I've heard this, mostly in relation to discussions of fiscal cuts, but have been unable to find a study quantifying waste or "mostly" wasteful. I don't doubt any large enterprise of humans, in government or private industry, will have instances of waste, even small instances of theft or fraud. It is the quantification ("mostly") and the conclusions thereof (removing delegated authority, either explicitly or via fiscal cuts) that I'm genuinely trying to understand. I'm aware of IG reports of specific instances of waste, but nothing remotely approaching a majority of an agency's funding. Given the history of the "snake oil salesman" era of the US (ca. 1890s-1920s, killing thousands with bogus and impure/junk medicines) that gave rise to the current agency mission, I'm reluctant to find out what social media and an unregulated medical industry can harvest 100 years later.
Strictly speaking that is manifestly false (the "only" part). At the very least, in practice they usually enable a bunch of unnatural markets/behaviors (usually falling under "corruption") that enrich many ancillary parties in addition to the planners, even if they don't enrich the general population (last I checked the west was filled with plenty of Marxist-adjacents who make arguments of such sort, so I suppose it it is not a given for everyone). To be clear, I am not advocating for the grant per se; just describing a theory the other side might be operating under.
> Louis in suits referring to anything non-Harvard as "worse than sludge".
Poor Louis doesn’t realize that some people get offered admission to Harvard and turn it down. He’s optimizing for the wrong thing (of course his character is a parody).
Well in Suits they explicitly only hire Harvard Law grads, which is a big plot point and they note multiple times that this is a dumb policy they have for traditional and marketing reasons
Travel agents is a nice, easy example. Everyone buys their own airplane flights now. Of course, it's complicated because there's a lot more accountants today than there were before electronic spreadsheets were invented. We needed more of them. I think first level customer service agents have already been replaced by not very good chat agents, they should get better with AI.
