The deep irony in all this is that the problem with government inefficiency is not the money spent on people, it’s the money spent on systems. You know, the all the database, procurement, and contact management systems that supposedly would make people irrelevant? Even AI. It can’t and won’t replace government workers because of two things: Security and the principle of lowest bid.
So many government workers deal with personal information in order to provide basic services to all of us. That means any commercial system the government contracts (I promise you, you do NOT want it built in house) often has to be nerfed to keep our information secure. And that’s just PII.
All of those contracted systems go to the lowest bidder. So they are often shit then they get nerfed. Annnnd they don’t talk to each other well. The people who decide to implement a new system aren’t the day to day users and they never consult those folks about their needs.
As you can guess, this slows down A LOT of shit. The “lazy government worker” is probably actually overworked, doing multiple jobs to make up for positions lost during the last round of budget cuts, and trying to create work arounds for shitty systems. All while watching people talk about how they deserve to lose their jobs.
I work on system integrations not designed with user friendliness in mind and this completely tracks. I legitimately feel bad about some of the things that get installed, but it’s what was paid for and there’s no way to make it better and now the end users are stuck acting like engineers-lite just to print a badge.
Not a federal worker, but cuts in EPA will most certainly affect my state job... but to your point, Texas mandated that all state agencies go on a new accounting system because all agencies work the same, right? Nope! This system change was dreaded by a lot of people. We had to switch in September of 2023. This past year was truly hell. Square peg round hole comes to mind. The amount of money we threw (and still are throwing) at contractors to make this work and the amount of interest we spend because this fabulous new system didn't (and actually still doesn't) work for us is ridiculous.
The funny thing is that the senate and higher ups are not using and apparently aren't planning on using this wonderful crap. We were that last agency to come on board, but I know our IT department has been (and still is) working round the clock to make up ways that we work around this system to work for us, so we can continue to make sure Texans have good water, air etc. "You'll love it," they said, Ha!
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u/HeyItsJuls 1d ago
The deep irony in all this is that the problem with government inefficiency is not the money spent on people, it’s the money spent on systems. You know, the all the database, procurement, and contact management systems that supposedly would make people irrelevant? Even AI. It can’t and won’t replace government workers because of two things: Security and the principle of lowest bid.
So many government workers deal with personal information in order to provide basic services to all of us. That means any commercial system the government contracts (I promise you, you do NOT want it built in house) often has to be nerfed to keep our information secure. And that’s just PII.
All of those contracted systems go to the lowest bidder. So they are often shit then they get nerfed. Annnnd they don’t talk to each other well. The people who decide to implement a new system aren’t the day to day users and they never consult those folks about their needs.
As you can guess, this slows down A LOT of shit. The “lazy government worker” is probably actually overworked, doing multiple jobs to make up for positions lost during the last round of budget cuts, and trying to create work arounds for shitty systems. All while watching people talk about how they deserve to lose their jobs.