Copied from the Reactions thread to Jan 14 comic.



Actually, the exceeding cost of every item in the government is not a myth. For example. If you a Berretta 92F handgun from a gun shop, it'll be a coupla hundred dollars. If a military unit gets an M9 from a supply activity, it's nearly a thousand, even though the Berretta 92F is the same weapon as the M9, except with a different etching on the barrel assembly. This cost, however, is not entirely just corruption, though some of it probably is.

Most of the cost can be attributed to the General Services Administration or GSA. The GSA has to approve everything that the government buys for any reason. For example, a government paid carpenter says, "I need a hammer." He tells his boss, his boss tells the supply guy. The supply guy checks his inventory and finds that he can't order hammers because no hammer has been approved for the nailing of seven and 3/4 inch nails. He contacts the GSA rep and they begin scouting for appropriate hammers by contacting an engineer for specs. The engineer calculates what characteristics said hammers would need, the length of the shaft, the width of the striking surface, the length of the prying wedge at the back. He calculates the force said hammer would be subjected too and the tensile strength necessary to withstand the forces. He puts this together and sends it back to the GSA who contract procurement department to either design and build said hammer or buy a large number of commercial hammers to test their limits. The procurement get back with an approved hammer design to the GSA which now bares the nomenclature, "Hammer, 7.5 inch nail approved, 1 ea." To pay the salaries of all those people, of course, the GSA has to set the price of the hammer at $200 and encourage everyone to purchase one by making it a requirement to own for similar units. Of course, the fact that the Hammer, 7.5 inch nail approved, 1 ea. is also called a Craftsman Medium Hammer and retails for $12 dollars, isn't important at this point.

BTW, the GSA is responsible for a large majority of government waste, but is being revamped so this isn't as bad of a problem anymore.

A lot more of that comes from Congress than the GSA. There is no less efficient way to procure anything on an ongoing basis than with annually reviewed and renegotiated contracts; but that's what Congress insists on.

The legislative problem is that Congresscritters can't extort pork barrel projects and useless ancillary contracts out of a program that won't come up for review for years; and the fix is to make sure they're all continually up for review. So the requirements are changed every year, and the project has to be reengineered from the beginning; what's that to their ability to steal a few million in voter bribes?

I have to wonder how much of the cost comes down to price-gouging. I know that most large organisations are viewed as cash cows by ... everyone I know.

I was once working for a shire council - um, they're the folk who fix roads and drains and all that.

My boss and I went to the local hardware store to get some supplies and the bill was handed over - made out to the Shire Council account.

Oops, said my boss - this stuff is for the <Commiunity Service Group> - I'm just sneakily using the Council ute to transport this stuff, can you cancel this bill and write it up for the <Community Service Group>, please?

The bill the second time was for less than half as much the second time around.

I asked my boss if the hardware store owner was giving the service group a discount, and he said no, that the hardware stores always charged much more for orders from the Shire Council.

well if you're going to start quoting examples, you should know where those examples come from.

When you make parts to special specs, it costs money. In the case of a hammer I'm guessing it was specially manufactured.

When you don't manufacture things in large lots, and you also use machines, you can get ridiculous costs.

Now I think this example comes from the 1980s.

As to the toilet seat, I think it was manufactured special for a fighter jet or some such. Many years back. I suggest looking for more up to date examples.

But if you want another out of date example, I think Dave Barry had fun with a several million dollar fax machine. Why was it so expensive? I believe it was hardened against nuclear attack. I don't know if that just meant EMP. Now I think there are and were probably better solutions. I don't know enough physics, but what about a lead lined box with a fax machine in it that says in case of nuclear war open box?

I'm sure that you may have more pressing things during a nuclear war, but that was just one suggestion.

And then there was the one about the organization that issued a report that said "quality goes in before the name goes on" on the front. And then it turned out they misspelled quality, and had to stick corrected labels over every one of those statements. But of course that wasn't government.

Organizations do the darndest things.

A nuke-hardened fax machine would be pointless since the entire phone system would be knocked out...

As for protecting it, the best idea would be to turn it off before the nuke lands. Next, put it in a well-conducting box (not a lead one) (if the direct radiation was strong enough to fry it, then the users are dead too).

As for the toilet seat, I understand it was the one on the Space Shuttle or other orbital vehicle. So, that was actually highly nontrivial toilet seat design.
The genuinely silliest one I heard about was a system for maintaining positive pressure in a fountain pen under zero-G conditions (alternate solution is to use a pencil, which is what the Russkies did).

I should have recalled this earlier...a great deal of the reason behind the $200 dollar toilet seats (in general) *is* simple fraud. Find a copy of the Rockefeller Commission report (if you can) from 1982; which looked into why weapons were suddenly so expensive.

The reason was simple. In 1981, Congress threw $200 billion into weapons procurement at Ronnie's request. The arms industry, already operating near their limits to meet Carter's expanded procurement requests from fiscal '80 (of about $120 billion), were faced with a problem. Tool up to produce that many weapons, with no real reason to think Congress would be stupid enough to throw that much money away in the next year; produce what they could and forgo the rest of the money; or produce a bit more, and simply raise prices to suck up all the money. They chose the latter.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon was faced with a problem. They could refuse the inflated prices, and give the money they couldn't possibly honestly spend back to Congress; but then Congress would cut their procurement budget back to something reasonable in fiscal 82. Or they could simply let the government get ripped off, to keep the money flowing. Bureaucratic imperatives being what they are, and since the arms dealers offered much better pensions than the government did; they instantly went with the second option.

And so, the Rockefeller Commission determined that for our $200 billion in fiscal 81; we actually got about $140 billion worth of weapon systems. For all that there are occasionally good excuses for this or that doohickey, and congressional corruption and interference was a steady drain; this is why everything suddenly became so expensive under Ronnie.