Source: Dealt with government contracts (admittedly, low-level, but still) for a couple of decades.
There’s plenty of fraud and waste.
I’ve seen plenty of people take advantage of government regulations because they know that the relevant overseers either are too inexperienced/overworked to notice, or simply don’t care. I dealt with school lunch programs. You’d be absolutely amazed at what food service vendors try to get away with, and you’d be even more amazed at how much of it gets through because of the ineptitude of the state officials they’re dealing with. (And on the flip side, you’d also be amazed at what inept state regulators who don’t understand the regulations they’re supposed to be enforcing try to push on school districts and vendors. Trust me, it goes both ways.)
And even when everybody is on the up-and-up, there are some government regulations that are simply out of date. Regulations that sometimes directly contradict each other. Procedures that shouldn’t be a thing in 2025 but still are because the bureaucracy hasn’t kept up with technology.
There is plenty of fraud and waste to go around. I saw it all over the place, and I’m about as close to the bottom of the totem pole as you were going to get. I can only imagine how bad it is higher up the food chain. But that’s not the kind of fraud and waste they’re looking for. To them “Fraud” is “anything that helps poor and brown people”, and “Waste” is “anything that doesn’t result in more tax breaks for the wealthy”.
That’s always the hard part of these “government fraud” narratives. It’s the insidious shit, the ineptitude, incompetence. Not something you can walk into the FDA and find a filing cabinet labeled “deliberate and known waste contracts”.
I work in aerospace and the worst engineers I’ve had the displeasure of working with were on cost+ contracts (the money keeps rolling in until the job is “done”).
The only real way to track down abuses like that is to stick an oversight committee on each and every contract, watch them like a hawk. But who watches the watchers? You run the risk at every stage, eventually you either need to trust or gamble
Source: Dealt with government contracts (admittedly, low-level, but still) for a couple of decades.
There’s plenty of fraud and waste.
I’ve seen plenty of people take advantage of government regulations because they know that the relevant overseers either are too inexperienced/overworked to notice, or simply don’t care. I dealt with school lunch programs. You’d be absolutely amazed at what food service vendors try to get away with, and you’d be even more amazed at how much of it gets through because of the ineptitude of the state officials they’re dealing with. (And on the flip side, you’d also be amazed at what inept state regulators who don’t understand the regulations they’re supposed to be enforcing try to push on school districts and vendors. Trust me, it goes both ways.)
And even when everybody is on the up-and-up, there are some government regulations that are simply out of date. Regulations that sometimes directly contradict each other. Procedures that shouldn’t be a thing in 2025 but still are because the bureaucracy hasn’t kept up with technology.
There is plenty of fraud and waste to go around. I saw it all over the place, and I’m about as close to the bottom of the totem pole as you were going to get. I can only imagine how bad it is higher up the food chain. But that’s not the kind of fraud and waste they’re looking for. To them “Fraud” is “anything that helps poor and brown people”, and “Waste” is “anything that doesn’t result in more tax breaks for the wealthy”.
That’s always the hard part of these “government fraud” narratives. It’s the insidious shit, the ineptitude, incompetence. Not something you can walk into the FDA and find a filing cabinet labeled “deliberate and known waste contracts”.
I work in aerospace and the worst engineers I’ve had the displeasure of working with were on cost+ contracts (the money keeps rolling in until the job is “done”).
The only real way to track down abuses like that is to stick an oversight committee on each and every contract, watch them like a hawk. But who watches the watchers? You run the risk at every stage, eventually you either need to trust or gamble