Throughout my 40+ years in the nuclear field it has been SOP to use filter paper swipes for surveys.
Posted on 02/12/2023 9:40:09 AM PST by SeekAndFind
My 40-year-long career as a scientist in a federal research laboratory has left me with an almost inexhaustible source of topics. Today I discuss some of the absurdities of the Federal Acquisition Regulations.
Put simply, the Federal Acquisition Regulations, affectionately known as the FAR, is a body of rules governing how federal employees procure goods and services to carry out the tasks set out for them by the powers that be. The purpose of the FAR is unassailable: it exists to protect the taxpayer from waste, fraud, and abuse.
Folks who work in the federal government have an obligation to safeguard the public purse and do their jobs as efficiently as possible. Our duty is to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. I get that. But with each passing year, this has become more and more difficult because the FAR, intended to protect the taxpayer, became such an impediment to the mission that it significantly damaged the very people footing the bill.
When I first joined the lab in 1981 with a newly minted Ph.D. in chemistry, I was told that any purchase I made for my work, no matter how small, would cost at least $120 to process ($427 in today’s dollars). Even if I needed some bolts from the GSA catalog, paperwork processing overhead was an intrinsic cost I needed to be aware of.
One of the “services” that the processing cost bought for us was that purchasing people would source the lowest cost goods for us. We all remember the story about how astronaut Alan Shephard, sitting atop Freedom 7, could only think how each component in his vehicle had been made by the lowest bidder! Well, my Alan Shephard moment came in 1983.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Everything the government does costs more disproportionately, even when it’s intended to increase efficiency. The Paperwork Reduction Act generated more paperwork to ensure compliance.
Does anyone remember the Paperwork Reduction Act passed under Reagan?
A WISER approach would be to give NGOs a small amount, have them prove accountability and results, and then increase the amounts to those who are faithful.
As a former federal employee being ever so conscious of avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, still wondering why congress critters get to blow off that aspect of the FAR with regularity.
Back in the last seventies, my office submitted a request to buy 10 calculators for the engineers, calculators with the fancy calculations needed by the engineers. Stuff like sine and cosine, square roots, etc., etc.
After a month we received 10 calculators. All these calculators could do was add, subtract, multiple, and divide.
We called the purchasing agent who was so proud that he had saved us a lot of money.
Indeed. The "rules" are more of an impediment to the mission than they are an impediment to "waste, fraud, and abuse". The rules are themselves wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive. It would be much more helpful to severely prosecute and punish the real wastrels, fraudsters, and abusers ... let the honest folk do their jobs. But we can't have that. Politicians who make the rules and bureaucrats who enforce them are powertripping egomaniacal tyrants.
After several years of complaints, my DoD agency gave me a fair amount of funding to purchase new office chairs. I did the research....found great chairs at a discounted price, and they would even deliver to the building. Then the regulations stepped in and said since I went over x-amount....I had to buy via a minority or women-owned company....which bumped my cost 10-percent higher.
When I pushed into the corner on this...the deal went to a female company in Penn. I sat and looked up the organization....it was one-single woman, who resided in a farm house. From what I could figure....someone designed the regulations and then arranged for the bulk orders to go over to special people who paid to get recognized in this status.
Throughout my 40+ years in the nuclear field it has been SOP to use filter paper swipes for surveys.
They write the rules, so they routinely exempt themselves. My favorite is the Congressionally mandated yearly ethics training. Putting “ethics” and Congress in the same sentence is hard enough to get your head around. However, “Congressionally mandated ethics training” is a conscious thought stopper!
Still happens…a lot.
I was a first line supervisor in an engineering office of an unnamed US Govt.
We had an electrical engineer move on so had a vacancy for one. Personnel sent me a list of qualified engineers for the vacancy. All of them had engineering degrees, but none were in Electrical Engineering.
When I called to tell them they had made a mistake, the woman informed me that any engineer was minimally qualified for any engineering discipline.
I told her that was ridiculous. Would she like to fly in a helicopter piloted by a fixed-wing only trained pilot?
.... silence.
I don’t even deal with DARPA anymore because the whole thing is fraud, waste and abuse. If you solve their “DARPA hard” problem, they will not even look at you.
I read most of what he wrote and its a joke from years gone by, when the Feds operated on a 1000% more honest level. This writer is a boring, bow tied stooge.
What goes on now is WFH, do jack squat, rip off the taxpayers to a fare thee well and beyond. And don’t bother applying if you a white male, as this old writer is. Come in as a black female with 2 ft long cornrows danging down. Then you can work from home, scamming the taxpayers as a “researcher”.
Talking to anyone in government HR is an exercise in futility! Their sole goal is to get the unit’s diversity numbers squared away. Finding a qualified candidate is not even a secondary consideration.
It's great work if you can get it.
“… calculators with the fancy calculations needed by the engineers. Stuff like sine and cosine, square roots, etc., etc.”
I was in an Army Field Artillery missile unit at the same time. Our fire direction calculation process involved using log tables to get the data for a manual solution. We also had a 1950s vintage computer that was very unreliable due to the generator required to power it. Finally, someone wrote a program for the TI-59 handheld calculator to do it in less time with the required accuracy. The Army somehow overcame the acquisition process to field these to the units. Guess civilian acquisition processes were not as informed as the Army.
T-Bird45 wrote: “Guess civilian acquisition processes were not as informed as the Army.”
Actually, I was working in a missile development project for the US Army when the incident I described happened. A supervisor was able to work with other procurement personnel that understood the differnce between engineering and accounting. IIRC, the calculators we needed were a mix of TI-59 and some HP of similar capabilities.
Did the $120 go to a third party, or was it just transferred to another government unit?
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