps unfairly ascribed, not stated) then doing so isn't 'waste' but it sure as fuck feels like it!
You may note that 2 and 3 are in conflict...yep. Gotta find a balance.
ETA: The GAO website isn't too bad, though it's no WestLaw--not sure how it was in 2009, but the Red Book has been around for a while and is a great resource!
The GAO internal system for searching legal decisions is probably better than the external one, and was in 2009. When you have a legal function, you have to prioritize the functionality around that. IIRC, humans had tagged all the old decisions (both appropriations and bids) with applicable laws (like Sunshine Act etc) and grouped a lot of related + precedential cases together? Maybe? It's been a while. But if you ever need a comprehensive list of GAO decisions, email the librarians and have them pull one from the inside. Probably the people who need that the most are already working at GAO? But still- talk to a federal librarian while you still can.
I'd add to your list 6) petty assholes trying to get people fired. There's whistleblowing, and then there's "Bobby hates Brenda ever since she got the last Herman Miller chair and now instead of relying on what's clearly stated in the Red Book we have to make it into water bottle federal case # 9."
LOL
And PLENTY of this goes on the in the private sector, which is MUCH BIGGER than the public sector.
I was calling that internal politics, but yeah. I've had pretty good luck with either searching their website or using the Westlaw Comptroller General database. But so far, I've been lucky and everyone's accepted my 'here's my yes/no and a link to the GAO opinion,' three line email.
ETA: There's one that kills me are micropurchases with indemnity clauses, we have one credit card holder who's terrified on that front, no matter how much hand holding I do...
I remember being fresh out of college in my new government role and my supervisor gathered up all of us to talk about TDYs and travel. He said "remember, our responsibility is *not* to do this in the most efficient way, it is to do it in the most *accountable* way." He repeated that no fewer than three times, necessary because all of us new employees constantly make the mistake of trying to do the government (and taxpayers) a favor by rationally spending less. He quite literally had to beat it into us to take the money and stop thinking about how weird and wasteful it was.
Clara, I think your anecdote gets to the root of the problem: a workplace culture, enforced by the leadership, that gets everyone to optimize for self-preservation through rule-following, good judgement be damned. So perverse to valorize this as "accountability".
In the 5 minutes it took to read that memo, DoD spent 7.5 million dollars, and GAO writes about that too. Quite a bit. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-108136
Are they focusing on the "wrong" things? Sure, sometimes, probably. So does everyone.
Oh, Im very pro-GAO generally. This isn't meant to be a slam on GAO. It's meant to questions the conditions under which GAO and agencies work, and think about why govt has to be so defensive. The point is that the public encourages this behavior.
Coincidentally I went to a talk yesterday on this topic - Don Moynihan and Dan Honig. It was great, as is this post. But does stifling accountability still exist today, in April 2025? Will it exist in two or four years? It *was* a big problem, maybe it will be again. I hope not.
I had hoped that what’s happening now would be ~ a fire that would enable a successor ecosystem. But every day it seems more like a flaming hazmat site that kills the soil.
Jen - love that you dug this up. A true GEM of unnecessary government process. But I have a question that starts before GAO would need to be involved. How was this not covered by department policy? Had DOD never sent personnel to areas that lacked water? I’m very doubtful. Feels like this could have been handled with a quick email to the CFOs office of the relevant agency. Do you have any info if that might have happened in this case and they said, “Go ask GAO?”
It’s the involvement of GAO (which don’t forget is a separate branch of government - and yes I know they have authority over appropriations policy) that really leaves me scratching my head…
It had! That's why there were 8 precedents the author could cite! So it's either a lack of access to that policy (there's a LOT of it, so very hard to find), conflicting precedent which means ambiguity, or just CYA on the part of the DoD.
Brings to mind recent posts in r/fednews where people were complaining that DOGE had put a spending limit of $1 on their travel & departmental credit cards.
💯! This is is accountability theatre. I had to write a note every time I wanted to purchase a $20-$30 book for shared use within my branch. Eventually, I couldn't even do that.
Great post, JP. I bet the GAO atty who authored the memo drew upon one of my favorite federal publications, Principles of Federal Appropriations Laws. It is the compiled case law of GAO: https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/red-book
Excellent post!
Your "decision tree" link appears to point to the original GAO decision PDF rather than a decision tree.
I once talked to a local government employee who was trying to send gift cards to people who participated in a pilot project. The cost of the required processing via certified mail and other “accountability” stuff ended up exceeding the actual value of the gift cards!
I like to call this and other issues (in hiring, budgeting, and more) the “paradox of government accountability”: we end up addressing concerns about government waste or wrongdoing in ways that create huge problems of their own—some of them the very same problems they were designed to fix! Like when convoluted “merit-based” hiring processes end up advantaging those who have friends or family who can coach them through things that aren’t otherwise obvious to outsiders, even if the point of all this process was so that we’re not just hiring friends and family. Or when upfront over-specification of tech requirements, created out of fear of tech failures, end up being a source of tech failures.
If you read the SF papers, you will see plenty of recent stories about city officials allegedly steering city money to their friends for various boondoggle purposes. Presumably the point of all this wasteful process is to try and stop that kind of stuff from happening. And whatever the tangible impact of such corruption in terms of money wasted, there is also an intangible but large impact in undermining trust in government.
So: is your implicit claim that we can and should find better, more efficient ways to deter and/or prevent those kinds of abuses (and then what would those ways look like)? Or is it that it's worth tolerating the occasional abuse of that kind, because it costs less than the process burden, and past a certain point which we've already long since passed, increasing the process burden won't do more to stop it anyway?
In short, what is the theory of optimal waste and abuse here, and what is the message to the public that sells that theory? Is it "trust us, we can stop abuses in a much less burdensome way"? Or "trust us, there is a certain inevitable level of abuse but we can keep it to a tolerable level at a much lower cost than trying to preemptively stop it entirely by tying the hands of the non-corrupt majority"? Or something else?
Thanks to Jennifer and to other commenters here. I would only add that I bet wildfire folks don’t have to do this to procure bottled water. In other words, by the time each agency or subdepartmant adds its own rules, the rule-embroidery can take all kinds of different forms and ultimately bear little resemblance to one another.
The agency I follow most closely, the Forest Service, when presented with huge infusions of cash in the IRA and BIL, gave the funding away in grants- each with its own overhead- and got rid of required matches- simply because hiring people and contracting was too difficult. And the monitoring requirements are made up by the grantees.. and I had to FOIA the quarterly reports as they are not public.
Plenty of blame to go around. Congress shouldn’t have given them so much money so suddenly. Someone should fix hiring (as Jennifer has written about) and the FARs. Dollars and accomplishments should be an open book.
This is a great example and, FWIW, I see some of the same cycles in my day job. I work for a small company that provides services to large multi-national companies that have a number of moderately large local sub-units.
When I first started there was a fair amount of freedom (and budget) allocated to the local level, and then there was a move to run that through more central decision making so that there could be an effort to standardize and look for efficiencies of scale across multiple units. Now, I suspect that's becoming too cumbersome and they will move in the direction of more local control.
I think that will be an improvement but, I would also say, we definitely saw cases where the process benefited from having a coordination at the corporate level.
Maybe it is just me, but I am having a hard time seeing the water due to the elephant stampeding through it.
Given events of the last few days, it seems like "power" is currently eating "policy" for breakfast.
Maybe "power" is the new policy, or is the whole point, the goal? The way of life?
"This is a great time to get rich."
Am sensing major vibes of "My kid beat up your honor student," or maybe "Give me your lunch money," or "Nice little country you got there."
Relatedly, you might want to have a look at this: Jon Stewart talking to Michael Lewis about government employees. The most relevant part starts about 30 minutes in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79_n1FKZwHo