Saying things are expensive is not saying they are corrupt or inefficient. What specific problems and examples of corruption do you believe should be fixed?
Similarly, overall spending patterns do not mean corruption or even excess. We get huge economic returns on science and space spending, for instance.
Look at the source you cited. Labor is expensive here and infrastructure projects often create public outrage that makes them take longer. That's a problem but it's not corruption and not something you fix by slashing spending.
I wanted to give you an example of what I see is not just corruption, but an example of how feedback loops of self interest combine to create systemic issues that threaten our entire society.
It is "known" in the research industry that getting government grants, especially NIH grants, is "gold" in that they provide large sums of money, and, importantly, that a large part of these grants have little accountability and are not used directly for the research. Peoples careers are rewarded for successful at getting these grants, and there are societal mechanisms in place to insure these grants continue to flow. A lot of organizations are so dependent on these type of grants that when an attempt was made to reduce the unaccountable and "incidental" nature part of those grants to what is standard in non-governmental charities, there was fear that entire important research organizations would be brought down.
This is an example:
- My congressman has a public campaign to support the political and legal fight to preserve the ability of research organizations to carve out nearly half, or 42% of government research grants so that they can be used for general organizational needs, and not directly for the research projects they are awarded to. Part of this political and legal fight is about making these carve outs more accountable, as they currently are not. For comparison, non profit grants from non federal sources provide for 0% to 13% carve outs. The new proposal is to reduce the carve outs to 13%, in line with these other organizations, and to have stricter accounting rules. The more common name for this is the 69% indirect costs added to federal grants, as compared to the standard 0% to 15% added by non governmental grants.
- The former CEO of one of these nonprofit research institutes (Dana Farber) was making $3M to $4M per year. This is not unusual for the CEO's of many of these larger non profits.
- This CEO is the mother of this particular congressman.
- This former CEO had 50+ of her research papers called into question due to claims of fraud. These papers were called into question by an outside researcher.
- Six of these papers were retracted due to fraud, several dozen others were "updated". These papers are used directly or indirectly to acquire government grants, and are also used to justify making this person CEO.
- One of this former CEO's co-authors on some of these papers was also the Director of Research Integrity for the institution, who also investigated the allegations (though not the ones he was a co author on).
Similarly, overall spending patterns do not mean corruption or even excess. We get huge economic returns on science and space spending, for instance.
Look at the source you cited. Labor is expensive here and infrastructure projects often create public outrage that makes them take longer. That's a problem but it's not corruption and not something you fix by slashing spending.