Vivek Kundra On US Government Inefficiency

parkland writes "Federal CIO Vivek Kundra described some dismaying government inefficiencies in a speech on Thursday at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs in Seattle. It takes 160 days to process benefits for veterans, he said, 'because the Veteran's Administration is processing paperwork by passing manila folders from one desk to another.' Another example bound to make you grind your teeth is why it takes the Patent and Trademark Office 3 years to process a patent. 'One reason,' says Kundra, 'is because the USPTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system.'"

Comments

Possibly another reason

[XxtraLarGe]

Is because there's no consequence for them doing a bad job, so they can take their own sweet time. You have to screw up pretty badly to get fired by the Federal government.

Re:Possibly another reason

[phantomfive]

One talking guy suggested that the reason government in the US is inefficient is because we expect it to be, and I think there is some truth to that. When was the last time you ever heard a politician say, "government is inefficient, and here is how we can make it more efficient!" It wouldn't be hard, there is so much low-hanging fruit on the tree of inefficiency. You could allow useless people to be fired, or change budgeting procedures so saving money is rewarded instead of punished.

But we don't have any politicians who think like that, instead we have Republicans who say, "government is too big, we need to either cut it or cut its budget" and Democrats who seem to try to pretend the issue doesn't exist, I don't know what they are doing.

In other countries, a government job is something you go to college for, and are trained for. It is something prestigious, and requires (often difficult) exams. I am not saying we should do this in the US, but I think we should be aware that there are alternatives, so we can choose which one we want.

Re:Possibly another reason

[mcgrew]

It's a perfect example of untrue but widely believed anti-union propaganda. This cop's union didn't help him, nor should it have. If your're caught stealing office supplies, your union won't help you. If you're reprimanded or fired for smoking in a no-smoking area, your union won't help you. If you're a "no call no show" your union won't help you. If you show up for work drunk your union won't help you. If your boss trumps up some bullshit charge because he just doesn't like you, then your union WILL help you.

This is an example of an untrue statement being widely believed simply because it's been parroted so many times. If you work for a paycheck, you're probably better off with a union.

Re:Possibly another reason

[hey!]

There's a kind of inside joke government workers use when there aren't outsiders around. It goes like this: "A guy comes into the office and asks, 'How many people work here?'. So I say, 'Oh, about half of us.'"

The truth is that if you look at any government agency where things get done, there will be a cadre of people who go above and beyond to make that happen. It's not easy getting things done under the rules politicians insist upon. I'm talking about the people who believe in public service, and the agency mission. I have a friend who works for HUD. He's passionate about access to housing for poor people. I've also known lots of absolutely stellar people working unglamorous and thankless public health and environmental protection jobs in the government sector.

I even knew an IRS auditor. All he wants from the vast majority of people is truthful documentation and an honest effort at tax compliance. As long as you do that he'll cut you all the slack he can find in the regulations. Why? Because most people *can't* commit very much fraud. IRS already has most of the money you owe. What little fraud an average guy can commit is so unlikely to succeed it's usually just a mistake. But he has to deal with people who are mad at him because of how much tax the law says they have to pay, because the politicians who wrote those laws use auditors as a scapegoat. They'd like to reduce the number of auditors so the small number of people who have the financial sophistication to attempt serious fraud can get away with it.

Here's the take home lesson: everything you hate about government isn't the fault of government employees. It's the fault of the politicians you elect to office.

I've worked with many state governments as a private contractor. Every time the politicians get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they pass "ethics reform" that applies to state workers *but not to themselves*. How dumb do we have to be not to figure that out? I've seen state employees who have to pay expenses out of their own pocket when they travel because the state travel reimbursement rates won't cover a decent hotel room. But the politicians are *still* flying off to those resort junkets.

So what about that other half? The half of government employees that's not really doing much work? They're the politicians' fault too. One thing I've learned in business is that good people are usually a bargain at whatever price they can command, but bad ones are worse than useless and still cost you money. In most cases I'll take a guy who can command 100,000 in a field that normally pays 80,000 over four guys who can only command 50,000 in that field.

I've also seen some really, really horribly corrupt places. They're not the norm, but you see them where there's a lot of political cynicism about public service. It is not a chicken or the egg problem. It's the politicians. They rail against *employee* corruption, but they don't take any effective steps against it because that would be breaking their rice bowl. For Chrissakes they talk about how bad the government *they're in complete control of* is? How stupid can people get?

These are places where government is low-paid, and workers utrageously disrespected. Of course they attract a lot of people who think that honest public service is for suckers. I can tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end. But you know what, the people who keep voting for the same crooks deserve that kind of service. What is amazing is that there are *still* people there who give honorable service under those conditions. In fact those people in the "half that works" are even more important, because they aren't 1/2 of workforce. They're maybe 1/4.

Inefficiencies.

[saintlupus]

I work in academia, which is in many ways culturally similar to working in government. I wonder how many of these inefficiencies persist in order to placate an aged workforce that refuses to embrace technology and learn to do anything in a new way.

I see a lot of people around here just sort of "running out the clock" - I can't imagine we're unique.

--saint

Re:Collosal waste of money

[PeterM from Berkeley]

I bet the problem is budget.

"Well, we'd like to stop doing these stupid things, but we don't have money to deploy a new system."

And no one is willing to pony up the investment in modernization to save money in the long run. There are stupidities like this in every organization!

It is all about the local minimum energy state.
--PM

Re:Healthcare

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

We're all thinking it, so I'll say it: "Hey, let's let our government handle healthcare to increase effeciency[sic]"

Obviously you haven't dealt with the private healthcare industry. The insurance companies (for example) actually have motivation to make simple task harder for their customers because their job is to get people's money then make it as hard as possible for people to ever get any back. So they invent useless paperwork and rules and procedures to discourage the process. Trust me, I've been there. When you're really, really ill you better hope you have some good friends because there is no way you're going to stay on top of the paperwork and phone calls needed.

You know, I've dealt with this kind of problem.

[hey!]

There are all kinds of ideological explanations for why this *must* be so, but I don't think they hold water.

My first management job was at a largish non-profit where I inherited a three year IT request backlog. So I analyzed the backlog and discovered that most of it consisted of requests for software to speed moving decisions from what amounted to the user's in tray to the out tray, and pretty soon I realized all those in-out transformations formed a network. I charted out the network, and it was *obvious* that certain key information latencies could be reduced from 35 days to about half a day by rerouting the information through this network. In fact, most of the work in the network could be eliminated entirely, while providing better, But rather than spring this on people, I just laid out the charts and they figured everything out for themselves. That way I didn't have to persuade anyone.

Now the interesting question was how this kind of situation could happen. It's not because the people were stupid. They weren't. It wasn't because they were lazy or not dedicated. Quite the contrary. Lack of profit motive certainly played a part in the evolution of the problem, but it did not create the least barrier to addressing the problem.

What we had was two levels of people in the organization. People down in the ranks who cared about the mission of the organization and understood their local piece of the process. And people at the top who sometimes cared about the mission of the organization, but were mainly focused on shmoozing. But nobody had any idea what the *whole* process looked like. So the people in the ranks were largely left to guide themselves in solving problems. They were self-starters, they had initiative, what they lacked was a global understanding of how everything fit together. So they talked to their neighbors in the existing process about where they were under pressure, then they demanded the higher ups provide them with tools to reduce the pressure at individual points. The higher ups had no idea how to fix these things, so they just stuck the requests onto the back of a three year queue, and when things began to catch fire they'd demand the queue get resorted.

But the queue shouldn't have existed at all. When folks were done applying common sense to the big picture I provided, most of the dreaded request queue evaporated. My backlog went forty months down to under thirty days, and I didn't have a lick of code written.

What was missing was *leadership*. In my book leadership equals caring about the results plus understanding how the process works.