I don’t have much of an “I saw massive waste in business” perspective. The only businesses I was in were creative freelancing and as a practicing attorney. I’ve written about how law firms fleece business clients by overbilling clients. “Creative billing” was the norm, not the exception. That is one of the reasons I spent most of my career practicing on my own. That is a business expense the bigger companies simply accept. Waste in business doesn’t have to be a fact of doing business.
In the movie “Office Space,” one of the funnier scenes is when one of the employees admits that he doesn’t do much of anything but waste time and is lauded by the guys who are there to cut the ranks of useless employees. In that same movie, an employee who had been fired years before but was still collecting a paycheck literally burned the company to the ground when his red stapler was taken from him.
I have a relative who works at Amazon. She told us of a bit of revolt at Amazon over the company telling employees to return to the office. Employees were quite content with “working” in the PJs from home. “You want us to work from…work?”
I don’t think anyone, either in the private sector or working for the government would deny that the most waste can be found in government. When the United States was formed, the founders never envisioned the massive bureaucratic state that emanates from Washington, D.C.
We also know that once something is “created” by the federal government, it is nearly impossible to get rid of it. Plenty of elected politicians have vowed to rid us of the massive government waste, but few have been about to make a scratch, let alone a dent.
Now that Trump is returning to D.C. and he has two men who have a lot of private sector experience willing to take a battle axe to the bureaucratic waste, we might see some dents – maybe even some departments going the way of the dodo.