No. of Recommendations: 6
So why not set a good example of minimizing cost even if it pissing in the ocean?
Mostly because (again) it won't actually help you reduce the deficit or debt. You'll never "set an example" of frugality with taxpayer money - most people will form their opinions of government spending through their partisan prism, which can always find examples of waste and then broadcast those examples far and wide.
All institutions have waste and inefficiency - it's unavoidable. And it has to be worse for the federal government. The federal government is exceptionally large, is virtually perpetual, is subject to public inspection, has (by design) frequent and constant turnover in leadership, is governed by a body (Congress) that intentionally gives departments and agencies multiple and sometimes conflicting goals (which people disagree on the merits of), and is subject to rules that no private institution has to follow.
This all drives up the cost of administering the federal government in ways that make fighting waste expensive. There are direct costs, of course -for example, there are managerial costs to monitoring employees and agencies. But there are also indirect costs - civil service protections make it harder to fire any single employee, for example, but eliminating those protections would increase the risk (nay, likelihood) of returning to a patronage system where even low-ranking government jobs are allocated as political spoils rather than more professional criteria. The power to cut costs is exactly that: a power. And in the context of government we have a lot of disagreements over who should get to have power.
And of course, you run the risk of pursuing a political agenda rather than a budgetary agenda. For example, the budgetary impact of reducing federal spending by 0.001% through eliminating waste across the board would be trivial - but if you got to choose which part of the government that 0.001% got cut from, you could accomplish all kinds of political goals under the guise of fiscal prudence. You could zero out a program that you don't like, or cripple a function of a larger department.
