I’ve brought this up before, but a big positive way to reform inefficient govt bureaucracy

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reform inefficient govt bureaucracy

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Run it like a business and it will self correct and could include what you suggested as some incentives...

Yep, I have said it for years. Allow the fund site to keep 10% of the fiscal savings to spend as they wish, the rest gets kicked up to the next fund site in the chain. They keep 10% and so forth. Until you get to the Dept level, all the saving goes directly to reducing the debt.

No. Here's the fix.

1. Term limits
2. Balanced Budget Amendment
3. No Unionization for Government workers
4. No Government Pensions. 401ks like the rest of us

End use it or lose it budgeting. If you don’t use it, that’s fine, the same amount will be budgeted.

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Gov agencies rush to spend money so that they don’t get their budgets cut.

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It typically starts in July, you start planning on how to burn through the moneys in Aug/Sept time frame before the accounts get locked.

It's how 300 flat screens end up on a military base some 4K units being used to display the lunch menu at the chow hall.

This will drive nepotism and outright bribery.

It is not hard to imagine how some politican could place people favorably to be lined up for a big payday, especially for defense contracts.

Why drive down costs when they use it for political points to be sold on the public dollar?

I would prefer that ALL federal government programs be administered by the individual states as each state sees fit. Many would not want every program and many would find the right mix of privatization/government-run approaches. The states that do things the best would be copied by the other states. You would get 50 approaches rather than one. One of those approaches is bound to be better than the others, or the one currently in use.

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ALL federal government programs be administered by the individual states as each state sees fit

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Eh, do you want say New York having full control of say West Point, Fort Drum, Niagra Air Force Base, Watervliet Arsenal, etc?

That might not turn out well in the days ahead.

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Gov agencies rush to spend money so that they don’t get their budgets cut.

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You don't need to cut their budgets. When the Flat Tax was first proposed there was sound evidence that merely freeing govt budgets would shrink the deficit significantly. Govt. runs on an expected increase in their budget every year. Stopping the increase is framed as a 'drastic cut' but it's not.

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This somewhat mimics the profit motive of markets. You need to incentivize innovation and efficiency.

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It's really difficult to do in practice and has been attempted numerous times, and this in particular is why it often fails - there is no real feedback mechanism.

In a market, sales, prices, market cap, et al are an immediate, ruthless feedback mechanism as to whether your economization or innovation actually provided value - it's extremely difficult bordering on impossible to gauge whether your public organization is providing value like a private organization. It throws management incentives all out of whack.

As a small example: a typical mounted infantry company in the American military has between $70 to $100 million in assets. If you incentivize the managers (the commanders) to economize, how would you actually measure whether that organization is just as good? You can devise some measurement mechanisms (e.g., training scoring systems and so forth), but over time, those systems get gamed and quality slips. Your VA example is another - if the NOLA East VA is gauged on customer satisfaction (which is really not a good thing in healthcare, but that's another conversation), then they'll just game the hell out of that system.

There just aren't good substitutes for true market feedback (pricing, sales, etc.). It's what makes public services fundamentally different.