Day: February 24, 2025

I keep seeing people talking about USAID being only 1% of the budget. As if somehow that justifies the waste.

Waste is waste. That 1% is still more money than I’ll ever see. It might be more money than most of the people in the United States will ever see.

That it’s only 1% isn’t the point. The point is what that 1% is being spent on. An alternate point is, “If we see this here, what will we find elsewhere in the miasma we call our government?”

The best thing we could have happening to our government right now, in my opinion, is to have successful businessmen looking at government, not as a black hole of poor investment, but instead looking at it like a failing business that they’re trying to save.

I say that as a preamble to the point I want to try to make.

I don’t understand the logic of trivializing money spent, or money earned.

Let me provide a couple of anecdotes from the opposite perspective. A perspective of companies trying to make a profit.

I once worked for a company that sold software. The software, drove process controls in devices and could easily be integrated into a company’s machines via a pretty clever API. 

The company’s software was in a ton of other manufactures machines. It saved the manufactures time having to write basic control software and allowed them to concentrate on feature differentiation.

The company I worked for sold licenses to use their software. Part of the licensing structure was for updates, modifications, and integration assistance.

One of my friends worked in the Sales department. One day he came to my cubicle really despondent.

He’d been working for weeks on several deals only to have those deals rejected by the ‘powers that be’ because they weren’t big enough. Meaning the individual deals weren’t in the millions of dollars range.

I can understand that philosophy if the smaller deals were going to require a lot of hand holding or customization. But that wasn’t the case. The other companies were looking for just the base software and they were going to handle the integration into their product on their own. They were looking for a jumpstart to get their products to market.

The powers that be, rejected 6, trouble free 1/2 million to 3/4 million dollar sales because they wanted nothing less than million dollar sales.

Neither of us understood the logic. Money is money.

The Company, like so many other I’ve worked for, no longer exists. 

Turns out bad management destroys even the best company. In this particular company’s case their refusal to do smaller contracts opened a door for their competitors to bring their products to market and capitalize on the perception that my company was “Too Elitist”. My colleague and I were long gone by the time everything imploded.

I’ve watched more than my fair share of companies and their dynamite products go down the tubes through bad management, arrogance, and greed.

I worked for another startup company whose CEO said in a meeting, “If smaller investors don’t understand our name change then we don’t need their money. Larger investors will understand and support us.” 

A couple of colleagues & I walked out of that meeting, looked at each other, chuckled, then polished up our resumes. The company was gone 8 months later.

The point of these anecdotes is:

When people trivialize even small amounts of money, (Or waste,) it seems to open the door to foolish decisions, or more waste.

In the case of companies, they lose access to operating capital and sometimes that’s enough to starve a company to death. With companies, they may get a reputation for being difficult to deal with, or slow, and that drives away potential future customers.

In the case of the government, trivializing amounts makes it more likely that smaller amounts of waste will be overlooked as “the cost of doing business”.

For example: If I’d known USAID was so wasteful, I’d have applied for an 80K grant renewing yearly to study frogs in drought affected areas of the mountains where I live. (There aren’t any frogs here.)

It’s a little bit of money, less than .000000000001% of the national budget. Regardless, it would still be a waste, and I’d be living pretty well on the government dime.

If NBC or CNN reported on me doing research on non-existent frogs swindling the government out of 80K a year, most people would be outraged.

Yet this is exactly what a lot of government apologists appear to want to sweep under the carpet and ignore. 1%, 5%, 10% of the national budget?

It’s just a little waste…