Cartoons and more: Government Waste

While we all joke about the snafu (military slang) that is Obamacare signup, it is an excellent example of how the Federal government works at present. This article at TIME Magazine offers an explanation of what was going on behind the scenes, "Traffic Didn’t Crash the Obamacare Site Alone. Bad Coding Did Too."

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Scott Stantis, "How The Glitch Stole Healthcare," USNews

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The site Outside the Beltway has an article titled "Is Government Inefficient?" with the cartoon shown below.  Here is an observation from the article:

While some federal agencies have made good-faith attempts to become more efficient, most still carry the dead weight of unnecessary overhead, outmoded business processes, infrastructure that is no longer aligned to their mission, and underperforming organizational structures.

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David Horsey, "The Federal Bureaucracy," OutsideTheBeltway

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One of the current problems is that the Fed uses a lot of contractors (aka outsourcing) with little coordination and oversight.  The article "Outsourced Government: Have We Gone Too Far?" discusses this.  During the Clinton administration, also that of G.W. Bush, attempts was made to 'reinvent government' (Wikipedia), but they fell by the wayside, as analyzed in this lessons-learned paper.  According to Wikipedia's NPR (National Partnership for Reinventing Government) article: "It was the eleventh federal reform effort in the 20th century."

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Paul Noth, "We Don't Need to Reinvent theWheel...," New Yorker

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In the case of government reform, reinventing the wheel may be needed.  If you feel something should be done, take a look at Citizens Against Government Waste.  The movement addresses more than government spending.

As for the dyfunction of the Obamacare site, some are suggesting that the NSA can help.

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Jack Ohman, Obamacare-NSA, USNews

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-- Marge