Ah yes. Like setting a price ceiling? Adding more administrators, managers, and bureaucrats to "find where all that money is going"? By paying teachers less?

It's not an easy task to reduce the cost of something... this is even more so when the government is the one doing it.

It's actually really easy to cut the costs on things, and all you need to do is cut all the levels of useless middlemen taking their cut.

Kind of like how Canada uses this one simple trick to cut their health care expenses.

When you pass laws to force government organizations to be wasteful, they will comply. Outside of that, not wasting taxpayer dollars is generally a high priority.

A great example of laws purposefully foot binding & hobbling organizations is USPS, who is not allowed to up the ante and offer any modern services, and has to severely overfund their pension obligations, to the point that they are funding pensions for people they haven't hired.

Well, no, you probably need far fewer administrators, actually.

I think GP was making this suggestion in a sarcastic jab about what cost reduction efforts look like when done by government.

OK, but I don't think it holds up. The US has one of the systems of education (and healthcare, too) with the least government interference and it's wildly expensive. As far as I am aware the biggest drivers for rising tuition costs are construction and increasingly large administrative departments.

The US has tons of government interference in all of those areas though!

Compared to other OECD countries not really.